Leo (or Slats, or Jackie, or Telly . . .) the MGM Lion

The roar of the lion before some of our favorite films has been going on for almost one hundred years and has actually been more like a pride of lions parading through the years.

The picture of a majestic lion first appeared on the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation logo in 1916 but it wasn’t until 1924, after Goldwyn Pictures became Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer (MGM), that a video clip of a lion was used in the bumper that preceded the studio’s films. Since then, there’s been seven lions to introduce the MGM opening credits.

SLATS: Slats was born in 1919 in Dublin, Ireland. He is the only MGM lion who doesn’t roar. That’s because in 1924, films didn’t have sound. Slats was trained by the famous MGM animal-wrangler, Voleny Phifer, and manages to look majestic even without roaring.

JACKIE: Jackie was a wild lion brought from the Sudan and trained for MGM. His roar–actually three separate roars–were recorded separately from his video. Jackie graced the MGM film openings between 1928 and 1956, including the first Technicolor image of a lion in the 1939 classic, The Wizard of Oz.

TELLY (’28-’32), COFFEE (’32-’35), TANNER (’34-’56), AND GEORGE (’56-’58): Between 1928 and 1958, MGM used four more lions for various color films, shorts, and cartoon openings. Their roars were often used in animated shorts, and Tanner even got some screen time in films (including once in The Three Stooges) from 1936 to 1947.

Finally, there’s LEO: He’s the most recent and longest-used MGM lion and has roared at the start of most films made by the studio since 1957. Like Slats, he came from the Dublin Zoo. He started his film career young, thus you can tell him apart from the other lions due to his smaller mane. Leo’s had plenty of extra screen time in the past 63 years, including an appearance in the 1961 biblical epic, King of Kings. Since 2012, MGM is no longer a self-distributing studio but a production company. Still, we can see Leo (re-mastered in 3-D) on many of today’s opening movie credits.

I hope you enjoyed this little look into Hollywood history. Watch for more blog posts about history, writing, book reviews, and travel as I eagerly await the release of my newest novel, In A Far Off Land.

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