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Chimp from 1930s US 'Tarzan' films dead at 80 - Yahoo! Movies
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Cheetah, a chimpanzee said to have performed in the "Tarzan" films of the 1930s, has died at the age of 80, according to the Florida sanctuary where he lived.
A sad day for Simian CinemaQuote:
The Florida chimpanzee -- which reportedly arrived at the sanctuary in 1960 -- loved finger-painting and watching football, and was soothed by Christian music, the sanctuary's outreach director Debbie Cobb told the Tampa Tribune.
Dang. Didn't know chimps lived that long. Outlived Charlton Heston...
Mitchrock will be inconsolable.
Dude, we chimps have longevity. My grandmothers on each side lived to 76. My grandfathers lived to 84 and 92.Quote:
Originally Posted by SuperCalo2000
This chimp plans to live to be exactly 100 then die while having a heart attack while banging his hot young nurse.
Hope he had a chance to watch the latest Planet of the Apes movie... It was really good!!
I read his review...he termed it 'chimpsploitation' and wasn't a fan of computers taking jobs away from hard working simians.
Reports of Cheetah's death are greatly exaggerated...
Chimp Actor Org Passes Away At The Age Of 80, Public Mourns Wrong Chimp | Bleeding Cool Comic Book, Movies and TV News and Rumors
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Chimpanzee and small-time actor Org has passed from the early 1930s has finally passed away from kidney failure on Christmas Eve at The Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor, Florida. Org was born around 1930 and therefore thought to be around the age of 80 at his time of death. Org had a number of small acting roles between 1932 and 1934, though they weren’t in the Tarzan movies as has been reported.
Here’s where the mix-up comes in, and where the BBC have accidentally misreported the death*. Claims have been circling the social networking world that the chimp was an actor called Cheetah who appeared in a series of 1930s Tarzan movies playing a character of the same name. In fact, Cheetah was portrayed by a series of chimps called Jiggs, Jiggs Jr, Jiggs III and so on, all of whom died many years ago.
The Guardian have untangled the threads of this strange story, which presumably resulted from a lack of proper records being kept back in the 1930s, not to mention the fact that chimpanzees are not currently required to produce birth certificates.
Org, today you trended on Twitter under the wrong name. But here at Bleeding Cool we’ll remember you for your real one, and also for flinging your poo at people when they annoyed you. Goodnight, sweet prince.
R.I.P.
Org The Chimp
1930-2011
Man oh man...this story keeps getting weirder
Cheeta: Is his death a hoax? | News Briefs | EW.com
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Evidence and other accounts are contradicting a Florida animal sanctuary’s claim that a chimpanzee that portrayed Cheetah, Tarzan’s sidekick in movies of the early 1930s, has died at 80.
A number of chimpanzees played the sidekick role in the Tarzan movies of the 1930s and ’40s.
But an 80-year-old chimpanzee would be extraordinarily old, perhaps the oldest ever known. According to many experts and Save the Chimps, another Florida sanctuary, chimpanzees in captivity live to between 40 and 60. Lion Country Safari in Loxahatchee, Florida, has a chimp it says is around 73.
Some Hollywood accounts also indicate a chimpanzee by the name of Jiggs or Mr. Jiggs played Cheetah alongside Weissmuller early on and died in 1938.
Debbie Cobb, outreach director at the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary along Florida’s Gulf Coast, said Wednesday that her grandparents acquired Cheetah around 1960 from Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller and that the chimp appeared in Tarzan films between 1932 and 1934. During that period, Weissmuller made Tarzan the Ape Man and Tarzan and His Mate.
But Cobb offered no documentation, saying it was destroyed in a 1995 fire.
A similar claim about another chimpanzee that supposedly played Weissmuller’s second banana was debunked in 2008 in a Washington Post story. Writer R.D. Rosen discovered that the primate, which lived in Palm Springs, California, was born around 1960, meaning it wasn’t oldest enough to have been in the Tarzan movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
Rosen said in an e-mail Wednesday that this latest purported Cheetah looks like a “business-boosting impostor as well.”
“I’m afraid any chimp who actually shared a soundstage with Weissmuller and O’Sullivan is long gone,” Rosen said.
Cobb said Cheetah died Dec. 24 of kidney failure and was cremated.
“Unfortunately, there was a fire in ’95 in which a lot of that documentation burned up,” Cobb said. “I’m 51 and I’ve known him for 51 years. My first remembrance of him coming here was when I was actually 5, and I’ve known him since then, and he was a full-grown chimp then.”
Film historian and Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osbourne said the Cheetah character “was one of the things people loved about the Tarzan movies because he made people laugh. He was always a regular fun part of the movies.”
In his time, the Cheetah character was as popular as Rin Tin Tin or Asta, the dog from the Thin Man movies, Osbourne said.
“He was a major star,” he said.
People love chimps as they should.
When I saw the title of this thread I thought it was going to be about the Cheeto's mascot. :grin:
