Directors: Picha, Boris Szulzinger
Cast: Johnny Weissmuller Jr., Bill Murray, John Belushi, Christopher Guest

Though I personally think it's healthier for us to admire and be inspired by real-life people who have made great accomplishments in their lives, I can understand why many people take fictional characters very seriously. It's much easier most of the time to design a fictional character from scratch than go through the long process of making yourself a person that Joe Public will look up to, or to make a bad guy who is so evil that he or she is fascinating. Sometimes, however, people's interest for a fictional character goes beyond common sense, so much so that these people don't see the sillier side of the character. That often results in other people making fun of the fictional character. For example, take Dracula - not the real-life Dracula a.k.a. Vlad the Impaler, but the Dracula character that author Bram Stoker created. There are so many ways you could poke fun at the character. For example, some good gags could come from the fact that Dracula hides in darkness during the daytime to avoid the deadly rays of the sun. However, he has no problem going outsid e at night when the moon is out - and the light from the moon is just refection of the sun's rays! Another example of how Dracula can be poked fun at comes from a cartoon I drew when I was in grade school. It portrayed Dracula looking to buy a coffin for himself and his wife. The salesperson in the cartoon showed Dracula a special coffin, which was essentially two coffins attached to each other side by side... but with a clear passage between both coffins at waist level. I showed my cartoon to a friend of mine, and he roared at the gag, showing me that I had hit comic gold. I think it still has gag potential today. Maybe I should submit the cartoon to one of the many popular men's magazines on the market.

Then there is the case of Spider-Man. When Spider-Man is shown to be standing on the side of a building, I wonder if even he would find it difficult to prevent from bending at his knees and promptly smacking his back against the side of the building. But the fictional character treated with great respect that I really want to discuss is Tarzan. Created by Edgar Rice Pudding in 1912, the character became an instant hit in magazines and books, and over the decades appeared in movies, television shows, comic books, and comic strips. He's still going strong after existing for over one hundred years. I think the appeal of the character is that he's usually portrayed as being right between civilization and sheer natural savagery. Such a position would be hard to reach in real life, and the ability to be between those two extremes is fascinating. It's certainly stirred my mind a number of times. Yet at the same time, I do see a sillier side to Tarzan. For example, it seems that in the hundreds of portrayals of Tarzan over the year, not one has depicted him with a beard. For many years, I thought that when Jane would have found him, he would have been a very shaggy man. However, recently I posed the question on an online AI program, and I found out the answer to that question (Tarzan shaved after reading picture books by humans.) AI also answered another Tarzan question I had, that being in hundreds of Tarzan tales, it's never explained why Tarzan wears a loincloth. For years I had wondered what source would have been around to tell Tarzan that human nudity is frowned upon... or if Tarzan thought of it himself to make sure that the Mangani apes he lived among would not be jealous of his junk? (Actually, I've learned that real life male apes have small penises.)

Now, I should point out I have never read any of the original Edgar Rice tales of Tarzan; maybe there are answers to those questions I posed in the paragraph above. All the same, I'm sure that with enough thought, you too could contribute to my small list of Tarzan implausibilities. So even though the character of Tarzan has a noble and admirable side, there's still enough about him to encourage poking fun at him. Over the decades there has been a healthy amount of ribbing towards Tarzan in media. For some reason, British humor comics repeatedly liked to call him "Marzipan of the Apes", MAD Magazine would occasionally make a Tarzan gag, comic strip creators have made one-shot jokes about Tarzan, and so on. But when it comes to feature films making fun of Tarzan, the well is almost completely dry. There was George Of The Jungle and its direct to video sequel, but apart from those, at this moment the only other one I can think of is Shame Of The Jungle. What makes it even more unusual is that it's not only an animated movie, it was made in France and Belgium. It's presently very hard to find in North America; I had to go to YouTube to watch it after many years of hearing about it but being unable to find a copy. For copyright reasons, the names of Tarzan and his mate have been changed. In this telling, in the deep African jungle is an inept vine swinger by the name of Shame. Not only is he poor at keeping the jungle in check, his girlfriend June finds him poor in the sack as well. Those are enough troubles, but Shame does not know that additional problems are rising on the horizon. A woman known as Queen Bazonga has two evil plans in mind. The first is to find a suitable head of hair off some other woman so she can cover her bald head with the unlucky woman's scalp, and the second scheme is to take over the world. Executing the former plan first, Bazonga commands her phallic-shaped minion soldiers to kidnap June so she can get June's healthy head of hair. After the kidnapping, Shame is understandably concerned, and sets off with his horny chimpanzee friend Flika to save June and the world at the same time. But with Shame being so inept at everything, it seems it would take a miracle for him to succeed.

