Cheetah dies at age 80

[TxD]

Brings back some memories.

"A Florida animal sanctuary says Cheetah the chimpanzee sidekick in the Tarzan movies of the early 1930s has died at age 80."

http://news.yahoo.com/cheetah-chimp-193 ... 34998.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[The Annoyed Man]

80 seems like a ripe old age for a chimpanzee. According to THIS WEBSITE, life expectancy for a chimp in the wild is 40-50 years, and as long as 60 years in captivity. Cheetah was a regular Methuselah. Johnny Weissmuller was only 79 when he died.

I used to watch those movies as a kid.

[speedsix]

...as reruns, right? (so did I...faithfully)

[stroguy]

Saw the title and thought this was about Tiger Woods.

[Oldgringo]

It is said that the chimps that now inhabit the Silver Springs tourist thinghy in central Florida are the descendents of the chimps used in the old Tarzan movies. It is also useful to recall that what is now southern Georgia and northern Florida were originally settled by Oglethorpe's miscreants.

[philip964]

Interesting that well cared for Chimps live as long as well cared for humans. Must be a gene we share. Sure wish our dogs had that gene.

Haven't been as warm and fuzzy about chimps since that one ate the face off of the lady a while back.

Read the "Right Stuff" recently. Apparently it was not well known that the chimp that went into space was trained by giving him a treat for pushing the right button and shocked on the bottom of his feet for pushing the wrong button. Apparently the shock part was really effective at getting him to pay attention.

It may be considered hazing now, but used to be the Texas A&M Vet students were given the opportunity to walk across the bridge at the chimp enclosure at the cancer center in Bastrop. The chimps are very accurate at throwing feces.

Yeah, haven't seen one of those movies in ages. A staple of those Saturday movie matinees I watched as a kid.

[Texas Dan Mosby]

/does a cheetah flip in his honor...

[C-dub]

I loved those movies. Used to watch them every time they were on when I was a kid back in the 60's and 70's. Those and the Abbott and Costello movies.

[Skiprr]

An interesting bit of trivia: there was never a Cheetah the chimp--or any chimp at all, in fact--in any of the Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. "Sheeta" was, in the books, the term for "panther" in the "language" of the Great Apes.

Yeah. I read most of 'em when I was a kid. And Burroughs's John Carter books, and the Doc Savage series, and Tom Swift, and the Shadow... Ah, those were the days of real pulp fiction.

[Carry-a-Kimber]

Looks like someone might be monkey-ing around.

[Purplehood]

It is said that the chimps that now inhabit the Silver Springs tourist thinghy in central Florida are the descendents of the chimps used in the old Tarzan movies. It is also useful to recall that what is now southern Georgia and northern Florida were originally settled by Oglethorpe's miscreants.

/winces

[jimlongley]

When I was a kid, one of the first inconsistencies I noticed was Cheetah's gender. For someone that was raised by apes in the wild, Tarzan sure seemed to have a problem telling whether Cheetah was a boy or a girl.

And then there were a couple of movies where Cheetah was quite obviously not the same individual from one scene to the next, much less from one movie to another.

Later I learned that using females for some scenes and males for others, in a variety of species, was common practice. The females were considered to be more trainable for close up "calm" scenes, while the more brawny males were trained for action shots.

It was not uncommon for a trainer to provide several individual animals that closely resembled each other to play a single role, based on the above.

It is possible that the chimp in question played Cheetah at one time or another.