Follow Friday - The First Seismometer Was Invented by Zhang Heng in 132 A.D.

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Rainy Dayz Reviewz and A Bibliotaph's Reviews.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: Are there any book to movie adaptations where you think the movie is better than the book?

Tarzan. This isn't so much a specific book adaptation into a specific movie, but rather a character from a group of books that was placed into a series of extremely loose adaptations that may or may not have much, if anything, to do with the books that inspired them.

Beginning in 1912 with Tarzan of the Apes (read review), Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote more than two dozen books about his most famous protagonist Tarzan. This character first appeared on film in 1918, and since then there have been almost ninety movies featuring Tarzan, which displayed varying degrees of fidelity to the books. But, for the most part, the movies in which Tarzan featured have been better than the books that inspired them, mostly because the movie makers have removed or otherwise muted the more cartoonish or objectionable attributes of the Lord of the Apes. In most movies, for example, Tarzan doesn't terrorize and murder black Africans simply because he thinks it is funny, although most of the movies, having been made between the 1920s and the 1950s, do present a rather racist viewpoint.

But on the whole, the Tarzan movies are better than the Tarzan books. Granted, the Tarzan movies are often fairly simplistic and were mostly made to show actors like Buster Crabbe, Johnny Weissmuller, and Gordon Scott in loincloths, and to show actresses like Maureen O'Sullivan and Enid Markey in somewhat skimpy outfits. Granted, the most famous of the movies transformed Tarzan from a cultured super-genius aristocrat into a monosyllabic savage. Granted, most of the movies take almost nothing from the original stories except the central characters and the idea of a child raised to adulthood in Africa by apes. Despite these admitted foibles, the movies generally provide more enjoyable and more palatable stories than the books. In a very real sense, the fame of Tarzan is the result, not of the books, but rather of the movies, which have eclipsed the books in the popular imagination.

Go to previous Follow Friday: 131 Is a Full Reptend Prime, but Only in Base 10

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: OMB Circular A-133 Is a Guide to Auditing Federal Grants

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