Today in 1928, the release of the movie “White Shadows on the South Seas.”
It was the first talking movie released by MGM, and to wow the audience at the start of the picture, MGM had a roaring lion.
Leo the Lion became a movie icon, though it hasn’t always been the same lion playing Leo.
And one of the MGM big cats wound up using up many of its nine lives during its career.
This was Jackie, the second lion to play the role of Leo the MGM Lion, and the first one to give that famous roar.
Forbes reported that getting Jackie’s roar “took a few takes, and it cost a few broken microphones.”
That was par for the course for the lion.
Jackie was four months old when he started working with a top Hollywood animal trainer, Melvin Koontz, and their relationship appeared to be pretty playful.
If only the rest of Jackie’s life had been so calm and uncomplicated.
In those days, part of being the movie studio’s mascot meant the mascot had to do public events.
And while sending a lion out into the world is already more complicated than sending a human movie star, Jackie somehow ended up in catastrophe after catastrophe.
Twice he was on trains that derailed; once he was on a ship that started sinking, and he also lived through an earthquake and an on-set explosion.
And then there was the airplane: in 1927, the company gave Jackie a customized plane with his stage name, Leo the Lion, on the side.
But on a trip to New York, the plane crash landed in the Arizona desert.
Jackie survived the crash, but then had to sit alone in a cage for days while the pilot walked out of the desert to find help.
Jackie had to fend for himself with some water bottles and a few sandwiches.
But he survived that too; in fact, he lived to be 20 years old, an unusually long life for a lion born in captivity.
Jackie lived through so many close calls as Leo the Lion that he won a new nickname: Leo the Lucky.
Starting today in Indiana, it’s the Jasper Strassenfest.
The town has held this celebration of German heritage each year for decades.
Adults can take part in a Beer Stein Holding Contest, in which the person who holds a stein in their outstretched arm, completely still, for the longest wins.
Kids have a contest to hold mugs of root beer.
Meet ‘Leo The Lucky’—The MGM Lion Who Cheated Death 6 Times (Forbes)
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Image via Wikicommons