delgadosaur wrote:
JJ, name one moment of the Tarzan series that is on par with Kong? Just one and it better be biggerthan the big sequences in Kong. Can you even name all of the MGM Tarzan films, such is their wild popularity? Meanwhile the Bond series is simply the most successful franchise in film history.

Actually if you are going by box office (and I thought that was all that mattered to you) Harry Potter has Bond beat (as of SKYFALL), along with STAR WARS and the MCU, which is #1.

As far as the relevance of TARZAN vs KING KONG at least as far as James Bond films go, clearly unlike KONG the Tarzan series is a precedent for a sustained series of adventure films based around a central heroic character in extraordinary circumstances (at least in relationship to its audience) with each subsequent film featuring similar themes but distinctive story-lines. Furthermore Tarzan has the precedent, for Bond, of having the franchise survive the need to recast the lead role. The quote that Ghostwriter supplied back in post #72 of this thread, about James Bond being the modern Tarzan, speaks directly to this point of relevance, and shows that Bond producer Harry Saltzman was keenly aware of the connection.

When Amanaplan1 first brought up Tarzan, he failed to appreciate that there was a sustained series of 12 films featuring the same actor (first at MGM then picked up by Sol Lesser and RKO) that subsequent to that actor's departure was forced to recast the lead and successfully continued the series. As with James Bond the franchise survived having the role recast several times, with Sy Weintraub taking over for Lesser as the series' ongoing producer.  He did his own recasting and rebooting (as again likewise to Bond) right up through the Ron Ely TV series you profess to have enjoyed. Additionally Amanaplan1 suggested that Tarzan had no international success which is untrue. The MGM and RKO Tarzan were hugely popular in the international market until WWII negatively impacted their ability to distribute them in locations like Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

image

from EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS AND TARZAN: A Biography of the Author and his Creation by Robert W. Fenton McFarland Books 2003

So bottom line despite the lack of knowledge or interest of your cool kids in film history, there is a connection and here is a relevance to considering Tarzan in relationship to the Bond films that goes beyond the fact that Sean Connery appeared in one of them before he became Bond.