There’s no getting around it: George of the Jungle is an amiable, highly ingratiating piece of lowbrow entertainment, and the audience of mainly young children and parents I saw it with on Saturday night clearly had a ball. So did I, for that matter. If consumer advice on where to take your kids is what’s needed, change “worth seeing” into “a must-see.” On the other hand, if I–a nonparent–had to choose between seeing it a second time and seeing the black-and-white Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942) for the third or fourth time on video, I wouldn’t blink before selecting the latter. Both movies, as it happens, are comedies–though klutzy George, who swings on vines directly into trees, is an even more ironic version of the noble savage–but there are also major differences between them that I suspect are generational. I suppose I could rattle on about the reverse-anthropological satire of “civilization” in Tarzan’s New York Adventure, but in George those gags have their counterparts in the plentiful subtitles (for the spoken Swahili) and the jokes derived from them, which are every bit as sophisticated.
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What we like and why we like it are always wrapped in layers of personal association. Part of what I like about George of the Jungle is the way it reminds me of Tarzan movies in general, with its tree house, swinging on vines, the hero’s echoing bellow, and the resident ape (Ape in George improbably yet irresistibly combines Tarzan’s Cheetah with Jeeves the butler). But these elements won’t amount to anything for kids who’ve never encountered Tarzan. And for viewers in their mid-30s, George of the Jungle may summon up Jay Ward’s animated TV show of the 60s, the source of this live-action adventure; for those closer to 40, it may recall Ward’s 1959 Rocky and His Friends. Dozens of other associations are possible for various people of various ages: viewers who saw the NBC live-action Tarzan series between 1966 and 1969, or the CBS cartoon series Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle between 1976 and 1977–not to mention Tarzan and the Super 7 (1978-1980), The Tarzan/Lone Ranger Adventure Hour (1980-1981), and The Tarzan/Lone Ranger/Zorro Adventure Hour (1981-1982).
Self-referential humor. Early on, when someone falls from a suspension bridge into a bottomless chasm, the offscreen narrator in George reassures us, “Don’t worry–no one dies in this story.” After we first encounter Shep, the elephant George trains to behave like a dog, we see it resting with an enormous Milk-Bone between its jaws until the narrator removes the treat with the comment “Wait a minute–the dog bone is too much: lose it.” When snobbish yuppie jerk Lyle Van de Groot (Thomas Haden Church), who comes all the way from San Francisco to “rescue” his fiancee Ursula Stanhope (Leslie Mann), falls face-first into a mound of elephant shit, the narrator informs us of the structure of the gag and, in advance, of its payoff (the native Africans exploding into laughter). And when Ursula, who’s fallen for George, tells her parents she no longer wants to marry Lyle, their first response is “That’s OK–we don’t mind,” followed by the expected outrage when the narrator interjects “Just kidding” and their initial response is instantly rewound and fast-forwarded.
I would add that George of the Jungle treats its African characters with an affectionate respect and a sense of reality that makes their counterparts in the old Tarzan pictures seem even more appalling racist stereotypes. Despite the differences discussed above, it would be foolish to argue that a freewheeling comedy like this one has any less humanity or reality than the Tarzan pictures did in their time; it would be better to say that it’s a different kind of humanity and a different kind of reality, as audience members and filmmakers alike are faced with different options.
