![]() Incredibly, one of them, named Jiggs IV, is still alive, living his senior years in a Palm Springs primate sanctuary, which is a better outcome than a lot of his peers.īecause for all appearances chimpanzees have playful, almost human-like personalities, they became wildly popular with audiences, appearing in Disney movies, live theatrical revues, Abbott and Costello shorts, The Ed Sullivan Show, the spy parody Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp, 70s TV series B.J. Though there is no Cheeta in the books, he became intrinsically tied to the legend of Tarzan, and nearly two dozen chimpanzees (plus one orangutan) played him over a period of more than fifty years. That on its own is an embarrassing reckoning, before we even get to what happens when they don’t cooperate to our liking, or outlive their usefulness.īeyond the circus (which has its own bleak history we’ve only started learning over the past couple of decades), America’s first exposure to primates as entertainment was likely Cheeta, the chimpanzee co-star of dozens of features and shorts based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novels. ![]() We put them as sidekicks in movies, forced them to perform in front of an audience, and trained them to act “more” human, mostly because it’s funny to see a monkey doing people things, like wearing a dress, playing the drums and smoking cigarettes. Rather than studying their remarkable, human-like ability to learn and retain information from a respectful distance and apply it to our own behavior, we turned primates into a spectacle. The attack, which ended with Travis shot to death by police while trying to enter a patrol car, was the tragic yet inevitable result of decades of primates being treated not as animals, but as pets, clowns, and surrogate children for people who had no training in primate care, and no respect for their natural instincts. Though Travis’s owner, Sandy Herold, claimed that she had seen no signs of trouble on the horizon, in fact there had been a number of events suggesting that Travis’s behavior was becoming unmanageable. Living entirely on a diet heavy in carbs and fats, he grew morbidly obese. While Travis, acquired through breeders for $50,000 cash and separated from his mother at just three days of age, wasn’t in show business, he was forced to wear clothes, used to promote his owner’s towing company, and even taught how to drive a car. Gordy is similar to the horrifying true story of Travis, a 13 year-old pet chimpanzee who, in 2009, attacked a friend of his owner, mutilating much of her face and causing massive brain damage. and Emerald that the event marked the end of the use of live primates in TV and movies, and that seems to be the last we’ll hear of it, an odd little aside that perhaps just adds dimension to his character. Now in his thirties, Jupe seems curiously unaffected about the whole thing, even wistful when he talks about the event being lampooned on Saturday Night Live. Some of Jupe’s choices in mementos are rather morbid, collected in the aftermath of a grisly event in which Gordy, agitated by the sound of popping balloons, attacked and viciously maimed his human co-stars, leaving only a young Jupe unharmed before Gordy is killed. and Emerald a secret room in his office where he keeps mementos from his time on the 90s sitcom Gordy’s Home, in which a family adopts a chimpanzee, dressing him in clothes and letting him live in their house. and Jupe’s interactions with each other are cool at best, but with the gregarious Emerald there Jupe is more relaxed. has had no choice but to gradually sell off the horses to Jupe, though he’s determined to buy them back at some point. With the family business struggling in recent years, and still grieving the loss of his horse trainer father, O.J. ![]() ( Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald ( Keke Palmer) visit their neighbor, Ricky “Jupe” Park ( Steven Yeun), a former child actor who now owns Jupiter’s Claim, a tacky Western-themed amusement park. It’s when horse ranch owner siblings O.J. ![]() There’s a brief moment in the film when it seems like Gordy might be some strange comic relief. It’s understandable: there’s not so much of a glimpse of a chimpanzee in any of the promotional material for Nope, and nothing that happens in its trailers seems to suggest that a chimpanzee will play any part in it. If you haven’t seen Nope yet, you might be a little puzzled by references to a character named Gordy, especially once you learn that Gordy is a chimpanzee. Please read Jon Negroni’s spoiler-free review here. Note: this article contains spoilers for Nope. A look back at the use of chimpanzees as clowns & sidekicks for humans, & how it relates to a strange & haunting subplot of Jordan Peele’s hit sci-fi horror. ![]()
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