Saturday, March 26, 2011

Pellucidar in The Legend of Tarzan

The Legend of Tarzan was a animated television series that spun off the successful animated film Tarzan. Can't say I'm a huge fan of the Disney version of Tarzan (I can say I am a big fan of Tarzan in general, however), I do appreciate the writers of the series mining actual Tarzan mythology as a source for the series. For such a relatively mainstream format to reference Pellucidar as they did, is awesome and unique. Tarzan visited Pellucidar in Edgar Rice Burrough's novels. It was the one book that crossed the Tarzan series with the David Innes Earth's Core series. Tarzan at the Earth's Core was the 13th Tarzan book as well as the 4th Pellucidar book. This episode does not reflect that plot as David Innes, Abner Perry or any native humans appear.

To be knit-picky, though, there remains a lot to be desired on how they did it.  The scene in which Tarzan and the Porters enter Pellucidar is a bit disappointing in that they climb down a rope. I believe there is about 800 miles of earth between the surfaces. About midway gravity shifts it's pull. So they should've climed down out of the outer-world and up out into Pellucidar (which would be impossible with a rope- even if you 800 miles of rope). This episode glosses over that with the valuable little time to tell the story the have instead of using that time to educate the audience on the science of a hollow world. Their focus was the existence of dinosaurs. How they get there was minor. Wider shots of the background revealed what I originally thought were floating islands, but I believe were supposed to be stalactites, establishing Pellucidar to be a huge cave instead of the established setting. It's a children's show and they're forgiven for just writing the setting into the episode.

Included is the Phil Collins theme song.

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