Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 1/31/25

International Gorilla Suit Day edition

Everyone here at the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker has been gleefully brachiating down hallways and caroming off of walls in unbridled joy—it’s International Gorilla Suit Day, Melon-Farmers, and we’re all just monkeying around, like all the rest of you.

Long time listeners won’t require any kind of refresher, but for all of you newcomers, a brief explanation is in order: Don Martin, one of the staff cartoonists for Mad Magazine, came up with this running gag in one of his strip collections from the 1960s (since reprinted throughout the seventies, which is when I discovered Martin and changed what I thought about onomatopoeia). I believe it was comics touchstone Mark Evanier who first tossed out the idea back in the early 21^st century, either 2007 or 2008, I can’t remember which.

The people who grabbed onto it were nearly exclusively the fans who followed Gorilla Suit Cinema, a now-dead blog, to be replaced by a Facebook group, consisting of special effects men, actors, stuntmen, actual gorilla suit actors who are still with us, and fans. It’s the most fringe group I belong to, and I love it unconditionally. It’s all great stories, rare photos, and news about upcoming books and projects.

I found them years and years ago when I was researching my unsold 1930s Hollywood Gorilla Man Murder Mystery. It was around this time that I first coined Finn’s First Law of Simian Cinema: there is no movie or tv show that cannot be improved by the judicious inclusion of a gorilla.

What follows then is my personal Top 5 List of my favorite gorilla men. I’m sure your rankings will be different from mine, and that’s fine; feel free to post your favorite gorilla men in the comments.

5. George Barrows

If you watched rerun television in the 1970s, it’s a certainty that you saw George Barrows doing his thing with people like Lucille Ball, The Beverly Hillbillies, and even over at the Addam’s Family house. He was in-demand in the 1950s and 1960s, thanks to the proliferation of television, along with bartender-turned-gorilla man Steve Calvert (using Crash Corrigan’s old suit) and sci-fi TV show regular Janos Prohaska, who played the Mugato in Star Trek’s “A Private Little War.” It was a good time to be a Gorilla-Man, I tell you what. George was also the man in the Ro-Man costume, for all of you Robot Monster die-hards.

4. Charles Gemora

Widely considered to be the Godfather of the Modern Gorilla Man, Gemora was a stuntman and make-up artist who innovated the idea of the gorilla suit. He studied how gorillas moved in the zoo, and modified his suit with things like water bladders in the stomach (to make a jiggle when he walked). It’s probably because Gemora was doing his schtick in the 1920s that he put an emphasis on the eyes of his gorillas—you can tell what he’s thinking in close-ups. It’s pretty amazing. He’s a legend on purpose.

3. Bob Burns

The Ghost Busters was a 1970s live-action Saturday morning TV show starring Forrest Tucker and Larry Storch, and let me just say right here that they really had their finger on the pulse of what kids wanted in the mid-1970s—an F Troop reunion on Saturday Morning. Bob Burns played the sidekick to two bumbling investigators, a gorilla named Tracy who was smarter than the humans. I loved Tracy. This was my first gorilla suit memory. The propeller beanie is what sold it, I think. Burns had already made a name for himself playing “Kogar” a gorilla you could hire for your event in Los Angeles, or use in a film, if you liked. Burns was a super fan who ended up becoming the thing he admired.

2. Don McLeod

There was a time, back in the distant past known as the 20th century, when everyone was watching the same things, including the commercials. The Ameican Tourister luggage company was in a tug-of-war for the hearts and minds of the traveling middle class with Samsonite, the number one leader in the affordable luggage demographic. They outsold American Tourister two to one. Until this commercial: American Tourister Luggage Gorilla.

This ad ran for years. I loved it, and I never knew that the gorilla in the commercial was a guy in a suit! And neither did you, until now. Don Mcleod is one of the most under-appreciated gorilla men because his performances were so natural and his suit so well-made (see below) that for years, everyone thought he was a real gorilla. Mcleod got gigs playing the gorilla in, among other projects, Trading Places and The Man With Two Brains, which is where you’d most likely have seen him doing his thing. He also wrote a memoir (linked above) detailing his wacky career.

