Tarzan's beard? does anyone know why they didn't give him one?

Question

Where the h**l is it?

In both the old movies, and the new kids cartoons, Tarzan the human ape does not have even the slightest trace of a beard.

I mean, surely he can't have learnt to shave that close with only gorillas to guide him.

So, why doesn't Tarzan have a beard?

Answer 1

Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote that Tarzan used to shave with his knife everyday to maintain some sense of humanity and to separate him from the gorillas.  He came up with the idea to shave from some pictures in a book that he found.  I'll try to find exactly how Burroughs stated it in his books.

EDIT: Here's what Burroughs stated in "Tarzan of the Apes":

"Was not hair commencing to grow upon his face? All the apes had hair upon theirs but the black men were entirely hairless, with very few exceptions.

True, he had seen pictures in his books of men with great masses of hair upon lip and cheek and chin, but, nevertheless, Tarzan was afraid. Almost daily he whetted his keen knife and scraped and whittled at his young beard to eradicate this degrading emblem of apehood.

And so he learned to shave–rudely and painfully, it is true–but, nevertheless, effectively."

Answer 2

If I remember correctly, there is a short story in "The Jungle Tales of Tarzan," a collection of short stories that deal with Tarzan's early life, in which he begins shaving at about age sixteen or so, using his father's knife to do so. Unfortunately, I can't remember why he decided to start shaving, although he probably did so because it drew attention to his ownership of the knife, the weapon that made him not only equal but superior to the band of apes he lived among.

Edgar Rice Burroughs wasn't a great novelist, but he filled his Tarzan stories with a great number of well thought out details, so I'm not particularly surprised that he did have a reason that Tarzan didn't have a beard. The character was originally featured in a serial that ran in "Blue Book Magazine" in the early years of the 20th century and was consistantly drawn as clean shaven (pulp magazines included small illustrations every dozen pages or so), and the first Tarzan movie (from 1918) also featured a clean shaven Tarzan, so Burroughs probably included the detail about Tarzan shaving in "The Jungle Tales of Tarzan," the sixth Tarzan book to explain why Tarzan was clean shaved before people started asking why Tarzan didn't have a beard, or he may have already been asked that question before he started writing the collection of short stories and wrote the explaination of Tarzan shaving as a result.

Answer 3

I've always been puzzled by that too lol! I guess his face was itchy from the beard and he shaved with a sharp stone or ripped it out lol.

Answer 4

He is freak of nature human ape that can't grow hair! Or maybe he is a super human ape and that is his super power. The power of not being as hairy as an ape!