Gorilla costume

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Gorilla suit (Cut out) copy.jpg

A gorilla costume (also gorilla suit ) is a full body costume in the shape and appearance of a gorilla . In the first half of the 20th century, actors known as gorilla men wore these costumes to portray gorillas in horror films or comedies . In the 1960s, make-up artists used special make-up and artificial, separately applied areas of the face, and from the 1990s on, electronics engineers developed special masks with electronically remote-controlled facial features ( animatronics ) to make gorilla costumes appear even more realistic in films and in advertising.
Gorilla costumes are also used at charitable events and as a disguise for humorous scares on Halloween or carnival .

Costume types

Gorilla costume ( Carnival in Barranquilla , Colombia)

Commercial gorilla costumes are usually black or dark brown and made of artificial fur ( faux fur ) or similar materials. The costumes, available in different sizes, can be one-piece (full-body costume) or multi-piece - body costume with separate hands, feet and head mask; some models also have a bare plastic breastplate. After putting it on, you close the costume with a zipper or Velcro . These costumes are worn at Carnival, Halloween and costume parties.

Professional gorilla costumes for theater and film productions are mostly one- offs made by make-up artists, which appear very realistic through the use of natural hair, for example combed yak hair. In addition, the face mask can be equipped with micromotors, which are usually remotely controlled by several people from the outside and thus allow particularly natural facial expressions.

Use of gorilla costumes

There are many uses for gorilla costumes, ranging from the movie industry to commercial services, charitable causes, science, and pure personal enjoyment.

Movie

Costumes to portray a gorilla - in a dramatic way as a real, threatening animal or rather in a humorous and absurd way as a "man in a gorilla suit" - have been used in films and less often in the theater since around 1918 and 1920.

In the threatening portrayal of gorillas, a subliminal warning of a sexual threat, especially to the leading actresses in these films, was indicated by the animal personification of the "beast in the man". In the humorous depiction, there is the counterpart, the apparently comical "man in the beast", whereby a gorilla costume can bring these two artistic elements together.

An actor or stuntman who specializes in the representation of gorillas (or gorilla-like beings) is referred to in English as a gorilla man (German gorilla man ). Famous gorilla men were:

  • Carlos ( Charles ) Cruz Gemora (1903–1961), who shaped the way gorillas were portrayed in around 30 crime and horror films up to 1958. Gemora also designed her own, very natural-looking costumes in the 1930s and 1940s and - after studying the body language of gorillas in zoos - wore them herself in films.
  • Emil Van Horn (? - 1967), a vaudeville actor who starred in about 9 gorilla films; besides his roles as "gorilla" he did not portray any other characters in films.
  • Ray "Crash" Corrigan (1902–1976), a fitness trainer, stunt performer, and western actor; he had his own gorilla costume and played between 1934 ( Tarzan and His Mate ; German Tarzan's retaliation ) and 1945 ( The White Gorilla ) in several gorilla films.
  • Steve Calvert (1916-1991); In 1948 he bought Ray Corrigan's gorilla costume and immediately got the role of the gorilla in Johnny Weissmüller's first Jungle Jim film . Calvert played realistic gorillas in unrealistic B-movies like Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla , The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters , Bride of a Gorilla , The Road to Bali , Bride of the Beast etc.
  • George Barrows (1914-1994); he made his own gorilla costume and made his debut on The Abbot and Costello Show in 1953 .
  • Janos Prohaska (1919-1974); the Hungarian worked as a stuntman in Hollywood and mostly played gorillas in television shows and comedies such as Clyde the Ape in Bikini Beach (1964), the gorilla in Gilligan's Island, etc. He also played bears.

The following films are examples of the two uses of gorilla costumes in films.

Dramatic use

Humorous, absurd use

  • At the Circus (Eng. The Marx Brothers in the circus ) (1939) - In his autobiography Groucho and Me , Groucho Marx describes - with a lot of Marxian imagination, because the gorilla actor was Charles Gemora - the difficulties that the filming of At the Circus preceded. There were two trained gorillas in Hollywood, but both were fully booked for years. So they sought contact with the agent of a gorilla character who, as it turned out, did not have a gorilla costume. Finally an agent was found “who represented a gorilla costume”, but who lacked the corresponding gorilla character. The negotiations with both agents were not easy, as both agents "represented the interests of their clients" and on the day of shooting it was not only heated up by the headlights, but also very hot, so that the actor in the unfamiliar gorilla costume passed out and then refused without Fresh air supply in this costume continues to work. But, according to Marx, unusual solutions were found that made the film's famous final gorilla-on-trapeze scene possible.

Other movie comedies that use gorilla costumes include:

TV Shows

Gorilla costumes were occasionally used in mostly humorous television series such as The Abbott and Costello Show , The Addams Family , Gilligan's Island, and The Big Bang Theory .

