Tarzan and the Mermaids

1948 film by Robert Florey
It was followed by Tarzan's Magic Fountain in 1949, starring Lex Barker as Tarzan, alongside a returning Brenda Joyce as Jane.

The setting is a coastal African village where swimming and diving are central to the culture, hence the term "the Mermaids." Tarzan and Jane (Brenda Joyce) help a native girl (Linda Christian) who has fled the village to avoid a forced marriage to a supposed local god. George Zucco portrays Palanth, the corrupt high priest attempting to force the girl into marriage, and Fernando Wagner plays a con man impersonating the god Balu.

The film was shot in Mexico by RKO during its collaboration with Churubusco Studios at Acapulco, Teotihuacan and Mexico City. It was the first official Tarzan film to be filmed outside the United States since Herman Brix's The New Adventures of Tarzan. Writing in Turner Classic Movies, Richard Harlan Smith reported that "[s]ets were destroyed by storms, Sol Lesser suffered a heart attack that necessitated his departure from the location, and Weissmuller experienced a case of sunburn which required him to wear make up for the first time in his career." The film is noted for its cinematography by Gabriel Figueroa, exotic Mexican scenery and coastal locales, a Dimitri Tiomkin score and much group singing.

Two members of the film crew were killed during production. One Mexican crew member was crushed by a motorboat whilst Angel Garcia, a stunt diver who doubled for Tarzan's high dive, was killed after he survived the dive but was swept by the surf into the rocks below the cliff.

Author and film critic Hal Erickson described the film in AllMovie as a "diverting Tarzan adventure" despite "jungle settings [that] don't look particularly African." Critic Graeme Clark wrote that Weissmuller "seemingly spen[t] half the movie freestyling through the waves, diving off cliffs and venturing to the sea bed where he could get up to such business as battling a giant octopus for no other reason than the plot needed a spot of peril" and "if you could put up with singer John Laurenz as a Boy substitute (many cannot) then the skill of veteran director Robert Florey kept it rattling along."