Production Notes
Mike Henry had just filmed several big-screen adventures as Tarzan in Brazil and was slated to play the lead in the TV series, but backed out due to disagreements with producer Sy Weintraub. Ron Ely was originally to have played a Tarzan impostor in a proposed episode of the TV series, but took over the lead role.
Like Jock Mahoney, Ely insisted on performing his own stunts when playing Tarzan. Unlike Mahoney, Ely was not a professional stuntman and sustained seventeen different injuries during the first season. These included singeing his arms and legs running through a burning village (Village of Fire); being bitten in the forehead by a "tame" lion (in a later fight with the same lion, Ely was bitten on the lower left thigh); falling down a hill and ripping the skin off the tops of his feet; falling twenty-five feet off a vine and separating his shoulder; and falling off another vine and breaking his other shoulder, fracturing three ribs and spraining both wrists.
Producer Sy Weintraub shifted filming from Brazil to the Churubusco studio in Mexico because of production delays.
In September 1966, former screen Tarzans James Pierce (1927), Johnny Weissmuller (1932–1948), and Jock Mahoney (1962–1963) appeared with Ron Ely as part of the publicity for the upcoming premier of the TV series. Weissmuller was approached to guest star as Tarzan's father, but nothing came of it. Joseph C. Poller, who as Gene Pollar had portrayed Tarzan in a 1920 film and was in 1966 the "oldest living Tarzan," complained in tongue-in-cheek fashion that he had not been invited to the publicity event because producers had assumed he was dead.
Ely made his directorial debut with the second-season episode Hotel Hurricane, which was a re-working of the 1948 film noir classic Key Largo, with the action transplanted from Florida Keys to the African jungle.
Both actor Ron Ely and line producer Steve Shagan became successful novelists.
Read more about this topic: Tarzan (1966 TV Series)
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