A Flying Tarzan? Please, no...

What is it with these talentless hollywood writers who think they have to give everything they touch a "reboot" or add things that are not in the original source material? It's the reason I don't go to all that many movies any more. Most of them suck!

Case in point: Some hack writer named Stuart Beattie thinks he needs to "reboot" Tarzan and make him fly. No, really...

"[It's going to be] more mythological and supernatural, mythic Africa, where the trees are two or three times the size of trees," Beattie said. "It's that deep, deep, deep, dark, heart-of-Africa jungle that no one's ever been [to], 1930s, period, all that kind of stuff, and really bring that world up into that kind of mythic status, where Tarzan can fly around on all these trees and do amazing acrobatics. I just had a lot of fun with it."

Beattie goes on to say that ERB "probably never imagined his hero performing such feats" and "He [Burroughs] only had the written word and his own imagination." Um, yeah, Tarzan can't fly because it would be unbelievable! What an untalented hack.

Now, don't get me wrong. I understand that the Tarzan stories are fantasy and could never happen in the real world. However the appeal of the stories is the element that they might happen. It's like the character of Batman. He's believable because he's human, and maybe, just maybe you or I could be him if we trained hard enough and had a multi-billion dollar fortune. He's not Superman, who's from another planet and thus we can not become him. But Batman and Tarzan both are just men, albeit men who have found themselves in extraordinary situations.

In his arrogant hacktacularness Beattie has the gall to imply that all the good Tarzan stories have already been told, so to make a Tarzan movie now he's got to put damn stupid stuff like flying into a script. ERB wrote 24 Tarzan novels. Is this hack really suggesting that just because there's been a few movies previously all those novels are now junk? Bullshit. Here's an idea for Beattie: instead of trying to make the character his own why not adapt one of the 23 lesser known Tarzan novels starting with, oh, I don't know.... Tarzan The Untamed. Try writing a relatively faithful adaptation of the Tarzan material and the movie will still be filled with action and romance and pathos; audiences will love them.

I really hate it when hack writers like this take literary gold and completely trash it because they are too arrogant and untalented to recognize how talentless they are.