ABSTRACT
By 1975, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., a family owned corporation founded in March 1923, was reported to be earning in the region of $1 million annually from the sales of merchandise and stories based on the character and adventures of Tarzan. ‘The worldwide gross of Tarzan products sold under license to us is at least $50 million a year,’ asserted Robert Hodes, the man in charge of the Tarzan business empire at that time (The New York Times, 1975: 59). ‘Besides the income from Tarzan motion pictures, there are also royalties from two million Burroughs books published annu ally and comic strips in 250 newspapers’ (ibid.). In addition, Hodes conti nued, ‘manu facturers pay royalties on Tarzan products.’ Author Edgar Rice Burroughs, once branded ‘the modern Jules Verne’ of the day, had in fact transformed the fictional tales of his imagination into a thriving business empire that stretched across an array of popular media forms and products (ibid.). Perhaps accordingly, as Burroughs’ grandson once claimed, ‘next to CocaCola, Tarzan is the best known name in the world’ (ibid.).
