Boy finally gets a name. Bomba the Jungle
Boy! While Johnny Weissmuller left Tarzan in 1948 to become Jungle Jim, Johnny
Sheffield had left Tarzan one film before Weissmuller in 1947 to become Bomba.
The jungle called them both for all of their acting careers. Sheffield appeared
in thirteen Tarzan films - the first in the 1939 Tarzan Finds a Son when
he was eight years old. And they could never find a proper name for him in
all those years? No wonder he jumped ship. Weissmuller had chosen Sheffield
out of three hundred applicants, He didn't do much outside of the Tarzan
and Bomba films but he was in Knute Rockne as the young Knute and in small
roles in a few other films like Babes in Arms with Mickey Rooney and Judy
Garland. When Bomba finished after twelve films, he hung up his spear and
leopard loin clothe and retired from show business. He always annoyed me
in the Tarzan films - a distraction I thought but now he is front and center
as Bomba and at least in this first one he is fairly likable though as stiff
as cardboard.
I wonder why jungle films were so popular back then - Tarzan films went on
for decades and Bomba until 1955 and many other jungle adventures. Maybe
back then it was still the mysterious continent that fascinated audiences
- now everything is everywhere - if something occurs in Africa, CNN is there
right away. There is no mystery left. Bomba though actually began in South
America. In the books. It began as a book series in 1922 published
by none other than the Stratemeyer Syndicate who published nearly every other
juvenile book back in the day - the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, The
Bobbsey Twins and so many more. There were 20 books in the series lasting
until 1938 - the first ten set in South America and the final ten in Africa.
Not sure how Bomba made the trip. Pan Am perhaps.
This first one in the film series is a fairly tame outing. With a lot of
stock footage. Every time they go oh look - you get stock footage of some
animal or an incredible swarm of locusts which was pretty amazing and the
Maasai tribe on a lion hunt with spears. A father (Onslow Stevens - the villain
in Jungle Jim's Mark of the Gorilla) and his daughter Pat come to Africa
on a photo safari. Pat gets lost and found by Bomba and he takes her back
to his pad that is a Dr. Doolittle paradise.
At one point she asks Bomba if he has a leopard skin for her and he begins
to take off his loin cloth. She hurriedly tells him no, not that one. But
it's the best. I will take second best. And don't you know it, second best
looks like a nifty summer outfit for women. All we learn about Bomba is that
he grew up in the jungle and was taught by a wiseman who is now dead. At
the end he just says goodbye like he just had lunch with the group and returns
to his paradise of no people. Pat is played by Peggy Ann Garner who had won
a Junior Oscar a few years earlier for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. That is
show biz - one day an Oscar, the next sitting in a tree with Bomba.
