Wich2 wrote:
It's a good thing to know history. 

Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes was gigantic - I know that much, and I'm not even that big a fan of the character. Start with the Elmo Lincoln movies, which were smashes. Crunch a few numbers re: how many people saw that whole series of films, and how many bucks they brought into box offices.

Beware of navel-gazing: "Only MY Era's Legends Are Real Legends!"

Without getting into the overall Tarzan-Bond comparisons, I think that Tarzan's popularity varied more within the advent of the first sound series. (I can't speak to the popularity of the character in the silent years.)

I think it's demonstrable that the first sound Tarzan had an impact comparable to DOCTOR NO. IMDB's estimate for the APE MAN budget was less than $700,000 , and it reaped about two and a half million at the domestic box office.  I don't know if TTAM was thought of as an "A picture" when it started, but that box office sounds pretty "A-level" for 1932. even without factoring in foreign sales.

The big difference that I see, however, is that even if TARZAN and his first few entries were treated like "A-pictures," the series became increasingly handled like any other B-picture, regardless of how much money it brought in. TARZAN'S NEW YORK ADVENTURE made about the same money as APE MAN, according to Wiki, I tend to doubt that any of the later series-entries did quite that well, though. Creatively speaking, it looks to me like Tarzan was treated much like Charlie Chan, as a dependable source of B-films, some of which did much better than any of the latter-day Chans.

James Bond did get different treatment: all of the entries generally have an "A" look to them, although occasionally some cheapness crops up here and there. So the impact remained steadier-- and moreover, even though there's a lot of "politically incorrect" stuff in the Bond books, this could be rewritten as needed, while for Tarzan, the incorrect content was germane to the concept. Thus the last popular movie Tarzan in years was the Disney cartoon version, which avoided sensitive areas by excluding any Black African tribes.

Another point of comparison: Bond and Tarzan both inspired foreign imitators, but it was a lot easier to imitate Bond, not least because imitating Tarzan might get you a lawsuit from ERB, Inc.