Commodore was a small company based out of Hollywood, California, that had a license agreement to produce Hopalong Cassidy and The Clyde Beatty Show for radio. The former was a Godsend to the company, providing so much lucrative products that the producers wanted to invest in other properties -- hence Clyde Beatty and then Tarzan. The latter program, however, did not receive as wide a distribution as the cowboy hero, even with General Foods signing up for sponsorship for Saturday evenings starting in the spring of 1952.
Tarzan, despite what some Internet referenced claim, premiered not in 1952 but in January of 1951 over the Don Lee Network on the West Coast. The tales of the jungle hero, however, were not of the high quality and caliber as the motion-picture counterpart being produced at RKO. Critics were quick to claim the program was dull. As Variety commented: "Why this was revived and sponsored must have puzzled many an unwary listener. Claptrap of the jungle is too contrived and what goes with it is just as dull."
Internal evidence points to a date after 1957 (with Ghana as an independent state) but no later than early 1964 (before the merger of Tanganyika and Zanzibar into Tanzania), so these plot proposals, from Judith Bublick, a female radio script writer located in New York City, are apparently for a proposed television series. At first I thought these might be for the Commodore radio program, due to the source, but thanks to Russell Fehr who caught and observed the internal evidence, it appears these are for television.
Bublick was responsible for writing scripts for such radio programs as Nick Carter, Master Detective, Quick as a Flash and The Shadow. While browsing through a number of archives recently, I came across two story proposals for this proposed television program. Neither were purchased for adaptation, but for fans of the vine-swinging hero, these un-produced plot proposals are awesome to read. The link for the PDF is included below.
