Happy Tarzan Day! "AUUUUUUUUAHOAHOOOOOOOOOOOAHOAHAAUUH-WHEEK! 🐹 🤎 🤎 🤎 🐒 🐒 🐒 🍌 🍌 🍌 🥕

Sorry, Jane .. it's tough to compete with the cuteness of a guinea pig.

On August 27, 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs introduced Tarzan of the Apes to readers of The All-Story magazine—proving that a fellow raised by apes could become an international celebrity without shoes, a shirt, or extensive vocabulary!

Tarzan's jungle circle included Tantor the elephant, Cheeta the chimpanzee in the movies, Kala his ape foster mother, Nkima the monkey, and Jad-bal-ja the Golden Lion.

However, over the years, Tarzan certainly broadened his social circle. He shared the screen with a Green Goddess, Amazons, a Leopard Woman, a huntress, mermaids, a slave girl, the She-Devil, and, of course, Jane, who was very understanding.

How a guinea pigs never made it into a starring role—Tarzan and the Gorgeous Guinea Pig remains one of Hollywood’s greatest mysteries.🤪

Johnny Weissmuller made Tarzan’s famous yell unforgettable in the 1930s movies. Although MGM encouraged wonderfully exotic stories about sound engineers mixing his voice with a backward hyena, a camel, a violin and a soprano, Weissmuller insisted it was essentially his own yodel—amplified, repeated and partly reversed for the soundtrack. Maybe ...

Tarzan became so famous that Burroughs named his California ranch “Tarzana,” and the surrounding Los Angeles neighborhood eventually adopted the name! People from Tarzana refer to themselves as "Tarzanans" 😮

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If you've made it this far, you may be interested to know that for all his mono-syllabic posing in those movies, in the Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels, Tarzan speaks Mangani, a complex, structured language of the great apes with its own grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. Tarzan also masters at least 29 other human languages and dialects, including French, English, German, Arabic, and various African tongues, learning them rapidly. "Me Tarzan ... You Jane!" Sure ...

So for the curious ... here is a typical guinea pig sentence, translated first into English, then Mangani.

🐹 Wheeeeeeeeeeeeek!

🗣️ "Feed me now, oh human. I hunger"

🐒 𝗠𝗔𝗡𝗚𝗔𝗡𝗜 𝗧𝗥𝗔𝗡𝗦𝗟𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡

“Tarmangani! Ka-po-po ah! Po po!” (

𝗧𝗮𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶 — “White-skin ape,” meaning a human.

𝗞𝗮-𝗽𝗼-𝗽𝗼 — “You eat” or “feed me.”
Ka = “you”
Po-po = “eat” or, literally, “hungry-hungry”

𝗔𝗵 — An intensifier suggesting urgency: “Now!”

𝗣𝗼 𝗽𝗼 — “Hungry, hungry” or “I hunger.”

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Wheek! Wheek! "Feed me now, oh human. I hunger"