Posted on 12/27/2011 4:11:38 PM PST by Brandonmark
Cheetah the chimpanzee, who acted in classic Tarzan movies in the early 1930s, died of kidney failure Saturday at Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor, a sanctuary spokeswoman said.
Cheetah was roughly 80 years old, loved fingerpainting and football and was soothed by nondenominational Christian music, said Debbie Cobb, the sanctuary's outreach director.
He was an outgoing chimp who was exposed to the public his whole life, Cobb said today.
"He wasn't a chimp that caused a lot of problems," she said.
Cheetah acted in the 1932-34 Tarzan movies, Cobb said. Movies filmed during that timeframe starred Johnny Weissmuller and include "Tarzan and His Mate" and "Tarzan the Ape Man," according to the Internet Movie Database.
Sometime around 1960, Cheetah came to the sanctuary from Weissmuller's estate in Ocala, Cobb said.
In the wild, the average chimp survives 25 to 35 years and at zoos chimps typically live 35 to 45 years, she said.
Cheetah, the most famous of the sanctuary's 15 chimpanzees, liked to see people laugh.
"He was very compassionate," Cobb said. "He could tell if I was having a good day or a bad day. He was always trying to get me to laugh if he thought I was having a bad day. He was very in tune to human feelings."
Ron Priest, a sanctuary volunteer for seven years, said Cheetah stood out because of his ability to stand up – shoulders tall, back straight – and walk like a person.
Cheetah also stood out for another reason, Priest said: "When he didn't like somebody or something that was going on, he would pick up some poop and throw it at them. He could get you at 30 feet with bars in between."
It doesn't appear Cheetah had any children, Cobb said.
(Excerpt) Read more at 2.tbo.com ...
Me Too!! I forget the name of the movie but Jane was in a cave surrounded by lions and was trying to start a fire to keep them away, and you could see her mmmm well it was love I tell you....
“when the monkey die, people gonna cry” - Dino De Laurentiis reflecting on King Kong.
You mean Cheetah LIED about being one of the Little Rascals?!!
UPDATE: Potential Cheetha-n going on!!
PALM HARBOR — A Florida animal sanctuary says Cheetah, the chimpanzee sidekick in the Tarzan movies of the early 1930s, has died at 80. But other accounts call that claim into question.
Debbie Cobb, outreach director at the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor, 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.
Also, some Hollywood accounts indicate a chimpanzee by the name of Jiggs or Mr. Jiggs played Cheetah alongside Weissmuller early on and died in 1938.
In addition, 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 generally live to between 40 and 60, though Lion Country Safari in Loxahatchee, Fla., says it has one that is around 73.
A similar claim about another chimpanzee that supposedly played second banana to Weissmuller was debunked in 2008 in a Washington Post story.
Writer R.D. Rosen discovered that the primate, which lived in Palm Springs, Calif., was born around 1960, meaning it wasn’t oldest enough to have been in the Tarzan movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age that starred Olympic swimming star Weissmuller as the vine-swinging, loincloth-wearing Ape Man and Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane.
While a number of chimpanzees played the sidekick role in the Tarzan movies of the 1930s and `40s, Rosen said in an email 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.
At the animal sanctuary, Cheetah was outgoing, loved finger painting and liked to see people laugh, Cobb said. But he could also be ill-tempered. Cobb said that when the chimp didn’t like what was going on, he would fling feces and other objects.
I feel like we’ve been Cheetah’d! (Latest update):
http://www.tampabay.com/news/humaninterest/article1208183.ece
Are we chumps for believing this was Tarzan’s chum? Experts scoff at Cheetah story
PALM HARBOR — Cheetah, a chimpanzee who may or may not have starred in Tarzan movies in the early 1930s, died Saturday at a sanctuary on Alt. U.S. 19. He was allegedly approximately 80.
The cause was kidney failure, said Debbie Cobb, outreach director of the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary, who announced the death on the sanctuary’s website. A statement called the chimp “star of the Tarzan films.”
