I remember the first time I saw Darkest Africa. It was an old serial from the 1930s starring lion tamer Clyde Beatty and introducing 12-year-old Manuel King, the world's youngest lion tamer, playing a jungle boy whose best friend was a man in an ape suit.
As I understand it, Manuel King's family owned a roadside attraction in the southwest featuring lions and tigers, and the kid would go in with a long pole and poke them with it until they escaped through a door. He was trained by a man who lost an arm in a lion taming mishap. The kid had no fear of lions which was not a good thing. They had to tell him not to hug them.
The first time I saw it---it was an edited down version called The Bat Men of Africa---I was stunned. It was on a local channel on TV. The jungle boy was an overweight kid in a furry loin cloth.
I told people about it, and someone suggested that being on the heavy side back then may have been seen as a sign of good health and athleticism.
If this was the case, they used the opposite reasoning with Clyde Beatty. He was shorter than everyone else but kept getting into fistfights.
I thought it was funny, but I've matured since then. Now I see a happy, normal kid who got to be a movie star for a brief moment. His acting was fine. Every other episode, his character would be tossed into a pit full of lions and he would pick up a long stick and start poking them until they escaped out a side door. They wisely let him wear shoes, not like Johnny Weissmuller gingerly walking in bare feet. That partially mitigated their making a child do his own stunts.
There was a Cecil B. DeMille-like scene straight out of The Sign of the Cross where the kid was in a pit chained to a post. He writhed as lions were released to kill him. He quickly broke free and picked up a long stick that happened to be lying there.
The serial was predictably racist with Ray Turner playing a character called Hambone, the comic relief.
Manuel King died in 2016 at age 92.
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