Tarzan turns 100

It is a century since Edgar Rice Burroughs’s iconic creation appeared in print. Richard Fitzpatrick looks at the evolution of oneof the most famous fictional characters of our times

TARZAN, “big pecs, small vocabulary”, as someone once put it, is 100 years old this year. He’s carved a considerable corner in our culture in the intervening period, as familiar to us as Dr Frankenstein’s Monster and other comic-book superheroes like Batman and Superman.

Perhaps nothing defines Tarzan as much, though, as his ululating call, “the bull ape’s savage roar of victory”, aped, as it were, by generations of breast-beating young boys (and the odd girl). “What a frightful sound! ... I shudder at the mere thought of it. Do not tell me that human throat voiced hideous and fearsome shriek,” wrote Edgar Rice Burroughs histrionically.