The film is named Adventures of Tarzan, which was likely conceived by Babbar Subhash a year after the Miles O’Keeffe Tarzan the Apeman film’s much derided if mildly successful release. Babbar Subhash partially modelled it on that film, but turned it into a Masala musical for urbanised, somewhat liberated women who desired to kick off their messed up spouses at the time. He waited until the 13th of December 1985 to help his own Masala pet project become a viable box office hit, and he did.
The film’s main stars are Hemant Birje as the definitive Bollywood Tarzan and Kimi Katkar as Jane Parker’s expy Ruby Shetty. Its recurring characters are Dalip Tahil (born 1952) as D.K. the Creature Captor (a much more heinous prototype to both the Hauser Brothers and Disney’s own boring Clayton), Om Shivpuri (1938-90) as Mr. Shetty, Raja Duggal as a Robert Candler expy, R.S. Malik as a Samuel T. Philander expy, and Narendranath Malhotra (1935-98) as Krishnakant Verma.
Also starring are Gautam Sarin (born 1947) and Sunita as Raina and his wife, a herd of elephants playing Tantor and his family, an Indian giant squirrel as the rodent equivalent of Nkima, a single macaque making a blink and miss cameo as a rarely seen best friend behaving like Cheeta/Terkina and a bunch of circus leopards, tigers and lions playing the big cats of the film.
Is it a knockoff? It’s an obvious knockoff, but it forgivingly took just some bits from at least two official Tarzan films; Greystoke for the opening and the aforementioned Miles O’Keeffe movie for the scenes where both the hero and Ruby were in the woods. Instead, it technically is a cross between Tomorrow’s Joe (hyper violent if well done fighting scenes), Buratino (a delightful tale with a circus scene more obviously known even to Astro Boy fans in both Japan and outside of Japan), the original Kamen Rider show (where losing one’s family is also a part of the plot) and, duh duh dun, a bizarre AF Tarzan screenplay from the man behind Star Trek.
Being a mix of all four kinds is most evident when its circus scene was transferred wholesale from that of Buratino. The film’s most distinctively Indian part is its own comically violent ending, when D.K. was absolutely killed off by the Bollywood Tarzan himself, which resulted in the hero finally escaping the dead circus, all while reuniting with his lover Ruby Shetty.
The film is a masterpiece of values dissonant silliness, sullied up by an army of tropes from a mix of both Japanese and Soviet period Russian works, as well as the glut of Hong Kong works inspired by Tomorrow’s Joe!
The story began shortly after much of India steadily gained its independence from the UK, when a pair of scientists and their toddler son were looking out for which African village (actually filmed in the Western Ghats for relative safety reasons) to study. Unfortunately, they violated the rules of a hidden monsoonal forest village belonging to stereotypical Bollywood Safari natives. Both of the parents died while fighting off them all, whereas their unlucky little son would survive being raised by monkeys (namely macaques and langurs) for the next nineteen years.
The story likely flashed forward to 1966, when Ruby Shetty and her super adulterous father were looking out for the beasts of the Western Ghats to capture for the rather corrupt circus which their boss owned. Mr. Shetty told her that his senior wife (also her mother) became un-alive as a recluse, but his daughter just wanted some peace and quiet.
Meanwhile, she had to survive such a daunting scam of an expedition, without much badass energy whatsoever. Some of the men were falling off a cliff because of how dangerous the terrain really was, resulting in Mr Shetty shouting at the sky about whatever happened to them all! Later on, she was in a camp with a bunch of serial perverts dancing around, even though she still enjoyed it while seeing the Bollywood Tarzan for the first time.
A day later, when Ruby was sunbathing near a river, Nkima the squirrel chattered to her about his whereabouts but got spooked by a lion named Numa. Then she fell down and was chased by a stuffed mugger crocodile. As a result, when Tarzan rescued her from the croc, she fully bumped into him and decided to think about taming him with love instead.
The next day, Ruby met him again near the trees when her fellow perverse men found her and forced her to leave. Otherwise, a bunch of rascally natives led by their chief were marching through the forest at nighttime, waiting for a woman to sacrificed for their own deity. Finally, after trials and tribulations, they escaped from the village.
Yet another day later, she and the Apeman were dreaming of having kids, but they otherwise wouldn’t marry yet. No one cared about Mr Shetty dying, as his own boss became a full on pervert coming out to forcibly marry the young woman when she’s only just a young adult, bleh. The Bollywood Tarzan as a result got captured for a perversely scummy circus exhibit and will have to act out for the rest of his days pre-marriage.
The circus exhibit also had unlucky elephants, whom Tarzan befriended in his childhood. The creepy circus exhibitors were so bad at befriending anyone that they could kill them whatever and whenever they wanted, culminating in them being destructed by Tarzan and his elephant friends. The story ended when he and Ruby finally got back together by riding on the former’s friend Tantor the elephant.
Even with its rather goddamn awful direction and somewhat tedious writing, The Adventures of Tarzan still remains the most iconic unofficial Tarzan film on record. Not only has such a film likely been subbed and dubbed into Burmese, Arabic, Russian, French, Swahili, Tamil and Thai, it still has a following from fans of fellow adults only clunkers. It’s also a truck-crashing, bus-honking peep fest for fans of both Joe Jusko artworks and the less hardcore parts of Bollywood’s smelly underbelly.
As with all the Asian Tarzan films made after Chandgi Ram’s decent jungle flick Tarzan 303 and Kunt Tulgar’s Tarzan the Mighty Man, the film’s own revoltingly scary villains are some of the most accurately depicted ones in a Tarzan film anywhere, even as Tarzan book fans sadly admit that they’re also on par with some of real life history’s most terrifying humans.
Given Hemant Birje’s super messy life, his plain head with menacing emotions and uncannily beastly moves have indirectly inspired Joe Jusko to create and expand his own long running Tarzan design portfolio, albeit indirectly. But many people still forgive Joe Jusko since he began such a portfolio with cringeworthy yet brutally honest ERB-themed paintings, only to produce 3 more decades of relentlessly more fabulous ERB-themed paintings than anyone else.
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