The Edgar Rice Burroughs estate tried to sue this animated X-rated Tarzan parody out of existence. Looks like that didn’t work out and the world has about nine hundred more dick jokes for it. This is that old story in which a vine-swinging jungle klutz named Tarzoon needs to rescue his girl who’s been kidnapped by an evil queen who has a vast army of penis soldiers at her beck and call. Misadventures that involve blazingly politically incorrect cannibal pygmies, a frat boy on a flying carpet and our hero’s genitals always falling out of his loin cloth follow. Imagine the comics pages in a vintage issue of Playboy turned into a movie. That about sums up this one.
There are two versions. There’s the original French-Belgian release that’s the unadulterated vision of cartoonist Picha and co-director Boris Szulzinger. Then there’s the American re-edit that’s pretty much a Saturday Night Live/National Lampoon affair with new English language jokes written by Anne Beatts and Michael O’Donoghue and voice-over work from the likes of John Belushi, Emily Prager, Christopher Guest, Bill Murray and Brian Doyle-Murray.
The Burroughs lawsuit got shot down in Europe, but the American courts disagreed and ruled against the movie AFTER it had already come out. What that meant was that the producers then had to go through the film and, in a mad rush, remove every reference to the lead character’s name by methods that ranged from splicing it out of the soundtrack to merely scribbling over written mentions of it with black ink. It’s crude and silly, but so is the movie. The film absorbs it as just another joke.