And I’m abstaining; I can’t play this game.

…Okay, maybe I have an idea.

But I actually think there’s a point where these two advantages merge, at least a little. For example I always thought the Tom Baker Who excelled at “doing comics” on the screen — sort of in the same way that one episode of Star Trek (“Court Martial”, actually…why am I pretending I don’t know what it’s called, when I can practically recite the damn thing line-by-line?) looks just like it was drawn by Ditko…there was a little corner of my little teenage brain that could always see T. Baker’s Doctor as adventuring in locales pencilled and inked by John Byrne and Terry Austin…

Uh…you all saw the Ditko in that Star Trek episode, right?

There’s another element in Tarzan’s success, I think: sex. The story of Tarzan and Jane is basically a sexual fantasy (for both genders!), again, tied in with the “escape from civilization/return to the Garden of Eden” aspect. Watch the first two Weissmuller Tarzan movies, in particular, and tell me they aren’t primarily about sublimated sexuality.

What’s the appeal of Tarzan? Why would a modern reader or TV viewer care about him? What’s compelling about him? Your version has story seeds a’plenty and a recognizable character arc, but it doesn’t grab me by the lip and yank. It has ideas, and it has soap opera goodness, as you called for in your manifesto, but it lacks…something.

What itch does the Lord of the Apes scratch in so many people? What makes the Feral Man so compelling that I’m gonna plop down in front of a TV set every week or cough up $4 per comic to follow his adventures, or even read a free story about him?

Tarzan’s original appeal came from widespread insecurity about the “effeminizing” effects of civilization, right? He’s the reassurance that we Manly (White) Men of Europe and America could, if need be, not only survive in the harshest environment without any human help, but thrive and even conquer it. We get the charge of being King of the Jungle, no longer haunted by the fear that civilized life has made us too soft. I don’t think that anxiety has left us. That’s not too difficult to recast without the racist mold, I think, though it’d raise some logical problems. (“If a human could take over the jungle, why the one white guy around and not one of the millions of locals?”) Your story hits this obliquely, but I think it needs to be hit harder.

A bigger problem may be the loss of exoticism. Africa isn’t as unknown to us as it was to the folks of yesteryear, and our desire for spectacle is much, much greater than a herd of elephants can provide. We see nasty jungles and amazing jungle creatures on cable television every day. It’s still stunning and amazing, but it’s not as alien to Western eyes as it once was. What spectacle could Tarzan provide that would take a modern viewer or reader’s breath away?

As written above, the story is the moral awakening of an alienated man. That’s tough to fit onto the genre trappings of pulpy action and make it work, because if Our Hero starts as an inhuman cipher, it’s hard to make us care long enough to stick around and see the awakening, and if you rush the awakening to drive audience interest, it feels lame.

Tarzan is a tough sell to a modern audience. Do people really think much at all about how “cities have made us soft” anymore?

This compliment, admittedly, is somewhat diminished by the fact I have never read any Tarzan book or movie (outside of the Disney one when I was like 10, but that hardly counts). But I have seen every episode of the 60′s George of the Jungle animated series, which has to count for something.