1. Ray “Crash” Corrigan

Tall, handsome stuntman and western matinee idol Ray “Crash” Corrigan had a lucrative side-gig for years playing a gorilla in various two-reelers and serial cliffhangers. When he got the call to star in Republic’s Three Mesquiteers Western B-Reel series (get it? Mesquiteers? Musketeers? Oh, never mind.) the higher-ups at Republic told him he had to give up his gorilla man gig, because they can’t have a matinee star debasing himself in a gorilla suit. Crash didn’t want to give up the gig, so he made a deal: he could still do gorilla man work, but only if he was uncredited! Thereafter, whenever you saw a list of actors for some cliffhanger and the last one was a gorilla that just said, “...AND...NABU THE GORILLA!” That was Crash, doing what he loved. There’s even an entry in the Three Mesquiteers series called “Come On Cowboys” where they did the old reliable schtick of having one person dress up in a gorilla suit to scare someone, only to have a REAL gorilla (yeah, another guy in a suit, don’t ruin the bit) show up and scare everyone else. Corrigan got to be both Tucson Smith and one of the gorillas for that episode.

Bonus: Rick Baker

I don’t think there’s anyone alive who has done more to advance the noble art of a guy dressing up in a gorilla suit than Rick Baker. His lifelong fascination with apes and his interest in special effects make-up helped him grab a lot of low budget movie and commercial jobs, like, for instance, making Don Mcleod’s gorilla suit, the Kong suit for the regrettable Dino di Laurentis version of King Kong (he also played Kong in the movie), John Landis’ Schlock (which led to him working on another Landis picture, American Werewolf in London, where he won the first ever Academy Award for special effects make-up), and then he got the job designing ape suits for Greystoke: the Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), an experience he’d build on four years later when he designed complete mountain gorilla suits for Gorillas in the Mist (and you cannot tell the difference between the real gorillas and Baker’s suits). He re-designed the classic John Chambers make-ups for Tim Burton’s widely panned (except for the incredible make-up) 2001 Planet of the Apes reboot. 33 Academy Award nominations. 7 wins. The guy is a living legend, and also a tried-and-true gorilla man.

Pronunciation

I listened to a man at a nearby table tell the story of Air Jordan shoes, and he kept saying Nike, as in with a silent e. Not Nikeee which is how I’m certain it was pronounced in the documentary he watched, and also, for the last two thousand years or so. I had a moment of genuine confusion—did the movie pronounce it “nIk”? No, of course not. This guy watched the whole movie (or the even longer documentary of the same subject) and the whole time, he was silently scoffing, “Pft. They’re saying it wrong.” Historians, people from the company itself, Michael Jordan...all of them. Wrong. Or, worse, he’s thinking, “Huh, so that’s how you pronounce it. Eh, I’m going to keep saying it the way I always have.”

Is it a big deal? No, it’s not. We’re talking about one guy, pronouncing a Greek word the wrong way. People presumably still know what he’s talking about, especially if he follows the word with “sneakers.” But on the other hand...he’s a case of someone who either thinks he knows more than people who are ostensibly experts, or he knows he’s wrong, and don’t care overmuch if anyone else thinks so.

See, I’m not so quick to dismiss this as a minor concern. I’m more inclined to think that mispronouncing the name of the Greek Goddess of Victory is not the terminus of this guy’s ignorance, but rather, the gateway. He wasn’t being loud, or drawing attention to himself, other than sitting in the middle of a mostly empty restaurant. He was just quietly and completely in error, and he didn’t care. He knew what he knew.

Janice watched my face contort as I struggled to find the perfect response. I gave up. There was no way to correct him in public, either jokingly, seriously, or surreptitiously, without being an asshole. I just had to listen to it and sit with the knowledge that people are wrong, about nearly everything, and nearly all the time.

