gorillas in popular culture

Representations of gorillas are common in popular culture in the Western world with the full range of electronic media having gorillas as mascots, gorillas behaving like humans, and humans behaving like gorillas. Art The French sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet won a medal of honour at the Salon of 1887 for his masterly Gorilla Carrying off a Woman ("Gorille enlevant une Femme"). The sculpture depicts a gorilla abducting a woman, something totally alien to actual gorilla behaviour. The Frémiet sculpture has somehow caught the public's imagination as witnessed by the repeated popularity of the King Kong theme. Animation In the 1944 Donald Duck cartoon Donald Duck and the Gorilla, a gorilla named Ajax escapes from the city zoo and terrorizes Donald Duck. Magilla Gorilla is a well-known Hanna-Barbera cartoon from the 1960s. In the Dragon Ball franchise, the protagonist Goku and several other characters belong to an extraterrestrial species known as Saiyans that can transform into gigantic gorilla-like beings called Great Apes. In the animated 1999 Disney version of Tarzan, the hero's adopted family are gorillas (unlike the "Great Apes" of the original book), including Kala (voiced by Glenn Close), Kerchak (voiced by Lance Henriksen) and Terk (voiced by Rosie O'Donnell). In 2005 animated prequel film Tarzan II, several additional characters are introduced: Uto (voiced by Brad Garrett), Kago (voiced by Ron Perlman), Mama Gunda (voiced by Estelle Harris), and Zugo (voiced by George Carlin). In the Tarzan-parody animated TV series George of the Jungle, George's best friend is an erudite talking gorilla named Ape. In the Disney 1997 film adaptation, Ape is voiced by John Cleese. Windsor, a supporting character in the animated Cartoon Network series, My Gym Partner's a Monkey, is a gorilla. In the anime series Cromartie High School, a gorilla is one of the more powerful delinquents at Cromartie High. He (she?) also plays backup guitar for "Freddie", a fellow student who may or may not be Freddie Mercury. The Iron Kong in the Zoids universe is a mecha shaped like a gorilla. In the Beast Wars and Beast Machines TV series, the leader of the Maximals, Optimus Primal, adopted an organic-skinned "beast mode" of a gorilla; and later in the series a TransMetal gorilla, and then (Beast Machines) he became a techno-organic gorilla. In the animated television series Ben 10, the future version of Dr.