Johnny Sheffield who had grown too old to play Boy in the Tarzan films got a nice break from Monogram Pictures and was able to extend his career with the Bomba The Jungle Boy series of films. Like Tarzan, Bomba grows up in the jungle and in fact this film bears no small resemblance to Tarzan, the Ape Man.Bomba's Jane is in the person of former child star Peggy Ann Garner who is a visiting photographer with her father Onslow Stevens. She gets separated from Stevens and enjoys an idyll of sorts with Bomba who is more articulate than those early Weissmuller Tarzans.The only other regular in the Bomba series is Commissioner Andy Barnes who is a glorified game warden here and played by Charles Irwin. In later films Barnes would be played by Leonard Mudie.Some stock jungle footage is integrated nicely into the film, better I would say than a lot of the Tarzan films done at RKO at the same time with Lex Barker. Not a bad beginning for the series.

Bomba, the Jungle Boy (1949) ** (out of 4) When MGM decided to take their Tarzan series into a different direction, Johnny Weissmuller headed to Columbia to start the Jungle Jim series while his son, Boy, went to Monogram and began production on another Tarzan rip- off, Bomba, which would end up running for twelve films. The series opener has Pat Harland (Peggy Ann Garner) and her father (Onslow Stevens) are in Africa trying to take photos of some rare animals when she ends up in the jungle lost. Soon Bomba (Sheffield) shows up to show her some of the finer, less appreciated things in life. There's no question that this series should have been called TARZAN, JR. and there's no question that what brain cells the MGM series had are pretty much gone here. This isn't a horrible movie but at the same time it's doubtful too many are going to find it completely entertaining and this is due to several factors. One is that the screenplay really doesn't offer us anything new, original or really all that entertaining. I thought for the most part we got one boring sequence after another and in fact it takes nearly thirty-minutes before Bomba shows up, another ten-minutes for any sort of action and it takes yet another fifteen-minutes before Garner finally gets into her leopard-skinned outfit. As with the Tarzan films and the countless other rips, this film gets the benefit of many stock footage shots of the wildlife in Africa. We get to see a wide range of animals but it's obvious the footage was shot for other movies as it looks quite poor and even for stock footage the stuff isn't that good because the shots are so far away from the target and out of focus that at times you struggle to even tell what you're looking at. For some reason the film is pretty light on action as there are only a few fight sequences and even these are pretty tame. The first time Bomba fights a fake leopard it all happens off camera. The one saving grace to the film are the performances. Sheffield does a nice job playing the lead character and Garner adds up some nice support. The two feature some nice chemistry together and fans of HOUSE OF Dracula will enjoy seeing Stevens in his part. At just 70-minutes the movie goes by at a decent pace but it's just too bad they didn't try something fresh or original to throw a little life into the picture.

Johnny Sheffield as a teenage Tarzan in the African wilds, rescuing a pretty young shutterbug and (rather half-heartedly) attempting to reunite her with her photographer father and his guides. Having already played "Boy" opposite Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan several times, Sheffield was a natural choice to enact the formative years of this role once filmmakers began to run out of ideas and made the (worthwhile) decision to explore the loin-clothed legend's early beginnings. Sheffield is somewhat self-conscious as the boy who calls himself Bomba, and yet his modest performance is the best thing in the picture. He's straightforward in an innocent way, immature and yet brave around the girl, and he manages an amusing connection with the audience (one can almost hear the sighs of young filmgoers as Bomba gently helps Peggy Ann Garner's Pat onto a log to cross the river). The film is padded with nature footage (most of it poorly photographed and repetitive), and too much time is spent dragging the characters back and forth through the foliage, but the simple story (perky girl meets tame savage boy) still holds a spark of enchantment. ** from ****

Bomba, the Jungle Boy is the first of the Bomba movies with Johnny Sheffield (Boy from the Weismuller Tarzan movies) as Bomba.In this first movie, a safari in Africa including a girl and her dad are photographing and filming the wildlife when the girl, Pat gets lost and Bomba finds her. They become friends and he helps her to look for the rest of the party, facing several dangers along the way including lions, leopards, a huge swarm of locusts and unfriendly natives. She is reunited with the others at the end and Bobma disappears back into the jungle.Joining Johnny Sheffield in the cast is Peggy Ann Garner as Pat, Onslow Stevens (Them!) as her dad and Bomba regular Smoki Whitfield.Bomba, the Jungle Boy is worth watching if you can get hold of a copy. Rating: 3 stars out of 5.