Tarzan

How It Got on the Air

The idea for a Tarzan radio show came from a promoter named Joe Neebe, who pitched the concept to Edgar Rice Burroughs fresh off the success of the 1932 Johnny Weissmuller film Tarzan the Ape Man. Burroughs agreed, and the result was something genuinely new in American broadcasting: the first major syndicated serial, prerecorded onto phonograph discs and shipped to stations across the country rather than broadcast live. Jim Cox, in his book Radio Crime Fighters, identified it as "the premier feature prerecorded and distributed to local broadcasters throughout the nation and overseas." Production originated at WOR in New York before switching to Hollywood, with the World Broadcasting System handling distribution.

The premiere had its own spectacle. On September 10, 1932 — two days before the official broadcast date — the first episode was played over the sound system at Hollywood's Fox Pantages Theater, with the entire cast appearing on stage. Three thousand people attended, including Johnny Weissmuller himself. Signal Oil sponsored the serial throughout California and launched a "Signal Tarzan Club" that pulled in 15,000 California youngsters in its first 30 days and 125,000 members in its first year. Another sponsor, Fould's Milling Company of Chicago, received 93,000 package ends in eight weeks through WBBM and a Windsor-Detroit market station, redeemable for plaster of Paris statuettes of Tarzan characters. From the first month, it was clear that Burroughs's jungle lord translated powerfully to radio.

The First Run and the Family Behind It

The 1932–34 serial ran 286 episodes — by some accounts closer to 300 were produced, though only the first 77 still survive, cutting the story off in mid-cliffhanger. It followed a child raised among apes after his parents were marooned and killed on an African coast, tracing the story through three introductory chapters before the main action began. Tarzan eventually encountered the Porter expedition and met Jane, who taught him English. The serial was distinguished by robust storylines and sound effects — producers authenticated the jungle atmosphere by recording animals at zoos and inserting those recordings into episodes. The first time the Tarzan yell was heard on radio was episode 4, broadcast September 15, 1932. Stations carrying the serial included KDKA in Pittsburgh, WGN in Chicago, KLZ in Denver, WSM in Nashville, KMOX in St. Louis, and WLW in Cincinnati.

The man playing Tarzan was James Pierce, a former All-American football center at Indiana University who had already played Tarzan in the 1927 silent film Tarzan and the Golden Lion. His wife, Joan Burroughs Pierce — the author's own daughter — played Jane. Director James Knight Carden oversaw the production, with Fred Shields narrating and also playing Bill Fraser and Basuli the Waziri. The cast included early appearances by Gale Gordon, Frank Nelson as Nikolas Rokoff, Jeanette Nolan as Princess La of Opar, and Hanley Stafford in three different roles. Edgar Rice Burroughs personally revised each script to ensure accuracy and was documented pushing back whenever Tarzan was written to show fear, laugh, or behave in ways he considered out of character.

Burroughs eventually broke with the original syndicator, Frederick C. Dahlquist of American Radio Syndicate, because the story had drifted away from his novel. That dissatisfaction led directly to the second run, in which he took much tighter control.

The Second Run: Burroughs in Command

In 1934, Burroughs produced two new 39-chapter serials in association with his son Hulbert Burroughs and Ralph Rothmund. The first, Tarzan and the Diamond of Asher, began May 14, 1934. Joan Burroughs had been sidelined by pregnancy and was written out; because she didn't return, her husband James Pierce didn't either. Carlton KaDell, a Chicago radio veteran who would later play Red Ryder and Sky King, stepped into the title role. John McIntire narrated, and Ralph Scott returned as D'Arnot.

The Diamond of Asher serial drew its plot from material Burroughs would later develop into his 1938 novel Tarzan and the Forbidden City. The second serial, Tarzan and the Fires of Tohr (1936), sent Tarzan, D'Arnot, and the Burton-Ashleigh Expedition into the lost city of Tohr, where they faced arena combat, rogue elephants, and sacrifice to a volcanic pit. Gale Gordon appeared in this serial as well. McIntire narrated the first fourteen episodes; director Fred Shields took over narration for the rest.