On Wednesday, Cobb said Cheetah liked finger painting, watching football and listening to nondenominational Christian music.
Word of his death was worth about 800 stories on Google News by Wednesday evening. Headlines referred to him as “Superstar Tarzan chimp.” Mia Farrow, the daughter of Maureen O’Sullivan, who played Jane in Tarzan, said in a tweet that her mother used to refer to Cheetah as “that bastard” because he bit her a lot.
What’s certain is that he is no longer living. What’s not so certain is his silver-screen celebrity.
• • •
The Tarzan movies were based on books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. There was no chimp in the books. For the purposes of comic relief, Hollywood created the character of Cheetah — or Cheeta or Cheta or Chita — played by more than a dozen chimps.
The most publicized Tarzan chimp lives in Palm Springs, Calif., not Palm Harbor. The story of the original animal star was a doozy, involving Liberia, a trainer named Tony Gentry and a smuggle job on a Pan Am flight from Africa in 1932. In 2008, in a piece in the Washington Post Magazine, R.D. Rosen debunked pretty much all of it, starting with the fact that commercial transatlantic flight didn’t start until 1939.
People didn’t want to hear it.
“It’s devastating to be told that everything you’ve been told is a lie,” a film producer told the Los Angeles Times.
Above all else, though, chimps typically live no more than 40 years in the wild and no more than 50 in captivity. To have been in black-and-white movies made during the Depression, and to still be alive, and to be a chimp — “very improbable,” a chimp expert told the New York Times on Wednesday.
“The world is full of chumps when it comes to old chimps,” Rosen said Wednesday on the phone.
He added: “The real fake is the one I wrote about.”
• • •
Cobb’s grandparents started what was then known as Noell’s Ark Chimp Farm in 1954. They did it year-round beginning in 1971. She said Wednesday that she was a kid when Cheetah arrived about 1960.
Looking back through stories in the archives of the St. Petersburg Times, the owners of the facility seem conspicuously quiet about the presence of a movie star.
A story in 1982 didn’t mention Cheetah.
A story in 1985 mentioned Cheetah, but it had nothing about Tarzan.
A story in 2002 mentioned Cheetah, “said to be a former star from the old Tarzan movies,” and described his “graying muzzle.”
On Wednesday, when asked for corroboration of Cheetah’s Tarzan roles, Cobb gave a Times reporter two brochures. One said that “Little Mike was called Cheetah. ...” The other said the facility “cares for more than 70 animals, including Cheetah, the chimp from Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies. ...”
She said she first heard about Cheetah’s role in Tarzan from her grandparents, who once had a vaudeville-style traveling show in which the chimps boxed people in a ring.
“My grandmother heard about it and my grandfather heard about it, so that’s how it got handed down,” she said. “We didn’t really know. They didn’t have stamped birth certificates with their pictures and footprints.”
• • •
Who was he? He was him.
The chimp once decorated a musician’s guitar by request. He relished red popsicles, although on colder days he preferred cream of wheat with oatmeal and hot, herbal tea. He liked to play “tag,” running from one side of his cage to another, and a YouTube video shows him pushing a 50-gallon plastic drum in circles before tiring and throwing it down. Even in his old age, Cobb said, he was always game for someone playing with his lips or toes. He enjoyed blankets with a lavender scent.
Of the 14 chimps now in their care, eight are more than 45 years old, Cobb said. When one dies, handlers take the body past the other cages, letting the others smell, touch and know. About two years ago, a chimp named Donna died, and Cobb brought her body by Cheetah’s cage.
“He reached out and held my hand.”
And, he did something that, Cobb said, chimps aren’t able to do: He shed a tear.
Cheetah was still playing up until two weeks ago, when he started experiencing flu-like symptoms. Blood work revealed the kidney failure, and he convalesced in his “bedroom,” a hideaway behind his cage. He died at 3:42 p.m. on Christmas Eve.
Now, in the sanctuary’s office in an octagonal wooden box, rest the cremated remains of its most famous resident. A gold plate bears his name.
Cheetah.
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