Theater / Posse

In 1836 the then famous monkey actor Eduard Klischnigg was in Vienna for a guest performance . For him Johann Nestroy wrote the farce with singing The Monkey and the Bridegroom . Klischnigg played the "real" monkey Mamok in it, another actor disguised himself as a gorilla in order to impress the lady of his heart - the piece is pure confusion.

advertising

Gorilla costumes are rarely used in advertising. If this is the case, however, and if the videos are presented in a technically perfect and humorous manner, they will attract a lot of attention.

American Tourister

In order to point out the stability of their products, the suitcase manufacturer American Tourister (now Samsonite ) planned a promotional video in 1970 in which a gorilla maltreats an American Tourister suitcase, but cannot destroy it.

You searched in vain for a real gorilla and were finally satisfied with the former circus chimpanzee Oofi in the Mexico City Zoo . The shoot was supposed to be finished within a day, but Oofi showed little interest in the brown and red suitcase: he contented himself with tearing off the luggage tag and chewing on it. Even helping his guardian with a stun gun did not have the desired effect. It was only after food was deposited in the closed suitcase that scenes in the cage emerged that can be seen in the promotional video.

In 1980 this advertising strategy was repeated and expanded to include two videos, but this time a “real gorilla” was to play the main role. Since one had learned from the experience with Oofi, this time the gorilla man Don McLeod was engaged , who had already appeared in the television series Tarzan: The Epic Adventures (1996-1997) in a gorilla costume and who later appeared in the films The Soldiers of Fortune (1983) and The Man with Two Brains (1983) portrayed gorillas.
American Tourister's gorilla videos are among the most popular commercials in American television history.

Cadbury

In 2006 and by mid-2007, candy maker Cadbury's image and sales had rocketed through multiple manufacturing mishaps and clumsy public relations , and the company announced it would lay off 7,500 employees.

In 2007, the marketing department hired Fallon Worldwide, London, to run a Cadbury advertising campaign with a budget of £ 6.2 million . In addition to billboards, advertisements in magazines, cinema and television advertisements and promotional events, the centerpiece was a one and a half minute long video showing a "gorilla" playing the drums for the song In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins in a music studio . The Cadbury advertisement only appears at the very end of the video. The video went viral - 500,000 views on Youtube in the first week of release - and a subsequent market research showed that the campaign improved Cadbury's image again.
The gorilla costume in the video was worn by the actor Garon Michael , who also starred as gorilla man in the films Congo (1995), Instinct (1999) and Planet of the Apes (2001). A special feature was the special mobility and expressiveness of the gorilla face, which could be animated with remote-controlled micromotors.
In the same year, the Wonderbra brand parodied the Cadbury gorilla video with 23-year-old model Jentina Chapman on the drums - but this time without a gorilla costume.

Running events

Great Gorilla Run

Participants and spectators of the 2013 Great Gorilla Run on Tower Bridge

The Great Gorilla Run (dt. Great Gorilla Run ) is one of The Gorilla Organization organized charity running event that in every year since 2003 London in September takes place. Participants receive a gorilla costume for a registration fee and have the opportunity to add additional disguise accessories to the costume using their own ideas . During the run, the “gorillas” dressed in this way collect money for the conservation of the habitat of the wild mountain gorillas in Uganda , Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo . The run runs 7 to 8 kilometers through central London and has grossed nearly £ 2 million since 2003 .

Other running events

In other city runs, too, such as the charitable Denver Gorilla Run or the City2Surf run in Sydney , where other disguises are permitted, it is not uncommon for participants to compete in gorilla costumes for their own pleasure and that of others.

Gorillagram

In English-speaking countries - especially in the United States , Australia / New Zealand and Great Britain - the gorillagram (also in the spelling gorilla-gram ) is a commercial service in which a recipient is surprised by the fact that a person in a gorilla costume gives him a short, sung message - for example a "love telegram" for Valentine's Day - delivers.

The term originated in the 1970s and gorillagrams were very popular , especially in New York , in the 1980s .

It is believed that this shocked surprise was caused by the black comedy film Where's Poppa? (also Going Ape , dt. Where is' Papa?; 1970) was inspired in which the frustrated lawyer Gordon Hocheiser ( George Segal ) asks his senile 87-year-old mother ( Ruth Gordon ), who repeatedly asks about her deceased husband (" Where's Poppa? “), By trying to scare her to death in her bedroom - in a gorilla costume. The attack fails very painfully for Gordon and also for his brother Sidney ( Ron Leibman ), who then takes over the costume, it only brings inconvenience.

National Gorilla Suit Day

In 1963, cartoonist Don Martin (1931-2000) published the cartoon story National Gorilla Suit Day in his Don Martin Bounces Back collection . In it, the protagonist Fester Bestertester rebels against the (then fictional) concept of a National Gorilla Costume Day and then suffers a series of incredibly absurd attacks from people in gorilla costumes and gorillas in “human costumes”.

