I’m not talking here about misplaced animals or animal noises, like the use of the Australian Kookaburra for “monkey” noises in the jungle, or the call of the American Loon to indicate wilderness (especially, for some reason, deserts), or rattlesnake rattles to indicate spiders or scorpions. Or the use of easily-tamed and trainable elephants in movies set in Africa (because they’re a lot easier to work with than African elephants). There are whole TV Tropes pages devoted to those.
I’m talking about cases where the filmmakers decided to completely make up some animal because they needed something exotic and/or threatening, and they didn’t have anything on hand.
So in the notorious Ingagi (1930) you have the venomous “tortorillo”, made from a turtle with extra scales and a wing-like shell.
Or the ridiculously oversized and laughable spider that shows up in Deborah Kerr’s clothes in the 1950 king Solomon’s Mines. I guess they figured they needed some minor peril at that point, and they couldn’t persuade Kerr to play with a scorpion or something.
That’s two, but I could have sworn that there were others. Anybody know of any?
It’s not clear where the Loompaland jungle was, possibly Africa, nor were they portrayed onscreen, but Hornswogglers, Vermicious Knids, Snozzwangers and Whangdoodles were said to lurk there.
In the original edition of the books, they are unambiguously from “the deepest and darkest part of the African jungle” and depicted as African pygmies. But this was changed even in Dahl’s lifetime. Very fucking reluctantly, but nevertheless.
The apes that raised Tarzan - called “Mangani” in the books.
Burroughs never clearly defined exactly what species they are, but they are expressly not chimpanzees or gorillas, nor any other real-life African primate.
Not an African animal, but similar to the use of Kookaburra sounds, the cry of a Bald Eagle in movies is always dubbed in with the sound of a Red Tailed Hawk. Because it sounds more impressive. The real life cry of a Bald Eagle sounds like a drunken chipmonk or tweety bird. No one would be impressed by it.
If I was asked what was the iconic African sound, I think it would be the cry of the Fish Eagle. Not sure how that sounds to people with no sentimental attachment to the place.
For one of my Bad Film Festivals I was going to have a section I would call “Armadillo Follies”, featuring Tod Browning’s Transylvanian armadillos from 1931’s Dracula and the armadillo that was supposed to be some prehistoric beast (Ankylosaurus? Glyptodon? who knows. The film mixed up Mesozoic with Cenozoic with wild abandon) in Hal Roach’s One Million B.C.
In his mock biography of Tarzan, Tarzan Alve!, Philip Jose Farmer opined that they were some form of early man (although Australopithecus showed up in later books of the Tarzan series, with tails and prehensile toes.)
I’m surprised that no one has yet mentioned the Pushme-Pullyu from Hugh Lofting’s “Dr. Doolitte” books, described as the descendant of Abyssinian gazelles, Asiatic chamois, and unicorns (genetics wasn’t Loftings string suit), which arguably makes it African. It showed up in the 1967 musical adaptation of Dr, Doolittle (the one with Rex Harrison), looking like a two-headed llama (it looked more like a mule in the books), and apparently wasn’t in the Eddie Murphy or the Robert Downey versions at all.
Yes, that’s true. I read the books as a kid a lot and particularly enjoyed the drawings. I now know they’re a look at Dahl’s ugly, dated stereotypes as you point out.
The version better remembered with Gene Wilder’s magnificent performance lets us better concentrate our energies against the real villain: that asshole Grandpa Joe.
Roald Dahl also invented the Roly-Poly Bird, which appears in several books: Dirty Beasts, The Enormous Crocodile, and The Twits (where he’s able to communicate with Mr. and Mrs. Twit’s trained monkeys in their “weird African language”).
Oh. I thought the OP was about mythical animals in, e.g., magical realism genres in actual African cinema, like the Akala bird in the Nigerian film Anikulapo. But you mean made-up animals in mainstream Hollywood films set in Africa.
These critters didn’t make it into any of the Tarzan movies, but in the first Tarzan novel, Jane’s maid Esmeralda was fearful of the that they might be attacked by a ripotamus or a hipponocerous, which caused her to get ‘nervous prosecution.’
Nitpick: Strictly speaking, I don’t think that counts as “made-up animals” that the creator’s narrative was claiming actually existed in Africa, as in the OP’s examples.
Rather, it was a (racist) comedy bit about Esmeralda’s malapropisms in trying to refer to actual African animals.
