Tarzan Movies [top] Today

For over a century, the cry of “Kreegah! Bundolo!” has echoed from silent screens to CGI-heavy blockbusters. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan—Lord of the Apes by birth, feral king of the jungle by circumstance—is one of cinema’s most enduring characters. Since 1918, he has been reinterpreted through every major film era, reflecting changing social attitudes, technological leaps, and Hollywood’s endless search for a primal hero. The Tarzan movie canon is not a single saga but a fractured, fascinating mirror of 20th- and 21st-century popular culture. The Silent Birth: Elmo Lincoln and the Primordial Tarzan (1918–1929) Tarzan first swung onto screens in Tarzan of the Apes (1918), starring Elmo Lincoln. This was a direct, often surprisingly faithful adaptation of Burroughs’s 1912 novel. Lincoln, a former bodybuilder, embodied the strong, noble savage. The film introduced key iconography: the vine-swinging, the chest-beating, and the halting introduction of Jane Porter. A notable aspect of these silents—particularly the lost film The Romance of Tarzan (1918)—was their focus on Tarzan’s linguistic and social education, not just his violence. However, they also cemented problematic tropes: white superiority in Africa and the depiction of natives as either hostile warriors or superstitious servants. The MGM Golden Age: Johnny Weissmuller (1932–1948) If any actor is Tarzan for the general public, it’s Johnny Weissmuller. An Olympic swimming gold medalist, Weissmuller brought athletic credibility and a surprisingly gentle physicality. His debut, Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), was a sensation—not for its plot, but for its chemistry between Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan’s Jane, and for the revolutionary use of stock footage mixed with studio sets.