It's the fault of those stupid fuckers in Hollywood, Rapaire! The real name of Tarzan's son in the books was not "Boy", it was Korak (which meant "The Killer" in ape language), so named in adolescence for his fighting abilities, which were considerable. Tarzan's apes seem to have believed, like the American Indians, that someone should receive a new name upon entering early adulthood, one that has symbolic significance.

Hollywood chose to call him "Boy" instead, because they assumed that their audience is too stupid to handle a foreign name like "Korak".

Further errors by Hollywood:

1. Tarzan, as Don pointed out, was not inarticulate and did not speak like the village idiot ("Me Tarzan. You Jane. Jane like go for swim now?") Uh-uh! Tarzan spoke good English and completed all his sentences using proper tenses, articles, and even adverbs. He'd have put present day American youth to shame in his mastery of the English language.

Again, Hollywood figured the public wasn't smart enough to be able to handle that!

2. Tarzan had a small monkey companion...not in the original books...but in the Tarzan comic books, and that monkey was named "N'kima"...which is a pretty cool name, I think. It sounds legit.

Hollywood figured that the public was too stupid to handle a rare name like "N'kima", so they changed it to "Cheetah", the name of a big cat. How stupid can you get? As stupid as a Hollywood screenwriter and producer...that's how stupid!

Hollywood was also too set in their ways to bother using a monkey for the part of Tarzan's companion when they already had a stable of trained chimpanzees on hand...so they used a young chimpanzee instead of a monkey.

3. In the books Jane was a cultured young woman, a member of the English aristocracy, and she acted and dressed like such a person. She has been accurately portrayed in only one film, which was the one that Andy McDowell was in ("Greystoke - the legend of Tarzan of the Apes"). In all the other films she has been a blousy blonde American woman who seems not like a member of the English aristocracy, but like your typical Hollywood starlet...there to scream, flaunt her body, and get rescued, but not much else.

More fodder for the movie-going masses, whom Hollywood clearly regards as complete morons.

4. In the movies, Tarzan almost always calls for elephants to come and save him at some point. This is a major departure from the books, I can assure you, but Hollywood does it just because they LOVE filming an elephant stampede.

*****

Don, you made some good points there. ;-) Look, I know its fantasy, I just think they coulda done way better than these cleancut shorthaired guys who look like they just stepped out of a Wildroot Cream Oil ad...or a Burmashave ad...or something along that line.