TV's Teen Jungle Star by Dave Goode

One of my favorite ersatz Tarzans was Bomba,the Jungle Boy. The character appeared in 12 movies beginning in 1949 with Bomba , The Jungle Boy and ending in 1955 with Lord Of The Jungle. The series was loosely based on books by the Stratameyer Syndicate. As loosely based as the MGM and RKO Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller were based on the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Strangely enough the actor who portrayed Bomba was the same actor who played Tarzan's son opposite Weissmuller. Johnny Sheffield didn't play John Clayton a.k.a Korak. Instead he played "Boy" , the adopted son of Tarzan and Jane. A creation of the MGM studio. Sheffield would be written out of the Tarzan series after the Tarzan series after the movie Tarzan And The Huntress (1948) from RKO. He simply grew to large to play a character called "Boy".

 

I remember watching and enjoying the Bomba movies on television as a boy. The stories played like something out of Fiction House's Jungle Comics. And Sheffield was believable as the athletic Bomba. Built along the lines of a high school running back.

In 1962 WGN-TV repackaged the Bomba movies as a prime-time Summertime TV series.* DC COMICS would publish 7 issues of Bomba , the Jungle Boy comic book from 1967 to 1968 and for the first two issues sub-titled it TV's Teen Jungle Star. Seriously? Repackaged B-Movies from the 40s and the 50s aired on TV in 1962 and you're marketing the comic book as if the "television series" was still being run. No wonder they dropped that " TV's Teen Jungle Star " tag by the third issue.

* "WGN in Chicago started running them once a week in the early evening under the umbrella title “Zim Bomba,” with the films cut from their original 65- to 70-minute lengths to fit a one-hour timeslot with commercials. The huge reaction from viewers caused Allied Artists, the successor to Monogram, to recut the 12 pictures into 13 TV episodes also designed to run in one-hour timeslots with commercials. This “Zim Bomba” package remained in syndication through the 1970s" - 2010 Johnny Sheffield obit

Want to know about Zim-Bomba?: 

 

 Speaking of jungle fun...let's see what the Golden Adonis is up to...

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