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Western Wednesdays: Wild Horse Phantom (1944)

SYNOPSIS:
Lawman Billy Carson [Buster Crabbe] orchestrates a plan that sees a band of prisoners, led by Link Daggett [Kermit Maynard] and Tom Hanlon [Robert Meredith], to escape from their confinement in search of a sizable amount of money, stolen from Piedmont County ranchers, they’ve hidden away. Hanlon has second thoughts about escaping with Daggett and his gang and starts to head back to prison only to be shot in the back by Daggett.
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The Bootleg Files: King of the Jungle

BOOTLEG FILES 815: “King of the Jungle” (1933 adventure film starring Buster Crabbe).

LAST SEEN: On YouTube.

AMERICAN HOME VIDEO:
None.

REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: It fell through the cracks.

CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not likely.

In 1932, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer scored a commercial hit by casting former Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller in the title role of “Tarzan the Ape Man.” Paramount Pictures thought it could replicate the rival studio’s success, but rather than acquire the rights to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan character it opted to make a quasi-Tarzan film based on Charles Turley Stoneham’s “The Lion’s Way” – in which a Tarzan-type character was raised in the African jungle by lions rather than apes.
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