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Front cover of a photo novel with Denny Miller as Tarzan standing in front of the statue. |
The Beginning
In 1981 I picked up a comic from my local news agency. As a nine year old with a love of the fantastic, I grabbed a comic entitled Hellfire, which featured a horned monster on its cover terrorising a young couple. It was a striking cover that captured my imagination. I enjoyed reading it (mainly stories about the DC horror superhero, The Demon), but it was the image on the cover that has stayed with me through the years and started me on a strange journey of discovery.
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Hellfire (1981), a one shot horror comic published in Australia by Murray Publishing. |
It was a year or two later that I first saw the film Tarzan the Ape Man (1959), starring Denny Miller as Tarzan . It's at the films climax when Tarzan is saving Jane, her Father and his partner Holt from a fiery sacrificial death, that a large statue of a horned humanoid monster holding a snake is featured. As the film finished I raced to my comic box, feeling I had seen the horned statue before. As I flicked through the stack, I finally came to Hellfire and realised that I had a match. The idol, on whose sacrificial alter the wild inhabitants of the lost city tried to present Jane as a burnt offering, was the same as the one on the cover.
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Holt (Cesare Danova) and Jane (Joanna Barnes) climb the statue to escape the fiery sacrificial pyre in Tarzan the Ape Man (1959) |
I thought that this would be the end of the appearance of the mysterious statue, however sometime later I sat down on another Saturday morning to watch another epic fantasy movie, director George Pals, Atlantis: the Lost Continent. It was as the characters were entering the temple of Atlantis that something caught my eye, there sitting in the middle of the temple was a familiar statue, the horned man beast from my comic and from the lost city high a top Tarzan's Mutia Escarpment. However here the head of the snake had been removed and replaced with a dome like structure and it appears that another coat of paint had been applied to give it a different look from it's previous appearances.
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Azor the High Priest (Edward Platt) and Demetrios (Sal Ponti) look upon the statue, minus the snakes head and mace, in Atlantis, The Lost Continent (1961) |
Until recently the statue had become just a faded memory from my childhood until I was discussing Denny Miller's Tarzan the Ape Man with fellow fans on FaceBook. It was now that I realised that I may be able to solve the mystery of the amazing horned idol. After some discussion with my fellow fans, I discovered that the statue originally appeared in the 1955 movie, The Prodigal, starring Lana Turner and Edmund Purdom and Directed by Richard Thorpe (Tarzan Escapes (1936), Tarzan Finds a Son (1939), Tarzan's Secret Treasure (1941) Tarzan's New York Adventure (1942). According to some (www.turnview.com/mudverks/tagged/mgm) the statue is of the Babylonian goddess Astarte. The art direction for this film was over seen by Cedric Gibbons and Randall Duell and it is they that were most probably responsible for the amazing statue. However it is interesting to note that the set decoration was the responsibility of Edwin B Willis and Henry Grace, the latter of which was also the Set Decorator on the other two MGM movies, Tarzan the Ape Man and Atlantis, The Lost Continent.
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Where it all began, Samarra (Lana Turner) and the statue in The Prodigal (1955). |
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Worship in the Temple of Astarte in The Prodigal (1955). |
The Statues Identity
However as to the statue being Astarte, as The Prodigal evidently suggests, there are some issues, primarily that Astarte is a Goddess, which the statue is clearly not. The horns seen on some statues of Astarte are usually those of the crescent moon, symbolising here royal power, however they are not those of a bull.
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Depictions of the the goddess Astarte. |
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Bel Marduk and his Mushussu (The Serpent of Splendour). |
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Depictions of the storm god from various ancient near eastern cultures, each featuring the bull motif either as a physical feature or chariot/throne. |
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Moses smashing the tablets of the Ten Commandments in protest against the Israelites depicting Yahweh as a golden calf. |
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Clock wise from left to right: DC comics character Baal-Hadad, the movie statues head, and another picture found on the internet depicting the god Dagon but seemingly inspired by the movie statue. |
Where is he now?
Having now identified the statue not with Astarte, but her male counterpart Baal Hadad
the storm god, the question must be asked, where is the statue now? After sometime surfing the Internet, I managed to piece together some of the statues journey after its movie career ended.
It appears at some point during the 60's or 70's it ended up in a second hand/junk shop, in Ogletown, Delaware, for several years (www.tsutpen.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/before-and-after-250-babylonian.html?m=1). It was around this time, or at least some time before 1980, that the statue was used as the inspiration for the cover of the comic mentioned earlier. Eventually the statue was sold to a travel agency, Tranquillity Travel, in Dover, Delaware, where it sat out the front of the business on Route 13 (www.tsutpen.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/before-and-after-250-babylonian.html?m=1). It was here that the statue got it's next big modelling gig, appearing on the cover of the Live Skull album, Snuffer, released in 1988.
In 2003/2004 the statue was bought by Denney Van Istendal for $5000 in Lumberton, New Jersey, much to the horror of the local community (www.roadsideamerica.com/news/10348). Eventually, after much controversy, the statue was put up for sale again in 2009 and, as of Oct 2011, it appears to have been sold to a bar in Philadelphia (www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/1615). With this news, many questions still remain: where is the bar that owns the statue located in Philly? Will the statue ever be placed in a museum somewhere and restored to its cinematic glory? Will it ever be reunited with a new snake head and mace? And finally, will it ever make a cinematic comeback?
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The statue in Lumberton, New Jersey |
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The statue with the 'For Sale' sign. |
Hello
ReplyDeleteMay I ask ask what happened to the comments that were here? This webpage was turning into a rallying point for information on the two statues (11' and 5.5') - especially their location history.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteIt's been a while since I've visited this page, and it's a shame that the comments were wiped. BUT I have a major piece of news to share!
ReplyDeleteA couple months ago, I brought the search for both statues over to Reddit and it got a good amount of attention.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RBI/comments/f42s5j/i_need_help_finding_the_current_locations_of_two/
Most of the search over there was handled by me and Reddit user GhostOfTheReaper. After contacting a number of people and exploring different leads, Ghost has FOUND the current location of the 11-foot statue! It now belongs to a resident of Southampton, NJ and is standing in their backyard! Apparently it has been there since it was sold in 2011, which puts to rest the claim that it was installed on the roof of a Philadelphia bar.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RBI/comments/g650m0/this_post_got_a_decent_amount_of_attention_when/
Here's a photo of it, courtesy of a neighbor of the statue's current owner:
https://imgur.com/a/pmn2foa
Right now, we are in the process of trying to find the 5.5-foot statue. This will be a more difficult endeavor as unlike the large statue, nothing is known of what happened to it after the 1970 MGM auction. Still, we are confident that if the large statue can be found, then so can the small one!
We welcome anyone who is interested in joining the search!