Word: tarzanitis
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There has probably never been a literary reincarnation like this. To U.S. men of draft age, Frank Merriwell is a vague synonym for a ninth-inning home run or a last-minute touchdown. But to an older generation, he was as vividly real a person as Superman or Tarzan is to youngsters today. Gilbert Patten, under the pseudonym of "Burt L. Standish," wrote the first Merriwell book in 1896, kept on writing at the rate of 20,000 or more words a week for nearly 20 years. Insatiably, week after week, legions of boys gobbled him up between paper covers...
...probably the masculine ideal which . . . carries supreme strength and masculine ruggedness. . . ." Those heroes of the comic strips, Tarzan, Superman and Li'l Abner...
...grisly Rock People are scarcely less gluttonous. In one spirited set-to over supper, Tumak, the picture's Tarzan-like hero (Victor Mature), is heaved off a cliff by Angry Volcano, his father (Lon Chancy Jr.). Five minutes later he is heaved off another cliff by a mammoth. Amid assorted saurians Tumak floats safely down to the country of the Shell People, who are soft-living sybarites about 1,001,940 years ahead of their time. Even a cave man can see that Shining Star, their blonde leading lady (Carole Landis), is a Hollywood babe in a deerskin playsuit...
First issue of the Tribune, subtitled "The People's Paper," ran to 32 pages. Next day it settled down to 16 pages, one afternoon appeared with a scant ten. Inside were plenty of robust comics (Superman, Charlie Chan. Tarzan), such columnists as Eleanor Roosevelt. Raymond Clapper, Hugh Johnson...
From Romulus and Remus, mythical wolf-suckled founders of Rome, to modern times, the world's folklore is full of tales of human children reared in the wilds by animals, and such tales have flowered in fiction from Kipling's Mowgli to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan. Very few, nevertheless, are the cases, authenticated to the satisfaction of science, of moppets growing up in forest or jungle without human contacts, whether with or without animal foster parents. One authentic woodland waif was the "Wild Boy of Aveyron," found in a French forest in 1799. Others were Amala...