This stunningly so bad its good tv show episode is from a Fantaserye (which means ‘Fantasy Tv Series’ in Filipino) anthology which aired for about seven years and was aimed at a young Filipino audience.
Said special episode is known as Ang Kuwento Ni Tarzan At Jane (The Story of Tarzan and Jane), or Tarzan At Jane (Tarzan and Jane). Tarzan At Jane was likely made by DKNLK writers and producers early in 2018 for the end of its first season, which was when the rather cheapish (but otherwise very popular) GMA Fantaserye anthology was gaining ground with working and middle class Filipinos and Filipinas of almost all ages.
The filmic episode’s stars are handsome (part-Spaniard) model-actor Gil Cuerva as Pinoy Tarzan and (also part-Spaniard) singer-songwriter Julie Ann San Jose as the discount expy of Jane Parker, Jane Port.
For Pinoy Tarzan before his adulthood, he was played by an infant and a kid respectively. Similarly for the comic relief Terkina, the two girls playing her are a female youth and a grownup woman.
The others are a bunch of people playing both cool mannered gorillas and nasty monkeys (who neither look fully like actual baboons and mandrills), Toby Alejar as Professor Port and Chinese-Filipino Rob Sy as Clayton Hauser the logger (who is more of a Hauser Brothers expy than that of his Disney Counterpart).
Also starring are comedian Tess Bomb as a frumpy but matronly Kala, Archie Alemania as Terchak (a discount Akut expy combined with elements of both Kerchak and Tublat) and the deliciously unstoppable Diva Montelaba as both Sabor Senior and Junior (with slightly differing personalities, but otherwise rather identical due to budget constraints).
Is this a Tarzan ripoff? Definitely a ripoff, but at least it does mix fellow (more official) Tarzan adaptations with each other to an extent, rather than with the authorised canonical books themselves.
The story likely began in the Philippines’ first year of independence, when a brown eyed baby Tarzan and his zoologist parents were likely shipwrecked into the Republic of Congo-Brazzaville’s coast. Months after building a makeshift treehouse for shelter, he lost his homesick parents to a flood, hours before a hungry big cat named Sabor Senior came along by trying to eat him.
Meanwhile, a band of Filipino speaking gorillas in discount caveman clothes were looking for fruit, but bumped into the Pinoy baby’s bassinet. When the discount Kala told Terchak that she adopted baby Tarzan, he steadily learned how to be more of a daddy figure. As a result, the fellow gorillas found the (derelict makeshift) treehouse to be a good semi-permanent residence as well, thus they and the baby became a found family of sorts.
A couple of years later, a school aged knockoff Tarzan and his friendly trouser pooper foster sister, the wisecracking knockoff Terkina, enacted a running contest with a cheapish butt violin expy of the Gooney Bird. Since his birth parents likely died in a flood years earlier, Tarzan was learning how to do a screaming yell in order to be understood by the other jungle animals.
Slightly over a decade after the running contest, the newly grownup discount Tarzan and Terkina had to fight off Sabor Senior’s cheapish looking dastardly daughter, discount Sabor Junior (again played by the same Filipina actress in a tiger costume) but lost their first and only battle against her and had to come home to talk about self-care with Kala instead.
Days later, they have a fun time in their jungle backyard, but the former will have to rescue the lovely Jane Port from a bunch of finking discount monkeys, themselves played by rascally actors in unofficial Rafiki costumes. He introduces her to the gorillas, while she introduces him to both her well meant father and his unwanted superior, a logging discount Clayton in military clothing, whom I dubbed as Clayton Hauser.
Otherwise the hero gets kidnapped into a would-be circus scam by the nasty hooning logger, who in turn has also forced Professor Port to be with him, if only for as long as he expects him and his daughter to be circus attendants themselves. Jane Port herself and the gorillas hurry up by freeing Tarzan out of the rather small cage.
Nonetheless, something much different will finally happen. Despite her relative antagonism towards the gorillas, Sabor Junior finally responds to Clayton’s dastardly antics in a begrudging manner, this time by kicking him off and punching him to smithereens. In an ironic twist, all of the gorillas are (ironically) not dead, unlike in the official Disney variants where some of them did pass away.
Days later, after Jane Port’s own unlucky father leaves her behind by saying goodbye to her, she fully becomes the first new member of Tarzan’s gorilla pack in years! The story fully ends when she and discount Tarzan become both partners and adoptive siblings to each other, which is more often expected for some cliche stormy Shōnen and Shōjo mangas nowadays.
Despite its obvious badness, Tarzan At Jane is both a freaking iconic Daig Kayo Ng Lola Ko (2017-23) episode and a very funny unofficial take on the Tarzan mythos indeed. Without doubt, by being different from Disney’s official spin on ERB Inc’s Tarzan lore, its own titular heroes are played by an actual Filipino and Filipina (who both have partial Spanish ancestry) rather than by an American and a Brit.
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