Boy! Boy! Omg, I just learned that Boy is dead! Johnny Sheffield, the boy who played Boy in the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan flicks of the 1930s and '40s, died Friday of a heart attack at his home in Chula Vista, about four hours after he fell off a ladder while pruning a palm tree. "He was a jungle boy to the end," said his wife of 51 years, Patty, and doesn't that just make you want to sob? Johnny was 79. Back in 1939, the curly haired young Johnny beat out more than 300 other youngsters for the role of Boy in the 1939 movie Tarzan Finds a Son!, in which Tarzan and Jane (Maureen O'Sullivan) wind up adopting the young child whose parents were killed in a plane crash in the jungle. He played the leather loin-clothed young lad in eight other Tarzan movies before moving on to play Bomba the Jungle Boy in 12 movies and Bantu the Zebra boy in a failed television pilot. I guess you CAN'T take the Boy out of the jungle, no matter how you try. He later gave up movies all together and dabbled in construction, farming and real estate. In his later years Johnny Sheffield lived in Southern California where he wrote articles about his Hollywood years and sold copies of the TV pilot Bantu, the Zebra Boy on video. And though it may be gauche to drool over the recently dead... MY GOD he was hot in his Bomba days, wasn't he? (via Los Angeles Times)
