- "All right, Cheetah, give it here!"
- ―Indiana Jones[src]
Cheetah was a nickname given to a golden furred monkey in Kenya. In 1931, while searching the jungles outside of Mombasa for Ali Bey's Palace, Indiana Jones had his fedora stolen by one of the forest's monkeys. Climbing down from a tree, Jones referred to the monkey as "Cheetah" when trying to get his hat back. The monkey screeched at Jones and bared his teeth, and Jones screeched back louder, scaring away the monkey, and retrieving his beloved hat.[1]
Behind the scenes[]
The name Cheetah is a reference to a fictional chimpanzee in the Tarzan movie series of the 1930's through 1960's. While sometimes billed as "Cheetah", the usual name for the character was "Cheeta". As a character in the Tarzan franchise, Cheeta was not in the original Edgar Rice Burroughs stories, but was first introduced in the 1932 film "Tarzan the Ape Man", starring Johnny Weismuller, thus making Jones' knowledge of the character in 1931 a potential historical contradiction.
