Doof Artist Profile: Bananas the Chimp

Bananas (1920-1985) was an extremely intelligent chimpanzee who was tested and found to have an IQ of 150 which is considered to be highly gifted. Bananas was also discovered to have a natural drawing ability that was unparalleled with any chimpanzee on record.

His remarkable drawing skills were discovered by the US government after they recruited Bananas for the then infant US space program. It was there that Bananas was being groomed to be the first intelligent animal to be sent into space. One afternoon, Bananas was watching a soldier drawing Doofs for the enjoyment of his fellow GIs and Bananas started to draw the image on the walls of his room. Art supplies were given to Bananas and for six months he created Doof drawing after

Doof drawing.

These Doof drawings were extremely sophisticated for someone without opposable thumbs. The perplexed scientists brought in psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts,

psychobiologists, psycholinguists, psychometricians, pseudoscientists, psychophysicists, psychotherapists, psychopharmacologists, pyschohistorians and a couple of art critics from New York to study Bananas work. The final analysis was that while Bananas was blessed with a high IQ, he was not fit for the space program because of his new found artistic temperament. He was released into civilian life and went to work in Hollywood, first as an actor, then a artistic advisor eventually becoming a producer and writer. He quit the movie industry in the late seventies and became a comic book artist until his death in 1985.

Bananas Photo Album

This is one of the many drawings Bananas executed that day at the military installation in the early days of the space program.

Here is Bananas in the arms of actor, Gordon Scott who played Tarzan in RKO's Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan's Hidden Jungle, 1955.

Bananas landed a job as a technical advisor for the epic cult movie, Planet of the Apes. His friendship he made with the actor, Charlton Heston, lasted for many years. As you see below, Bananas was introduced to fire arms by the future president of the NRA and took to them like a duck to water.