Bagheera
Bagheera , often Baghira in German-speaking countries , is a fictional black panther (black leopard) created by Rudyard Kipling for his collection of short stories Das Dschungelbuch ( The Jungle Book ) from 1894. In this, Bagheera is portrayed as the friend and companion of the human child Mowgli , who grew up in the Indian jungle .
As one of the main characters of the jungle book, Bagheera also appears in numerous film adaptations and adaptations of the jungle book, including the well-known cartoon version The Jungle Book by Walt Disney from 1967. Bagheera is mostly portrayed as a male, but more rarely also as a female, panther. Bagheera also gained importance for naming various objects, including one genus and species in excess of the story and the film adaptations jumping spiders ( Bagheera kiplingi ), the car model Matra Bagheera or the American Navy -Schiffes USS Bagheera (SP-963) .
Description in The Jungle Book
In The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling Bagheera comes in the first two chapters Mowgli's Brothers ( Mowgli's Brothers ) and The hunger dance of the snake Kaa ( Kaa's Hunting ago).
In the first story, Mowgli's brothers , Bagheera and the bear Baloo (Balu) are friends and advisers of the wolf pack of the leader wolf Akele, which takes in Mowgli, who was separated from his family after a tiger attack by Shere Khan, where he is in the family of the she-wolf Raksha grows up. Bagheera and Balu support Mowgli after the pack turns against him after Akele's death and help him return to the Meschen.
In Kaa , the snake's hunger dance , Mowgli is kidnapped by the lawless and despised monkey Bandar-Log and calls Balu and Bagheera for help. Together with the snake Kaa, they manage to free Mowgli.
Bagheera in film adaptations and adaptations
Kipling's jungle books have been filmed and adapted several times. The main characters Mowgli, Balu and Bagheera play a central role in these film adaptations, even if most of the implementations only loosely adhere to the story template. Bagheera is a black panther in all of the film adaptations, although he appears as a female animal in individual works. Even the earliest film adaptation of Zoltan Korda's material from 1942 only roughly uses the original texts as a basis for the film. This mainly describes the life of Mowgli, who has already returned to a human village that is threatened by the tiger Shir-Kan. Mowgli faces the fight with the tiger and defeats it with the help of the snake Kaa, but is pursued by a group of men who want to confront him. Bagheera supports Mowgli and attacks the men who then tell the village that Mowgli has magical powers and has turned into the panther.
In 1966 and 1967, two animated films followed that took up The Jungle Book . The film The Jungle Book - The Adventures of Mowgli , produced in the USSR in 1966 , adhered closely to the original of the book, while the film The Jungle Book, produced in the United States by Walt Disney , only made rough use of the stories of Kipling. In the latter, Bagheera and Balu accompany the human boy Mowgli from the wolf pack to the human village and have to rescue him from several dangers. They save him from the snake Kaa, which tries to hypnotize him, and from the monkey town, where he was kidnapped by a gang of monkeys led by King King Louie. Finally, they also support him in the fight against the tiger Shir-Khan and then bring him to the human village. In the sequel, The Jungle Book 2 , Mowgli visits his friends in the jungle despite a warning from Baghira and puts himself in danger again.
In addition to these early films, the material was later processed several times in different variants. In 1994, The Jungle Book was released as a real-life adaptation by Stephen Sommers . The 2016 film The Jungle Book is primarily based on the 1968 Disney template, with actor Ben Kingsley playing the role of Baghira and Bill Murray taking over the baloo. In December 2018, the film Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle was released on Netflix , which in turn uses the original templates. In addition to these films, television series such as The Jungle Book - The Series as an anime series , which was produced from 1989 to 1990, as well as the 3D animation series The Jungle Book, which was broadcast from 2010 with 104 episodes in two seasons, were made. In both, Bagheera / Baghira appears as one of the main characters.
Other reception
The name Bagheera , based on Kipling's panther, was also used for other objects apart from literature and film. The name was used both in technology and in the natural sciences.
From 1917 to 1919 the schooner USS Bagheera (SP-963) served as a patrol boat in the United States Navy . The ship was built in 1907 by Hodgdon Brothers in Boothbay as a private two-masted schooner and named Bagheera after the panther in Kipling's factory . On June 22, 1917, the US Navy took over the ship from its then owner JW Hendrick from Chicago, Illinois, and used it after its inauguration as the USS Bagheera (SP-963) as a patrol boat during the ongoing First World War until the end of the war. On February 5, 1919, she was taken out of service and returned to Hendrick.
The automobile manufacturers Matra Automobiles and Simca named a joint automobile development as Matra-Simca Bagheera and presented it to the public during the Le Mans 24-hour race on June 9, 1973. The car was built in two generations from 1973 and 1980, but after its appearance it received the ADAC negative award "Silver Lemon" due to numerous defects. Among classic car fans, this award and the naming after Bagheera developed the name "lemon panther" for the car. The MZ Baghira , a motorcycle with a single cylinder engine manufactured from 1997 by MZ Motorrad- und Zweiradwerk GmbH in Zschopau , was also named after Bagheera or the Germanized name Baghira.
In 1896 the American arachnologists George and Elizabeth Peckham named a previously unknown species of jumping spider from South America as Bagheera kiplingi Peckham & Peckham, 1896 after the jungle book. They used the name of the panther as a generic name and the surname of Rudyard Kipling. Another spider described by the couple in 1901, Bagheera prosper ( Peckham & Peckham, 1896 ), was classified in the genus and, as part of a revision, Bagheera laselva Ruiz & Edwards, 2013 from Costa Rica and Bagheera motagua Ruiz & Edwards, 2013 from Guatemala two more species were added. In 1896, Peckham and Peckham named further genres after characters from the jungle book: Akela Peckham & Peckham, 1896 after the leader of the wolf pack, and Messua Peckham & Peckham, 1896 and Nagaina Peckham & Peckham, 1896 after other narratives in the collection.
In 2014, a working group from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry presented a prediction model for the gene expression of a specific codon in various types of fungus called Bagheera . Specifically, the model is about predicting for different types of yeast how they translate the GUC codon consisting of guanine , uracil and cytosine , whereby different amino acids are formed for this purpose .
supporting documents
- ↑ The Jungle Book (1942). In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ The Jungle Book (1967) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ↑ The Jungle Book 2 in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ↑ The Jungle Book (2016) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ↑ Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ^ Raymond A. Mann: USS Bagheera (SP-963). Naval History And Heritage Command, Sept. 23, 2005; accessed on June 9, 2019.
- ↑ Stefan Anker: Here the lemon panther is under species protection. Die Weilt, September 24, 2018; accessed on June 9, 2019.
- ^ Gustavo RS Ruiz, GB Edwards: Revision of Bagheera (Araneae: Salticidae: Dendryphantinae). The Journal of Arachnology 41 (1), 2013; Pp. 18-24. doi : 10.1636 / K12-67.1 .
- ↑ Stefanie Mühlhausen, Martin Kollmar: Predicting the fungal CUG codon translation with Bagheera. BMC Genomics 15, 2014; P. 411. doi : 10.1186 / 1471-2164-15-411 .
- ^ Website of the Bagheera model ; accessed on June 9, 2019.