Billy Jack Meets Tarzan

I just had a good spree of thought/fantasy about the coming together of two great action heroes, Billy Jack and Tarzan.

At the time I really loved Billy Jack (the first movie) and of course Tarzan, swinging through the jungle doing a great Carol Burnett impression. We used to watch movies of Tarzan with these prolonged underwater fights, and it about destroyed my lungs watching him stay underwater for eight to 10 minutes at a time. But somehow he always survived.

Billy Jack was a survivor too. I'm sure if I saw that movie again it'd all come rushing back to me. Why exactly it appealed to me at the time I can't say. It was countercultural with a sense of still enforcing justice. The poor put upon kids had a hero who seemed to have mystical (Native American) powers and a mother figure to counsel them, the way I remember it.

Put Billy Jack and Tarzan in the jungle together, with Delores and Jane, and you've got all the action and justice you can handle. If Boy is kind of a hippie doing performance art downtown with a lot of his wayward teen friends, and there's a big Ape, like the Sheriff in Billy Jack, causing troubles, Billy could be out in a heat hutch somewhere meditating and Tarzan could be knitting stronger vines. Then they descend on the Ape and the ape people of the town and bring justice to the entire jungle. We wouldn't end it like Billy Jack, though, with him being led away. Instead it'd have a happy ending, like with him shipping out to some other locale, like to take on Fu Manchu and the yellow menace.

Hello to Tom Laughlin out there. During the '08 campaign I saw some things by him online, like he's a Renaissance man intellectual, which I would want to tamp down a bit instead of being so overt about it.

The first movie was a great one at the time!