Tarzan - The Awful Truth

The world's most typecast actor is celebrating his 75th birthday today - Cheetah, the chimp.
Let's face it, you could hardly say the boy ever stretched himself professionally! He played himself in all those Tarzan films and then, when no doubt his agent advised him to break out in search of a meatier role, he took the part of another chimpanzee in Doctor Doolittle. No Lear at The National for the hairy guy.
Still, people of my age grew up with Cheetah - well, not literally. I mean, in my case, my brother has some strange habits but he can just about walk upright and he doesn't like bananas. No, I mean Cheetah and his chum Tarzan were an intrinsic part
of my youth. I was of the "Ron Ely as Tarzan" generation which no doubt spoiled things for me a little as Ronald and his thick American accent were, without doubt, T W...........THE WORST!!
Him aside, I remember I still had misgivings about Tarzan when I was a kid. I have always had an inquiring mind and there were several things about the ape man which just didn't add up to me. Admittedly, I never read Edgar Rice Burroughs so I could only go by what I saw on screen, but how come he didn't have a beard? In fact, in Ron Ely's case, how come he appeared to have no bodily hair whatsoever? Are you telling me that the chimps he grew up with taught him to shave? If so, who taught them and why didn't they shave themselves?
Secondly, how come he wore a loincloth? Again, he grew up with a load of hairy-arsed, simian siblings and I don't recall ever seeing any of them, Cheetah included, walking around in pants. If they permanently had their knobs out then surely he would have followed suit? Were we meant to think that at some stage in their youth the other apes had turned to Tarzan and said: "Put it away lad. You'll have somebody's eye out with that. Look, I found this C&A catalogue in the bushes. Be a mate and run yourself up a pair of those undies"?
Thirdly, what exactly had he got against lions? Every time some passive looking lion
strolled by nonchalantly in the distance, minding its own business, he had to run over, grab its mane and start wrestling it. The lion always looked really reluctant to get involved and I always imagined it thinking to itself: "Of fuck! Here we go again. Go on, then. Get it over with."
He was equally anti-social with crocodiles. He always had to swim over to
them, wrap his arms and legs around their suspiciously rubbery bodies, and then roll over and over, stabbing them intermittently.
The elephants worried me as well. They were Tarzan's biggest mates and if ever
things were looking a bit dodgy he'd give out that gut-wrenching yodel and they would arrive on the scene in seconds. Where the fuck from? They live on the plains in Africa! Was there some sort of elephant shuttle service which bussed them into the jungle at the drop of a hat? It then got more confusing. When they got to Tarzan's side, guess what? They were fucking Indian elephants!! Assuming they hadn't taken the considerably longer land route between the two continents, we were supposed to believe that they had made it to their nearest port, queued up to get on a ferry, crossed the Indian Ocean and then made their way across Africa to hook up with the Big T. They would have had to go like fucking rockets!
Talking of that trademark, jungle yodel, what was that all about anyway? He would invariably climb half-way up a tree and let out that distinctive "YAAAAR, DLARDLE, AAH, ALAARDLE, AAAAH!" and then what would happen? In one episode the elephants would start packing up and heading off to the ferry port, in another a lion would come running and in another the monkeys would start building him a box girder bridge or something. Same fucking yell each time, mind. How could one guttural bellow constitute entirely different fucking languages to 30 different animals?
Still on the subject of that yodel, we were also supposed to believe that in the 30 years he spent with just the chimps in the jungle that was all he had managed to come up with yet the moment Jane showed up and gave him a couple of basic English lessons he was talking like an Oxford professor of fine art after about a week!
Then we get onto the tricky subject of sex. This bloke had spent his entire life without a woman and then Jane wanders into the woods in just a micro-bikini affair. I'm amazed we ever saw her in any of the episodes! Human nature being what it is, when we did see her she should been teetering about, bandy-legged, or flat on her back, exhausted, in that 15-bedroom, luxury treehouse Tarzan had knocked up.
No, it all confused me as a kid. Cheetah didn't do me any harm and so I wish him a very chimpy birthday but Tarzan can go to Grantham.