Now, having told you that story, I’d like you to apply it to whatever person you know who, awash in their ignorance, posted their wrongness on [social media site you want to dunk on] as a reply to people being accurately upset about an actual thing that happened and can be verified in a dozen or more different ways. |

This is why we all need to take a deep breath, exhale, and then pick our battles. You can’t fight them all. You can’t combat everything. Well, I mean, you COULD, but you’d tire yourself out before the first leg of the marathon. Also, you would be insufferable at social and family gatherings. No one has the bandwidth to stay that plugged in, especially for four years. That’s how we all ended up with bleeding ulcers and a Xanax prescription last time.

Here's what I’ve personally seen happening. Stop me if you’ve heard this before:

The White House sends out a firehose of horrible nonsense, which grabs headlines and the news cycle for 72 hours. Day one is the press release, followed by a wave of outrage, doom, despair, and agony on me. Day two is spent watching the various politicians, judges, lawyers and pundits jockey for airtime, while watchdog groups set up opposition, rebuttals, strongly worded emails, and so on. Day three finds the White House walking something back to avoid a Thumbs Down/Unsubscribe, or it quietly gets shuffled off of the front page and everyone settles in for a protracted legal battle using any and all checks and balances available.

In my mind, that’s when you should roll up your sleeves. Save your energy for things that will actually need to be fought. Trying to be the same amount of righteously indignant about the list of things they just vomited up on the American public is what they want. The more distracted you are, the easier it’ll be to slip even worse shit by. And when Random Guy You Met at a Company Retreat Twelve Years Ago starts defending those actions, ask him to pronounce the word “Nike.” That may not be a fight you’ve got to get into, after all, you know what I mean?

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Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: We’re not exactly protesting the Academy Awards here in the office, but we’re not exactly fired up about them, either. There may be enough juice for a small editorial about this, provided we can bring something to the conversation that hasn’t already been said, every year, since 1981. In the meantime, here’s a fun bit of fluff.

Saturday Night (Netflix)

Get a behind-the-scenes look at the first-ever episode of Saturday Night (Live), one of the last shows that changed the cultural landscape of America in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

I love this poster, with art that looks like a cross between Mort Drucker and Jack Davis, which is right where it needs to be.

Lorne Michaels is our everyman on this madcap, chaotic ride that spends a lot of time over his shoulder as people come to him with problem after problem, and if you’ve ever tried to manage a group of actors, never mind THOSE coked-up miscreants, you know what a balancing act it is. In this case, there’s a heroic level of people management in Saturday Night, as literally every single department working on this unfamiliar format with untested and untried actors, clashing with the executives and the Old Guard performers, gets in Lorne’s face, begs for favors, reports problems, and tries like hell to pull the train off of its tracks.

Michaels, played with grace and without a Dr. Evil impression, by Gabriel LaBelle, does a good job of being the Everyman here—he’s the most normal person in the building. The rest of the Not Ready for Prime-Time Players are really well-cast, especially Chevy Chase, played by Cory Michael Smith, and Michael O’Donoghue, played by Tommy Dewey. Oh, and don’t miss J.K. Simmons’ turn as Milton Berle. I forgot about Simmons honing his acting chops by playing assholes very well, and his “Uncle Milt” is a return to form. His confrontation with Smith as Chevy Chase may have been fabricated, but the character of Milton Berle was drawn straight from numerous accounts of the man.

As with every movie, you have to remember that it’s made up. Yeah, most of what happens in Saturday Night really did happen—it just didn’t’ happen all on that one night. It was more like over the course of the first two seasons. It was written like that to kind of love bomb the audience, who likely has no idea who some of these people were, never mind what groundbreaking and transgressive shit they came up with, seemingly in a vacuum.

Props to writer/director Jason Reitman for managing to shoehorn in some classic first-cast gems, offered up in the spirit of being spontaneous, off the cuff bits that they liked and kept. I mean, there’s nothing to say they didn’t happen that way, and we know some funny stuff surely did, so the spirit of the creative overflow was well-intentioned.

If you like those movies where we go “behind the scenes” on a movie or a TV show, and if you ever liked any seasons of SNL in the last fifty years, Saturday Night is worth watching if only to appreciate how hard it is to make something out of nothing.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”