I wonder if there’s going to be a slippery slope for Disney’s Tarzan reboots?

Other than anniversaries, not many young casual consumers have seen a lot of officially recognised Disney’s Tarzan content in the past five years. Fair enough, the Disney’s Tarzan franchise is recently gaining considerably more attention from web consumers as they know it. If the Terra Mater show + both Sony’s and Disney’s live action Tarzan reboots do flop in both critical and commercial ways, an animated reboot will have to be webcasted on Disney Plus but can still be coproduced by ERB Inc. and Rough Draft, as it may as well become the former’s first fully digitally animated work. 

While the first Disney attempt, consisting of 3 films, a show and a musical, plus a couple of video games and plays, surely got stale pretty fast. Nonetheless, it thankfully didn’t stale so badly as to become sludge like the hundreds of fellow, otherwise wildly different Tarzan plays, video games, shows, comics and films, whatever official or not. The literary books are, increasingly, mainly an in between of these ridiculous extremes. 

A heavily updated Sony Pictures film series centring around Tarzan and his gang of fellow misfits is in the works and will have a high chance of becoming sludge as well. Even if the three Disney’s Tarzan films can and do get a live action-CGI mix reboot, it sadly will still have a higher chance of being filled with so much boring, sludgy badness too. Another Disney’s Tarzan reboot, this time being a cyberpunk anthology animated entirely in 3d CGI, can begin life as a webcomic storyboard instead. 

In almost all European Union nations, some African ones, and a couple of Asian states, many of their consumers are only recently starting to see more newfound Tarzan content coming into the shelves than ever before! Even funnier and more heartwarming is that said overload has long been there, but it only began to creak out on New Years Week 2021. Said New Years Week, seventy years (and about nine to ten months) after Edgar Rice Burroughs passed away, was when all the fully written Tarzan books made by him had to enter the public domain canons of most nations, excluding a few like the USA.

Disney’s Tarzan: Body Chart

My own Disney’s Tarzan reboot universe has a large and well detailed body chart. 

Afterword

Vu-D, a little known DeviantArt veteran, has proposed a Tarzan design that would make Glen Keane, John Ripa, Greg Guler, Eric Battle, Roberto Castro, Benito Gallego, Stevan Subic and Roy Allan Martinez proud. Also helping is that, despite their questionable views, I respect both Stevan Subic and Benito Gallego’s magnificent works and I know how to separate them from the artists themselves.

But I wonder if illustrators like them will update and multiply their own Tarzan designs for a whole new era? They can and will do it, but for now, it’s very unlikely. Not only do I have a motley of iconic Tarzan designs to mess with, I can turn them all into different characters in their own right when it’s necessary to do so. 

The Big P Productions Timeline

While P Productions has a rather prominent tokusatsu catalog, it is a stockholder primarily known outside of Japan for its UltraMan competitor SpectreMan. 

1964

Its first animated show was the anime adaptation of Kyoto prefecture native Naoki Tsuji’s (controversial and downright values dissonant) second best known manga, 0 Sen Hayato. Naoki Tsuji went on to create the famed art of the original Tiger Mask mangas by the infamous late Ikki Kajiwara. 

It was a subcontractor for a few episodes of the first animated Astro Boy show in 1964. 

1965

Its only adaptation of a Mitsuteru Yokoyama manga was the pilot of a scrapped anime based on Spaceship Red Shark. 

1966

Its first live action success on international airwaves was the tokusatsu adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s own battle giant manga Ambassador Magma, itself the first major colour Toku in world history other than the first show under the UltraMan name.

1967

Its only anime adaptation of a Shotaro Ishinomori manga was that of Don Kikko. 

Its first original animated tv show was the anime Chibikko Kaiju Yadamon (aka Little Monster Yadamon).

Its first live action tv work was the Jidaigeki tv Dorama Kaze. 

Its first original tokusatsu tv show was the Monster Prince, which succeeded in a couple of Asian nations but flopped hard in Japan. 