The Fires of Tohr serial reportedly reached relatively few listeners because, according to researcher Robert Barrett, it was offered for syndication too late in a fast-moving medium. But whatever its immediate reach, the second run had lasting personal consequences for two of its cast members. Jeanette Nolan and John McIntire met while working on Diamond of Asher in 1934 and married on August 26, 1935. They would work together again on Fires of Tohr and eventually became known as "the Lunt and Fontanne of radio." The popularity of the format itself was illustrated by an anecdote out of Dayton, Ohio, reported in Broadcasting: when station WHIO and local milk dealers sponsored a showing of the tie-in film The New Adventures of Tarzan with a single milk cap as admission, more than 15,000 children lined up for several blocks, and the theater had to add two showings.

The People Who Played Tarzan

James Pierce's connection to the character was deeper than most actors ever get. He had played Tarzan on screen, married the author's daughter, and gave up a role in the 1927 film Wings — a part that went instead to Gary Cooper — to take the Tarzan film role. He and Joan Burroughs married on August 8, 1928, at the Burroughs family ranch in Tarzana, California — his 28th birthday. Together they voiced Tarzan and Jane through 364 fifteen-minute radio episodes, and the serial was distributed across every U.S. state, South America, and Western Europe. Pierce spent much of his later life searching for a print of Tarzan and the Golden Lion; one was found in a foreign archive only after his death in 1983. Both James Pierce and Joan Burroughs Pierce are buried in Shelbyville, Indiana, their tombstones inscribed "Tarzan" and "Jane."

Carlton KaDell, who replaced Pierce in 1934, was born in Danville, Indiana, in 1904 and built a long radio career in Chicago. He suffered a fatal heart attack in 1975 while on the air during his Classical Kaleidoscope program. Lamont Johnson, who played Tarzan in the final run, had a different trajectory entirely. Born Ernest Lamont Johnson Jr. in Stockton, California, he studied at Pasadena City College, UCLA, and the Pasadena Playhouse, and spent World War II performing for Allied troops in Europe with the USO after being classified unfit for military service. He played Archie Goodwin opposite Sydney Greenstreet in The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe and served as announcer on programs including The Whistler, The Six-Shooter, and Tales of the Texas Rangers. He was later blacklisted during the McCarthy era, a period he discussed in a 2003 interview with the Television Academy Foundation. After Tarzan, Johnson signed with Universal Pictures and eventually became a television director, earning eleven Emmy nominations and winning two — for Wallenberg: A Hero's Story (1985) and Lincoln (1988) — along with five Directors Guild of America Awards.

The Final Run on CBS

The third Tarzan series, which began on the West Coast Mutual-Don Lee Network around January 1951 and moved to CBS on March 22, 1952, was a different animal from the serial format of the 1930s. Episodes ran thirty minutes each and were complete in themselves — produced by Walter White's Commodore Productions, the same firm behind the radio version of Hopalong Cassidy, and written by Bud Lesser. CBS aired it on Saturdays at 8:30, sponsored by General Foods and Post Toasties.

The series opened with Tarzan's war cry — rendered as "Aaaaaahhh-o-ahhhh-o-ahhhh-o!" — and an epigraph announcing him as "lord of the jungle" and "bronzed white son of the jungle," transcribed from "the immortal pen of Edgar Rice Burroughs." This Tarzan was deliberately different from the Weissmuller movie version: he speaks several languages fluently, carries himself as educated, and operates from his parents' coastal cabin as a protector of the jungle alongside Captain Stanley Lawrence of the Governmental Police of an unnamed West African British colony. A recurring small character, Torgo — described as "a small native boy of the Punya tribe" — appeared across multiple episodes.

The storylines ranged across ivory poachers, slave traders, uranium hunters, gold thieves, and pirates. One episode adapted material from Burroughs's 1932 novel Tarzan and the City of Gold; another had Tarzan fighting a genetically engineered monster; another saw him shanghaied by pirates. On the sponsor side, Post cereals leaned in hard enough that on at least one occasion, Lamont Johnson was asked to perform the Tarzan yell while spelling out "P-o-s-t R-a-i-s-i-n B-r-a-n." The CBS run ended June 27, 1953, closing out more than two decades of Tarzan on American radio.