Tarzan 2 _ Porter

We wanted Porter to look like a little monkey himself. It was his first time in the jungle and he was to be completly overwhelmed by what he saw and found. Things and animals he so far had encountered only in the books he had studied and written. He would get lost in some small detail, a frog or a bug, and he would overlook the gorilla behind him. He needed Jane to take care of him. I tought a lot of Catweazle, a character fom an english TV-series from the seventies, which nobody in the states knew about. Another big influence was Jack McGowern in his role as Prof.Ambronsius in Roman Polanski's "Vampire Killers", a movie only Kevin Lima knew about.






Geoffrey Bayldon as Catweazle

Anyway, I didn't know where to go visually with this character, because I didn't want to use other cartoon-professors as reference.I wanted to get away from the cliche and was looking for some other kind of inspiration. Then it hit me. Some sketches I had done reminded me of Albert Schweitzer, a philosopher, doctor, musician and humanist, who founded a hospital in the jungle at the beginnig of the last century. Always very much a gentleman, always in a white shirt and a bowtie. Again, when I told that to the team, nobody had heard about him. There was no google at the time, so I was more than lucky to find a German book about Schweitzer in a second-hand bookstore in St.Monica. I made a board and sold the idea to the directors.




Albert Schweitzer