Favorite Jungle Series

Ramar of the Jungle

Have never seen Ramar(but I could be wrong, just don't remember).
I have 16episodes of Sheena on dvd.
Love Jungle Jim have complete tv series and also all of the movies and also all of Weissmuller's Tarzan movies.

Ramar is the only one of the three that I remember watching. I preferred the African episodes over the Indian. The only episode I still remember in any detail had 2 Bengal Tigers escape captivity in Africa and Ramar had to re-capture them.
One Tiger fought a python and the other fought a Water Buffalo in pretty good stock footage.

Have not seen them.

"Jungle Jim" I see when looking though old Australian TV schedules. It was among the first American series to be shown here. In Melbourne it was first shown 9 November 1956 at 6:30PM, preceded by The Judy Jack Show (1956) and followed by the news. I assume it was already being shown in Sydney.

"Ramar of the Jungle" began being shown in Sydney on 7 December 1956 at 6:30PM, preceded by kiddie show "Captain Fortune" (which did not debut in 1959, despite what IMDb says), and followed by At Seven on 7 (1956). It likely came to Melbourne at a slighter later date (Sydney and Melbourne were the only two cities in Australia with television prior to 1959)

"Sheena: Queen of the Jungle" began being shown here in 1958.

Also shown here were various BBC documentaries on Africa and such, and various documentaries on other "primitive" places. There was also an obsession by the public broadcasting stations (ABN-2 in Sydney and ABV-2 in Melbourne) with programming about "Malay", a place which was all over the news at the time.



The Johnny O'Keefe doll...wind it up and it makes a comeback

As a little girl, I identified with Sheena. And, yes, I wanted to wear that costume.  But, I remember more about the episodes of "Jungle Jim," and "Raymar."

I don't remember all of them being on Saturday mornings. Somehow, I think of them being on during the late weekday afternoon ... the other "kiddie ghetto" ... along with "Howdy Doody," "Beany and Cecil," (hand-puppet version), and "Crusader Rabbit." That was in San Francisco. Various markets probably aired them at different times.

My favorite was a black and white syndicated wild animal documentary show called Wild Cargo, which featured Arthur Jones who later became famous for inventing the Nautilus exercise equipment.

Jones was an excellent low-key narrator and there was some striking film.

Of the fiction shows, Ramar seemed to be in syndication almost forever, so I remember it rather well. Lots of stock footage. Jon Hall and the supporting would walk past a potted plant and then Ramar would point toward the camera and they would cut to whatever animals footage they were featuring. Crude, but it was fun for us kids.

There was a Sunday morning show, I think on WNBT, New York, called Time for Adventure which showed clips of Frank "Bring 'em Back Alive" Buck movies in serial format. I asked about this show in the Need To Know category back in September. No answers yet. If you asked Ramar "Who's your Daddy?", he'd have to say "Frank Buck".

I tried to help you track down “Time for Adventure” but was not successful. The comprehensive guide to TV programs, Alex McNeil’s Total Television had no entry for the title. It had only one index entry for Buck and that was a 1982 fictional series starring Bruce Boxleitner as Frank Buck.

I took your use of the word “serial” literally. In 1937, Buck appeared as an actor (his character name was Frank Hardy) in a 15-chapter cliffhanger serial from Columbia Studio. In 1946 it was edited down to feature length and released as “Jungle Terror.” I tried to find some TV connection using those movies as search terms, but again came up empty.

So I turned to Frank Buck’s contemporary in the Wild Animal Capture Game, Clyde Beatty. Beatty acted in two cliffhangers: “The Lost Jungle” (1934, Mascot) and “Darkest Africa” (1936, Republic). I ran the same searches for these films as well. There are no entries for Beatty in Total Television.

So unless you can dredge some other memory up from your subconscious, it seems like a dead end.

mf

Trust me. I’m The Doctor.