- "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 released throughout the 1930s to 1960s. While sometimes billed as "Cheetah", the usual name for the character was "Cheeta". As a character in the Tarzan franchise, Cheeta was not in Edgar Rice Burroughs's original stories, but was first introduced in the 1932 film "Tarzan the Ape Man", starring Johnny Weismuller, potentially making Indiana Jones' knowledge of the character a year prior an anachronism.
