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Filmation shows have had a very rough time on DVD. Most of their shows and movies have been released time-compressed, occasionally edited ("Diamond Ray of Disappearance" from He-Man and "Busted" from Fat Albert being the two most notorious examples), and with messy noise reduction that turns fast-moving objects into featureless blobs. Warner and Paramount have had better luck, as the Filmation shows they own have, until now, been nicely restored from high quality elements. Now, with Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle's first season, Warner breaks form.
As seen on
Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1970s Vol. 1
, Tarzan looked its age: instead of a fresh transfer, we were presented with a very old video master that, while watchable, was definitely in need of a good restoration. This release is the same: the episodes are watchable, but clearly very old transfers (the Warner Bros. logo tacked on after the end credits look particularly dark and muddied). "Tarzan and the City of Gold" has some rather annoying white lines across the screen for a lot of the episode (which explains why it was taken off that earlier set at the last minute) and the commercial bumpers have been taken out, but if you have that DVD, you know what you're getting here. To further add to the air of "we didn't spend much time on this", the DVD immediately started playing the first episode when I popped it in. No menu, no ads, no FBI warning, nothing.
The show itself is pretty much what you remembered: the most faithful adaptation of the Tarzan books ever put to film. The writing, by Len Janson and Chuck Menville, is strong throughout, and multiple episodes adapt the actual books (or elements of them). The Mangani language is also liberally used, further enhancing the connection to Edgar Rice Burroughs' work. The art, while it of course uses stock footage and other "cheats", looks very good for its time, especially with the rotoscoped elements. The voice cast is excellent: Robert Ridgely soars as Tarzan, and Alan Oppenheimer and Lou Scheimer voice a wide variety of supporting characters with great skill. Guest actors are equally stellar, with Ted Cassidy, Joan Gerber, Barry Gordon, and (in the first of many roles for Filmation) Linda Gary are just as good here as they are elsewhere. And the music by Ray Ellis is some of the best he ever created for the studio: it sounds hot, primal, and suffocating, just like you'd imagine a jungle would feel like.
The bottom line, however, is that a lot of people are going to complain that this release "looks like a VHS tape" or "my old bootlegs look better" because there has been no restoration work AT ALL. Granted, there have been problems in finding suitable masters for many Filmation shows, as Lou Scheimer's personal vault and a recent UK vault find (which is how we got the recent He-Man soundtrack CD) have apparently been of little help with Tarzan, but Warner could have done a lot with these old tapes. Color correction and a simple round of dust-busting would have done wonders, and maybe solved a good deal of the issues with "Tarzan and the City of Gold" (because, as critics of Filmation incessantly point out, the animation is rather limited). Furthermore, there's the issue of the packaging: it's awful. Yes, there are minimal promotional materials in existence (and most include Batman, The Super 7, The Lone Ranger, and/or Zorro), but this series famously modeled its look after Burroughs' favorite artist, Burne Hogarth, and there are a great many artists out there who have been inspired by Hogarth and/or the animators at Filmation (just look at the cover art for all of those other Filmation DVD sets: they are way better than the editing, time-compressing, and poor restoration work would imply). They didn't even use the series' logo, WHICH WAS THE OFFICIAL TARZAN LOGO when the show aired. This whole release seems to be sloppy, and if the show wasn't SO good, I'd have docked well more than one star.
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