by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a smorgasbord of
shorts I’d downloaded from archive.org, including a real oddity: a 1949 TV show
called Kimbar of the Jungle, a Tarzan knock-off starring Steve Reeves in the title role, and a scrap
of film so obscure that imdb.com’s page on Reeves doesn’t list it. What makes
this even odder was that its producers wanted to make a classic, old-fashioned
serial for TV, complete with cliffhanger endings, only they were shooting for a
time slot of just 15 minutes (!) and so the scrap we have is just 10 minutes
long, and while it’s ballyhooed as the first episode of a serial, “The Lion Men
of Tanganyika” (actually normal humans dressed in really risible “lion” suits;
they not only looked funny in the wrong way but covered the bodies of the
actors so well I suspected that there were white people inside even though the
lion men were supposed to be African natives), the post on archive.org said
that this was the only episode actually filmed.
It’s a nice little curio, fun
to watch when Reeves is on screen showing off his body (blessedly naked from
the waist up!) — it’s interesting that back in the 1950’s you could still win
Mr. Universe without turning yourself into something as downright ugly as
Arnold Schwarzenegger; Reeves comes off as muscular but without having built
himself so far as to look like a
relief map of the moon — and rather stupid at other times, especially since
much of the soundtrack is animal noises unrelated to any human language.
Apparently we were expected to believe that Kimbar, like Dr. Dolittle, had
managed to figure out how to talk to the animals in their own tongues — the
principals at the trading post (or whatever it was) who were being menaced by
the lion men even sent Kimbar’s pet chimpanzee to fetch him — and at one point
they referred to him as “king of the jungle,” just before we saw a series of
quite venerable clips of wild fauna and I joked, “The King of the Jungle is
reviewing his stock footage.”
The other items we watched last night were one of
Willis O’Brien’s earliest films, The Dinosaur and the Missing Link, and an “Out of the Inkwell” Fleischer brothers’
cartoon called The Ouija Board. The Dinosaur and the Missing Link was made in 1915 and was a bit of a surprise because of how crude it
was; that early, O’Brien wasn’t yet doing authentic-looking stop-motion models
but was instead practicing what eventually came to be called Claymation,
animating both his human and non-human characters out of clay. The effect is
charming but low-tech and the film itself — except for a beautiful shot of the
missing link hanging from a tree branch (a still of this appeared in the book The
Making of “King Kong” and was captioned with an
explanation that O’Brien called this character “Kong’s ancestor”) — is pretty
dumb, a would-be comedy that isn’t all that funny.
The Ouija Board was the least ambitious of these three films but
also easily the most entertaining: genuinely funny in its fusion of live-action
and animation, and with some excellent gags (the ouija board itself is actually
in the live-action portion of the film, but its needle is being moved not by
magic vibrations but by Koko the Clown, an animated character, crouching under
it) including a great finale: Koko leaps off the animated page but instead of
going back into his inkwell (which is how these things usually ended) he leaps
onto one of the three humans in the room and becomes a large black stain on his
white shirt. One of the three live-action people in the movie is Black, and is
obliged to do the usual scared-servant schtick (a real pity, especially since he’s a lot
better-looking than most of the people after him who did these parts), but
aside from that lapse The Ouija Board is genuinely creative and also very funny and well worth its six-minute
running time.
