7th January: Tarzan

On this date in 1929, the first Tarzan comic strip appeared. Here are some things you may not know about Tarzan of the Apes:

1. Tarzan's real English name is John Clayton, Viscount Greystoke.
2. His ape name, Tarzan, means "white skin". Burroughs considered other names including "Zantar" and "Tublat Zan".
3. His parents were marooned on the Atlantic coast of Africa by mutineers. When Tarzan was a baby, his mother died, and his father was killed by Kerchak, leader of the ape tribe by whom Tarzan was adopted.
4. Tarzan was adopted by a species of talking ape unknown to science (ie fictional) called the Mangani. The word means "great-ape" and is used by the apes to describe themselves, their language, and even humans. Science fiction author Philip José Farmer has speculated they might be a variety of Australopithecus.
5. Tarzan is highly intelligent, and as a teenager, taught himself to read English with the books his parents had brought with them in order to home school him. He didn't learn how to speak English aloud until he met some English speaking people. In the books, he speaks perfect English rather than the "Me Tarzan, You Jane" style broken English used in the films.
6. Tarzan's love interest, Jane, is Jane Porter from Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of professor Archimedes Q. Porter. Her family are also marooned in the same jungle, twenty years later. They get out and go home, and Tarzan leaves the jungle to go looking for her.
7. Cheeta the chimpanzee, Tarzan's companion in the films, doesn't appear in the books. In fact, there are no chimps in the books at all.
8. Tarzan's yell was described in the books as "the victory cry of the bull ape." People have speculated a great deal about how the sound was created: it was recorded by an Opera singer and blended with "the growl of a dog, a trill sung by a soprano, a note played on a violin's G string and the howl of a hyena recorded backward"; it was recorded by three people - a tenor, a baritone, and a hog caller; it's an Austrian yodel played backwards and speeded up. However, Johnny Weissmuller claimed that he voiced the yell himself. This theory is supported by his co-star, Maureen O'Sullivan. Tarzan's yell is a registered trademark, owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.
9. The Internet Movie Database lists 200 movies with Tarzan in the title between 1918 and 2014. The first actor to play him was Elmo Lincoln. There is even a rock musical based on Tarzan, called T. Zee, written by Richard O'Brien of Rocky Horror Show fame, in 1976.
10. Jane Goodall, who lived among great apes to study them, was a huge fan as a child and thought she would have made a much better wife for Tarzan than the original Jane. The books may have made such an impression on her that they influenced her choice of career.