1971 

Its biggest international original success by far, SpectreMan, began that year. 

1972

The Lion Maru Trilogy began with Kaiketsu Lion Maru, one of its biggest international original successes by far. 

1973 

Kaiketsu Lion Maru ended up with a much less popular (although still good, but not great) sequel, Fuun Lion Maru. The trilogy would remain only two thirds complete until 2006. 

The Lion Maru Trilogy begat an honorary Kamen Rider style spin-off, Iron Man Tiger Seven. 

1983

Its last subcontracted animated movie and tv show were from a Mainland Chinese-Japanese-German coproduced franchise, TaoTao, which heroically remains partly responsible, in an ironic twist, for the fall of Communism in Albania. 

2006 

The Lion Maru trilogy + Iron Man Tiger Seven formally ended with the darker and edgier Lion Maru G. 

Forgotten Pulp Heroes that deserve adaptations

It’s fair to say that, although American pulp is a contentious topic, it does have its defenders and fellow fans. 

A few Anime and Manga industry notes

Here are some notes from the greatest anime and manga industry talents. 

Most constant super couples and love teams 

Go Nagai and Junko Higo.

Leiji Matsumoto and Miyako Maki (ups and downs).

Yoshihiro Togashi and Naoko Takeuchi (ups and downs).

Kōji Morimoto and Atsuko Fukushima. 

Hideaki Anno and Moyoco Anno (ups and downs). 

Hayao Miyazaki and Akemi Ota (ups and downs).

Yoichi Kotabe and Reiko Okuyama (1963-2007). 

Mamoru Nagano and Maria Kawamura (disappointingly screwed up, isn’t it).

Azure Konno and Ayami Kazama.

Most constant siblings

Noboru, Tetsuji and Satsuko Okamoto (the former two died in 2021): do note that these siblings are just three out of painter Toki Okamoto's slightly under a dozen offspring. 

Masashi and Seishi Kishimoto. 

Yasutaka and Go Nagai: do note that these guys are just two out of five brothers, as their two older brothers and younger brother are much lesser known. 

Jenny Dolls

Licca, Jenny and Chabel Dolls 

Ellie (1987) 

Starlight Jenny (1989) 

18 Summer Resort Jenny (1989) 

Princess Jenny (1990)

Chabel’s Mama and Papa (1990) 

Romani Chabel and Danny (1990) 

Melli and Zos (1990) 

Idol Jennies (1991 and 2002)

Tom (1992) 

Ellie’s Club Raph (1992) 

Rainbow Jenny (1993) 

Juliana (1994) 

Nanny Licca (1996) 

Super Action Skateboarding Jenny (1996) 

Kindergarten Licca (1997) 

Calendar Girl Rasta Jenny (2000) 

Calendar Girl Folk Jenny (2000) 

Photogenic Jennies (2000): note that the Platinum, Gold and Chocolate Photogenic Jennies are different variants.  

15 Age Jenny (2000) 

Mama (2001)

Tomoki (2001) 

Shiny Brilliant Jenny (2004) 

Takumi (2005) 

The future that not even George Orwell could tell you about

Imagine a practically dystopian world where addiction to digital equipment is only just the beginning? Definitely. 

I'm so hypocritical to a considerable extent about this possibility. Not only is that mostly true, I'm actually a chronic phone addict who wrote this article. 

A few members from the majority of future minority world children, if they're born to their future parents at all, will unpredictably have hereditary addiction-related disorders; perhaps because most of said future parents will have spent much of their lives being hyper-addicted to a corporatized variant of the net, (gasp) even when they're kids already. It's quite a worry, even as the majority of the world's future humans are starting to get addicted (to a growing extent) to the net.

Understandably, the most screwed up humans are unfortunately winning far too much in terms of net addiction, which gets more harrowing, due to factors such as varying levels dysfunction and a parent’s relative inability to constantly remind children of actual threats.