The Elephant God
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Spoiler warning Bob guides a young woman, Virginia Clay, into the jungle in search of the site where her parents plane crashed many years before. Her crabby uncle, Roger, doubts her story of being raised by a tribe but she remembers a waterfall and a herd of elephants, especially a bull with only one tusk. She also has a doll given to her by the tribe, which Sheena identifies as being from the Masai. This leads Bob to believe that the waterfall must be the Kitmantu Falls. When they meet some Masai warriors they realise that the tribe holds the one-tusked elephant sacred and not to be seen by white people. Jungle drums soon announce that the safari have come to kill the elephant with one tusk warriors are soon tracking the safari. Sheena splits the group to be harder to track and takes the Masai doll and Roger, but Bob and Virginia are soon captured. They are about to be killed when Sheena takes the chief hostage with her knife and shows him Virginia's doll. He realises she is the little girl from long-ago and frees the captives. Roger now accepts Virginia and they return to London a closer family. |
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COMMENTS This weak entry in the series has a lot of walking around, often over the same territory, and a great deal of padding provided by Miki Carter's stock African footage. This is used to convey the sense that the safari are travelling through wild country and there are abundant shots of baboons, Guinea fowl, Crowned cranes, Maribu storks, running wildebeest, howling hyenas and feeding lions. The lengthy scenes of the large elephant herds and the one-tusked bull are also very nice. The shot of the one-tusked elephant was used under the title credits since the series began and may have inspired the plot of this episode. Barbara Bestar, the actress who plays Virginia, had been around Hollywood since the late-1940s and had appeared in one of the Bomba the Jungle Boy films - Safari Drums (1953). During the 1950s and early-1960 she would appear in numerous television programs, including Dragnet, Lawman and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. Lewis Martin also had a lengthy career in film and televison, appearing in Maverick, Peter Gunn, and several episodes of the Ron Ely Tarzan series. |
• The production credits and plot were taken from the DVD of this episode
IMAGES
• All of the photos used on this page are screenshots from my DVD of this episode
• The two video clips were uploaded to Youtube by me to use on this web page
LYNX
• See a Barbara Bestar filmography at the Internet Movie Database (IMDB)
• See a Lewis Martin filmography at the Internet Movie Database (IMDB)
CAPTURE
• Bag yourself a copy of this episode on VHS from Moviecraft; beware the high contrast and heavily cropped versions of these episodes currently available on DVD
SHEENA
© is the property of Sony Pictures Corporation
This independent, fan-based analysis of the Sheena material is copyright © 2005-2007 Paul Wickham
This page was updated December 2007
This independent, fan-based analysis of the Sheena material is copyright © 2005-2007 Paul Wickham
This page was updated December 2007