Dozens of chimps were considered for the program. What I’ve been unable to uncover, though, is what happened to the space chimps after the program ended. ![]() I don’t know how long that lasted, but there’s long been a fixation on great apes in general and chimps in particular in US pop culture. It’s also true that the comic book companies learned that putting gorillas on the cover sold more comics, and they actually had to limit how many times the covers featured them. Fred Muggs (apparently still alive!), a chimp who seems to have been smart enough to work out that he couldn’t be disciplined when the show was on the air and therefore did whatever he wanted to in those times. In the ‘50s, The Today Show had featured a cohost named J. ![]() However, it’s strange that the phenomenon lasted so long. All but one of the movies came out after the flights of Ham and Enos, and as I said, the one chimp who didn’t is from source material. There have been assorted other primates, mostly monkeys, to fly in space before and after, but for obvious reasons it’s the chimps who captured the human imagination most. Enos flew two orbits later that year, the only chimpanzee to orbit the Earth. Ham flew a suborbital flight lasting slightly over fifteen minutes in 1961, a year and ten days after the release of Toby Tyler. They’re mostly forgotten now, I think, but two chimps from the US actually flew into space. The space chimp connection is doubtless important. Finally, The Barefoot Executive never, as I recall, actually mentions where its chimp came from before his previous owner started keeping him as a pet. Monkeys, Go Home has four failed space chimps. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N., features a lost space chimp. Stubbs had been a circus animal and the chimp who appears on the Moon Pilot poster is in a space helmet, Stanley starts as a lab chimp at Midvale College. (Or if I saw it, it was back in my early childhood Disney Channel days.) The two Merlin Jones movies followed whereas Mr. Then came Moon Pilot, the one I haven’t seen, much less written about here. Stubbs the Chimpanzee is a character in the book, not that I’ve read the book (future Camera Obscura entry?), so Disney didn’t choose to have him as a character. The first of these films was Toby Tyler or 10 Weeks With a Circus. I haven’t even considered Disney Chimp Television, because that feels exhausting to research. If my count is correct, we have one still to go, and I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised to find that I’ve missed one or two. ![]() Wikipedia has a page called “List of fictional primates in film,” but it is quite obviously incomplete and only mentions on Disney chimp, and we’ve discussed more movies than that without actually finished the list of Disney Chimp Films. It is surprisingly difficult to find a definitive list of Disney Chimp Films, not helped by the relatively recent release of a nature film just called Chimpanzee, from their True-Life Adventures But Not Called That series of recent years.
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