Ongawa!

Cheetah-Mike, a chimpanzee who was believed to have played Cheetah in some of Johnny Weissmuller's earlier Tarzan movies, died on Christmas Eve of kidney failure. He was thought to be about 80. Since chimps in the wild usually live to be about 35 or 40, Cheetah-Mike's equivalent in human terms would probably have been something like 150. Either way, he was one old chimp.

Anyone who's read Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan novels knows there's no such thing as Cheetah. There's also no such thing as swinging on a vine through the trees, at least not for full-sized human beings, but a combination of physics, tensile strength of jungle vines and the average person's weight clue us in on that without any assist from ERB. Burroughs gave Tarzan a companion monkey named Nkima -- a vain, selfish and fearful but loyal sidekick who offered some comic relief and a sometimes-reliable method of transporting messages from Tarzan to his friends.

The moviemakers probably decided that trying to work with a monkey would be tougher than working with a chimp, since chimps tend to be quite a bit smarter than monkeys, and thus Cheetah was born. He also offered some comic relief and served as Weissmuller's message delivery service on occasion. I imagine he offered a pretty good hook for critics to use when bashing the Tarzan movies, too, since they could compare his acting to that of the movie's leads, Olympic swimmer Weissmuller as Tarzan and Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane. That's probably accurate in Weissmuller's case but not so much in O'Sullivan's as she had a varied and well-respected career before, after and during her six Tarzan movies. But to be fair to Weissmuller, he was apparently a pretty good fellow and respected by his co-workers, and his "Tarzan yell," carried on today by comedienne Carol Burnett, is as much a part of modern pop culture as Superman's cape.

The Tarzan movies are silly fun, transforming Burroughs' lost English lord into a verb and adjective deficient Saturday afternoon serial character for kids -- although O'Sullivan's high-cut loincloth two-piece in her first movie might have drawn attention from a few dads as well and mom probably didn't hate a couple minutes of watching the broad Weissmuller shoulders and chest. They made some excellent diverting entertainment for a nation in the middle of the great depression and during the early, uncertain years of World War II, but their endurance probably owes more to nostalgia than to appreciation of their cinematic quality. Which is just fine by me, especially if it's Saturday afternoon during the era of six or seven channels and it's too cruddy to be outside and the family room reverberates to the ululating call of the Lord of the Jungle.

Cheetah-Mike was the last remaining major cast member of the Weissmuller-era Tarzan films. Weissmuller passed away in 1984, O'Sullivan in 1998 and Johnny Sheffield, who played "Boy," in 2010.

Update -- Three Associated Press reporters who don't have enough to do have filed this item calling into question whether Cheetah-Mike was indeed one of the chimps who played in the Tarzan movies. Looming economic crisis, unrest in Iraq, potential nuclear weapons in Iran, European monetary woes -- nah, let's not dig into those. Let's get some grind with his own horn to toot to say that the chimp in question was a hoax used to drum up business and use three reporters to file it.