Don Martin fans then declared January 31st to be National Gorilla Suit Day and celebrate this day by wearing gorilla costumes.

psychology

The invisible gorilla

Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University received the Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology in 2004 for demonstrating that people can overlook almost anything if they devote all their attention to a specific detail.

In the study Gorillas in Our Midst (German: Gorillas in our midst - a play on words with the English film title Gorillas in the Mist ; German: Gorillas in the fog ), they used several videos to examine the perception of test subjects with regard to the processes shown in the videos. In one video, a woman in a gorilla costume was made to walk into the picture from the left, stop in the middle, drum on her chest, and then disappear from the picture on the right. However, since the subjects were distracted by another task - in two basketballs zuwerfenden triplets a brighter dressed, the other in dark clothing, they should count the number of ball contacts only the bright-clad people - made selective looking . (Dt selective inspection ) for the fact that only about half of the test persons even noticed the "gorilla" walking through the picture.

Following this study, Simons and Chabris published the book The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us (Harper Collins Publ. UK (2011), ISBN 978-0007317318 ; The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Brains Can Be Deceived , Piper (2011) , ISBN 978-3492053518 ), in which they give further examples of how imprecise and unrealistic human perception can be under certain conditions.

Hidden Camera

Internationally there are numerous television programs that have used actors according to the principle of the hidden camera in order to bring adults or children into situations with “suddenly appearing or broken out gorillas”. The attraction lies in filming those who are so surprised with their reactions, which change from initial horror to subsequent relief when it is recognized that it was just a person in a gorilla costume.

Another remarkable human behavior was observed: Unsuspecting contributors who had applied for a job advertisement were asked by a "manager" in an office building to briefly replace him in his absence and to answer phone calls. While the unsuspecting sat alone at the desk and were busy making calls, a "gorilla" suddenly stormed through the office and then disappeared again. After a while - and further phone calls - the "manager" came back and asked if everything had been okay or if there had been anything special. Most “job applicants” reply that everything went well and that there was nothing special. They made it clear that they did not want to compromise the prospect of the position by reporting problems or difficulties.

Toys, disguise, children's book

The toy manufacturer Lego has in its range of minifigs, along with other people in animal costumes, the figure of a man in a gorilla costume, the detail of which appears realistic because drops of sweat show on his face when the gorilla mask is removed.

As for adults, there are also gorilla costumes for babies and children, which are primarily intended as a disguise for Halloween.

In the children's book The Gorilla Suit , the boy Tony receives a gorilla costume as a gift, which he loves so much that he wears it all the time, which brings him into absurdly funny situations.

