Hero of the Month: Frank Buck
Self promotion is a tricky art for a non performing celebrity, just take a look at many of the reality stars today and you can see just how thin a line it is between looking like a gracious or cool celebrity and looking like an needy attention whore. One of the true all time masters of self promotion was wild animal trapper Frank Buck. In his youth he worked at everything from a hotel bellboy to a cowpuncher. Supposedly his first expedition to Brazil was financed by winning $3,500 in a poker game. He returned with a number of exotic birds and the legend of Bring ‘Em Back Alive Buck was born.
Public interest in this man who traveled to exotic lands and captured ferocious animals led to him writing books about his expeditions, Bring ‘Em Back Alive, Fang and Claw, Wild Cargo and the children’s book On the Jungle Trail were all best sellers. Inevitably this would lead to Buck appearing in the movies, where he played himself and narrated film versions of Bring ‘Em Back Alive (1932), Wild Cargo (1935) and Fang and Claw (1935).
One of his few forays into actual acting was for Columbia Pictures, where he played wild animal trapper Frank Hardy in the studio’s premiere serial effort, Jungle Menace (1947), helping a plantation owner fight a gang of criminals while also recovering his escaped cargo of lions and tigers.
Other film work included pseudo-documentaries where he appeared as himself in jungle Cavalcade (1941), Jacare (1942) and Tiger Fangs (1943). His final film appearance was a cameo as himself in the Abbott and Costello comedy Africa Screams (1949) a year before is death from lung cancer.
Though he was extremely popular during his lifetime, even having a zoo named after him in his old hometown of Gainesville, Texas; the years following his death saw his exploits fade into memory until a funny thing happened in the eighties. The phenomenal success of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) brought about a rush by TV executives to cash in on the popular nostagia of the thirties and forties. NBC brought out a reworked version of Casablanca, ABC debuted Tales of the Gold Monkey (the most popular of the short lived fad, and my personal favorite), while CBS reintroduced the public to the exploits of Frank Buck in Bring’em Back Alive.
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