We all have favorite movies. They change from decade to decade or, if you are like me, hour to hour, as some drop off the list and others are added. A select few, however, remain and stand the test of time. A good chunk of my consistent "all-time favorites" come from the era when I was first discovering movies, staying up late at night on Fridays to watch "Memories of Monsters" and catch a glimpse of heroes like the Wolf Man, Frankenstein's Monster, and Dracula; or if not that, then staying up just as late on Sundays (always on the sly, of course, for not even my parents were going to let a elementary school kid stay up until one in the morning on a school night) to catch PBS's noir theater -- yes, there was a time when PBS actually showed things you wanted to watch and earned the support of viewers like you by bringing you worthwhile programming, instead of doing what they do now, which is guilting you into sending money to support crap just because you seem to remember that there used to be a time when they showed things like The Prisoner, Dr. Who, The Avengers, that Hitchhikers' Guide BBC show, and Matinee at the Bijou.


Ahh, Matinee at the Bijou. If Saturday afternoon was rainy or too cold to enjoy, I was guaranteed to be camped out in front of local PBS affiliate channel 15 for Matinee at the Bijou. I loved it. Monsters on Friday, gangsters on Sunday, and Saturday afternoons filled either with Godzilla movies on channel 41 or a grab-bag of golden era "classics" on PBS. Matinee at the Bijou was as faithful a recreation of going to a movie theater when movie theaters were worth going to as you could get from television. They always showed a serial -- Flash Gordon, Radar Men from the Moon, old Batman serials where Batman drives a regular sedan and punches out Japanese spies, or the thing where Bela Lugosi bosses around that ugly robot. Phantom Creeps, wasn't it?

Then you'd get a couple old newsreels getting you up to speed on how Patton was doing on the European front, and then the feature presentation. My only regret was and is that this all happened at home, instead of movie theaters actually being the kinds of places they used to be.

It was here, though, that I saw many of the movies that remain on my list of all-time favorites (I still even have a soft spot for serials, both good and bad, though I'll admit getting through Phantom Creeps is a Herculean chore). Old Bogart films, Hitchcock before he moved to America. Some of my favorite movies were the old Tarzan films. Really, I'd settle for just about any Tarzan film, since I don't have very high standards, but like just about everybody else in the world, if I have my choice, I'm going to choose Johnny Weissmuller every time. Well, almost every time. I'd choose Gordon Scott from time to time if anyone would ever get around to releasing those movies on DVD. But Weissmuller was king of the jungle, and I went ape for the Tarzan movies in which he starred. Sorry. I'm so, so sorry for that last sentence.

Undoubtedly my favorite of all the Weissmuller Tarzans when I was a kid was Tarzan's New York Adventure, which for some reason, I referred to for years as Tarzan Goes Crazy in New York. I must have been thinking of Hercules. Or did he go bananas in New York? Cheetah the chimp certainly went bananas. Ouch. Sorry folks. But we're talking old films here, and if you expect anything better than low-brow vaudeville for now, then you're going to be real sore when I start doing things like "walking down the stairs in my prop trunk." Best that you just throw on The Ink Spots crooning "When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano" and roll with it. Once us old folks get going, there's no stopping us until the nurse comes to pass out our medication.

I recently revisited Tarzan's New York Adventure. It's no longer my favorite Tarzan film, but it's still plenty of fun, with lots of Tarzan feeling stuffy in the white man's clothes and getting fed up with the white man's law, culminating in the famous dive off the white man's Brooklyn Bridge. Tons of fun, even if we're in the concrete jungle instead of the lush green jungle, though I have to admit that Cheetah's terrifying human laugh creeps me out.

When an unscrupulous big game hunter kidnaps Boy from Tarzan and Jane's idyllic mesa, Tarzan must play the fish out of water as he follows Jane's lead across the globe and into civilization. Tarzan's New York Adventure has a lot of what people started to dislike about Tarzan movies -- too much Boy, too much time spent on the antics of Cheetah as she explores the world of posh New York hostelries and gets into Jane's make-up. Oh, Cheetah! Will you ever learn? But as a kid, I didn't mind any of that stuff, and I still don't. Boy is neither here nor there, and Cheetah is good for a larf every now and again. And in between all that is a pretty good story even if it lacks the usual vine-swinging adventure. It still manages to work in one of the two great staples of a Tarzan movie -- an elephant stampede. frankly, I'm surprised that Tarzan didn't have to wrestle an alligator in the East River as well.

Above all, it has nostalgia on its side. There are better Tarzan movies, but Tarzan's New York Adventure was a major thrill back in the day, and it's still a rousing good time at the matinee.

Labels: Adventure, Series: Tarzan