Gorilla costume trivia

  • In May 2014, the newspaper La Opinión de Tenerife reported that in Loro Parque, Spain, a recently hired and not fully informed veterinarian had incapacitated an employee in a gorilla costume, who was supposed to represent an escaped gorilla during an exercise, with a shot from a tranquilizer rifle . This incident was reported internationally, and even after the Spanish report was denied and the exact circumstances of the work accident clarified - the employee, in work clothes, and the vet were in the empty gorilla enclosure when a shot was accidentally fired and the anesthetic arrow denied Employee in the leg - the gorilla costume version was still published.
Similarly, an American radio station reported that a man in a gorilla costume was shot by police while raiding a Kentucky Fried Chicken store , but the news was not confirmed by any newspaper either.
  • At Ueno Zoo in Tokyo , “exercises” are occasionally carried out under the eyes of the zoo visitors, during which zoo employees wear animal costumes. In 2004 two employees portrayed an "escaped rhino", in 2014 it was an exercise to capture a "gorilla". Observing zoo visitors questioned the relevance of this exercise to reality.
  • If people in gorilla costumes go into traffic - whether in a vehicle or on foot - this often attracts the attention of the police and can result in punishment or have other serious consequences.
  • Bob Woolf has played the Phoenix Suns mascot Go in a gorilla costume since 1988 and in this role entertains fans with various stunts and slapstick shows.
  • Bob Paris , who in 1989 first universe Mr. (1983) to his homosexuality known published in 1997 the book Gorilla Suit (dt. Gorilla suit , used figuratively for an extremely muscular body) in which it practical tips on bodybuilding there and describes his experiences in his time as a strength athlete .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The specialist trade also offers gorilla costumes in other colors such as purple, red, blue, green or fluorescent colors.
  2. ↑ a b c Linda Das: Face to face with the Cadbury's drumzilla , Daily Mail, October 27, 2007
  3. ↑ Animatronic gorilla costume
  4. ^ For example, The Curse of PP Fartingham's Gorilla Suit
  5. ^ Richard Klaw: The Apes of Wrath . Tachyon Publications, January 8, 2013, ISBN 978-1-61696-141-1 , p. 292.
  6. ^ Anthony Balducci: The Funny Parts: A History of Film Comedy Routines and Gags . McFarland, November 17, 2011, ISBN 978-0-7864-8893-3 , pp. 70 ff.
  7. ↑ a b c John Sorenson: Ape . Reaction Books, October 15, 2009, ISBN 978-1-86189-746-6 , p. 88.
  8. ↑ The list only contains films in which gorilla costumes as defined above were used. Films like the Planet of the Apes series or Hollow Man - Invisible Danger , in which animated gorillas or special make-up and individually adapted masks and the like were used, are not considered.
  9. ↑ Lost Media Wiki: Go and Get It (1920)
  10. ↑ Groucho Marx: Groucho & Me , Virgin Books (4th edition 2008), IBAN 978-0-7535-1950-9, pp. 173-177.
  11. ↑ Video: Marx Brothers At The Circus (Trapeze Finish)
  12. ↑ Season 1, Episode 26: "Safari" (May 29, 1953)
  13. ↑ Season 1, Episode 6: Morticia and the Ladies League (October 23, 1964)
  14. ↑ Season 1, Episode 22: Diamonds Are an Ape's Best Friend (February 27, 1965)
  15. ↑ Season 7, Episode 1: The Hofstadter Insufficiency (September 26, 2013)
  16. ↑ a b One Hundred Best TV Commercials . Times Business, 1999, ISBN 978-0-8129-2995-9 , p. 5.
  17. ^ Don McLeod in the Internet Movie Database
  18. ↑ The video was first shown on UK television on August 31, 2007.
  19. ↑ Cadbury video Gorilla , first published August 31, 2007
  20. ↑ ADWEEK: Wonderbra drummer hotter than Cadbury's , November 8, 2007
  21. ↑ Video: Wonderbra spoof of Cadbury's "gorilla marketing"
  22. ↑ DoIt
  23. ↑ In 2014 this fee was £ 50.
  24. ↑ The Great Gorilla Run . greatgorillarun.org. Retrieved April 14, 2013.
  25. ↑ Homepage of the Denver Gorilla Run
  26. ↑ Dasinger competes with gorillas , Augsburger Allgemeine, August 19, 2014
  27. ^ Robert L. Shook: Why Didn't I Think of That? . New American Library, July 1, 1973.
  28. ↑ a b Ted Gott, Kathryn Weir: Gorilla . Reaction Books, June 1, 2013, ISBN 978-1-78023-067-2 , p. 155.
  29. ↑ Jim MacQuarrie: National Gorilla Suit Day , January 31, 2013.
  30. ^ Daniel J. Simons, Christopher F. Chabris: Gorillas in Our Midst . ( Memento of the original from September 5, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 291 kB) In: Perception. Volume 28, 1999, pp. 1059-1074. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.wjh.harvard.edu
  31. ↑ Video Video: Selective Attention Test from Simons and Chabris (1999)
  32. ↑ Mike Sacks: And Here's the Kicker . Writer's Digest Books ,, ISBN 1-59963-249-7 , p. 240.
  33. ↑ Victor Kelleher: The Gorilla Suit . Happy Cat Books, August 2006, ISBN 978-1-905117-26-0 .
  34. ^ Antonio Herrero: Dispara un dardo narcotizante a un cuidador al confundirlo con un gorila , La Opinión de Tenerife , June 5, 2014
  35. ↑ Jill Reilly: Zoo worker in gorilla suit shot with tranquiliser dart during 'escape drill' because no-one told the vet it wasn't real , Daily Mail , June 5, 2014
  36. ^ Frédérique Gilbert: Un vétérinaire du Loro parque a tiré sur un employé déguisé en gorille , RTL, June 8, 2014
  37. ↑ aga / dra: Shot in the zoo: man did not wear a gorilla costume , Kronen Zeitung , June 5, 2014
  38. ↑ Tenerife Zoo - Zoo doctor shoots man in monkey costume , picture , June 11, 2014
  39. ↑ Katharine Greene: Man in gorilla suit shot while attempting to rob KFC , Wave 3 News, January 25, 2011
  40. ↑ Wilfred Chan: Japanese zookeepers successfully capture fake gorilla , CNN, February 7, 2014.
  41. ↑ No more monkey business: Odd-ball who dressed up in a gorilla suit to scare schoolgirls faces six months in jail , Daily Mail, September 28, 2010
  42. ↑ Jeremy Lukens, Man in Gorilla Suit, Sentenced Today , Cleveland Scene, Oct. 22, 2010
  43. ↑ Honey Boo Boo's cousin "Crazy" Tony Lindsey Arrested - In a Gorilla Suit! , U.S. Magazine, Nov. 30, 2012
  44. ↑ Biography of Go, the gorilla ( memento of the original from November 10, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nba.com

Web links

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