Unfortunately, the only version of Shame Of The Jungle I was able to track down was the 68 minute version that was cut down to get an "R" rating in America; the original version ran 85 minutes in length, and was reportedly more explicit. But as it is, this version of the movie has an ample amount of nudity as well as various sexual situations. That may sound good, but let me tell you that the movie is not the least bit erotic. I don't think people will get off on such sights as chimpanzees graphically masturbating, penises being stretched out to incredible lengths, Shame showing partial (or full) nudity almost every time he makes an appearance due to a droopy leopard skin outfit, or any of the movie's rape sequences, even if the rapist and victim are at one time portrayed as mosquitoes. All this sexual material soon feels like overkill, and quite frankly quickly becomes tiresome. There are also some pretty gory incidents along the way, which are a little better handled than the sexual material because they seem to fit in this absurd slapstick cartoon world. However, I wish that the animation could have been a lot better so that the sexual and violent material could come off better. The character design and animation are at a pretty crude level, akin to something you would see on Sesame Street at this same time period. Sometimes it looks so grotesque that the attempts at sexiness backfire and instead come across as completely antierotic. In fairness, occasionally there are some backdrops where it's clear some time went into their creation, such as inside Bazonga's pseudo Technodrome. And the frequent use of watercolored jungle background is often colorful, soothing, and pleasing to the eye.

But getting back to the negative side of the artwork, I have to also add that the design of characters who are Asian or of African origin is pretty racist. The African characters are given big fat red lips, something I have noticed in other drawn comic media coming from western Europe. Adding insult to injury are the fact the movie's few African characters are portrayed as dim-witted, clumsy, and drawling stereotypes. But believe it or not, they get off pretty lightly compared to how the movie's chief characters are portrayed. June is portrayed as a total selfish shrew with no background who does nothing but spout verbal abuse towards her mate Shame. That is, when she does show up; she only makes limited appearances despite her kidnapping being central to the plot. It's the same with villainess Bazonga; after making her first brief appearance around the five-minute mark, she disappears completely for the next thirty-five or so minutes (with no mention or reference to her during this time), and when she does re-enter the story, her subsequent appearances are brief and small in number. She and Shame don't even meet until the last fifteen minutes for one brief interaction. Her motives for her actions are just summed up with a quick statement: "So I can spit on people." As for Shame, he is one of the weakest characters I have ever seen in a movie. He doesn't really talk until one quarter of the running time has passed, and the movie makes no effort with him or outsiders to show his personality or how he got to be in the position he is in when the movie starts. The best way is to describe him is that he's close to being a silent film klutz, though without the ability to provoke laughs or sympathy from an audience.

Actually, there are even worse characters to be found in Shame Of The Jungle. There's a subplot about a professor and his assistance entering the jungle to find and capture Shame, and later Shame bumps into a fat lazy fellow (voiced by John Belushi, Old Boyfriends) with a unique flying craft. Both these subplots go on for some time, but ultimately end with the realization that they had no purpose except to stretch out the running time. I uncovered during my research that the movie originated as a short subject, but then was expanded to feature length. That would explain why there's only enough plot in the movie for a short subject. Despite the lack of plot, lack of interesting characters, lack of taste, and lack of pleasing visuals, the movie might have still worked had it actually been funny. It isn't. Oh, there are a few isolated moments that provoke giggles, like the amusing title crawl (with an announcer) that opens the movie, as well as a cameo by the famous Belgian cartoon characters Tintin and Snowy. But even these occasional amusing moments don't seem to be executed to their full potential. And you have to wade through a whole bunch of comic dreck to get to them. It should be pointed out that the movie was not only redubbed, but its dialogue was also changed by Michael O'Donoghue (Saturday Night Live) and another writer for American consumption. I don't know how the comic dialogue was in the original French version, but it's a desperately unfunny mess here. Characters make crude comments like, "I'm only in this movie because I blew the producer," but a lot of times the characters just seem to ramble on and on very quickly. Maybe O'Donoghue thought that if the rambling dialogue was so fast, nobody would notice it was weak. But I noticed it, and no doubt you would too if you were ever unfortunate enough to watch Shame Of The Jungle. Normally at this point I would sum things up by a snarky comment with an obvious reference in the movie's title, but there's no way I want to lower myself to the lower than juvenile feel of the entire enterprise.

(Posted August 26, 2025)