"From Bedtime for Bonzo to Chimp Crazy: Primates in Entertainment Media"
Primates have been appearing in entertainment media such as documentaries and fiction films for more than 100 years. Over this long and storied history, relatively little systematic research has examined how primates are portrayed in film. Dr. Koenig’s research over the past nine years has attempted to fill this gap. In her Grace A. Tanner Faculty Distinguished Lecture, Dr. Koenig will discuss the results of that research, summarizing how the portrayal of primates that audiences receive through media is vastly different from reality. Some key findings include that primates in media represent a narrow slice of overall primate biodiversity, favoring large, charismatic species like chimpanzees and gorillas over smaller species like squirrel monkeys and marmosets. In addition, primates in media are often engaged in fast-paced, interesting lives that heavily favor behavioral complexity while primates in the wild move at a slower pace. Primates in media are often depicted in a utopian environment, free from pollution, human overlap, poaching, and other challenges that plague wild primates. Likewise, primate pets in fiction film are often depicted as fun comic relief when real primate pets frequently struggle with depression-like symptoms. Dr. Koenig will address the real-world significance of this research by discussing how the skewed representation of primates in media may impact people’s conservation attitudes and behaviors, leading to meaningful challenges for the world’s many endangered primate species.

Dr. Crystal Riley Koenig is an assistant professor of anthropology at Southern Utah University. She earned her PhD and MA in Biological Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis and an MA in Social Psychology from New Mexico State University. Her research has focused on the portrayal of primates in media and the overlap of humans and macaques in Singapore. Dr. Koenig’s research has been published in American Anthropologist, Biological Conservation, Primates, and numerous other journals. For her contributions to her students and her field, she has been honored with several awards, including the SUU Distinguished Educator Award, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences Innovative Pedagogy Award, and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences Early Career Award.

Synopsis:

The 2025 Grace A. Tanner Distinguished Faculty Lecture on February 13 featured SUU’s own, Associate Professor of Anthropology Dr. Crystal Koenig. Her presentation was titled, “From Bedtime for Bonzo to Chimp Crazy: Primates in Entertainment Media”.

Dr. Koenig began her presentation outlining various examples of primates in entertainment media, from Bedtime for Bonzo to Night at the Museum 2. She explained that the research she was presenting on actually came when she was working with long-tailed macaques when she was a Project Officer for Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She counted and observed the monkeys, and shared stories of the macaques entering apartment buildings, stealing food, which served not only as a danger to humans, but to the monkeys as well. While doing this research, she watched a show called Monkey Thieves, in which a close relative of the long-tailed macaques was shown raiding children’s birthday parties, stealing lunches, and overall wreaking havoc. The monkeys that Dr. Koenig worked with did have moments—like stealing a woman’s smoothie while she was sunbathing—but otherwise they lived unremarkable lives. 

Dr. Koenig’s research stemmed from this idea; that primate media, while produced in primate habitat countries, are produced for Western audiences. She studied the history of primate documentaries, in hopes of finding trends within them that would help her research. She found that in early media representations of primates, they were portrayed as bloodthirsty; something to be subdued. On the other hand, these early filmmakers would also have primates that they had poached from the wild to keep as pets. “It really set up this early dichotomy where primates in the wild are scary, but if you can get a little one and keep it in your house, that’s a really good idea. And this is something we see carried over the entirety of primate documentary history.”

The future of primatology, however, was shaped by figures like Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas. “Despite their mixed legacies, it’s no question that they profoundly shaped the future of what we understand about primates and also how we represent them.” Dr. Koenig said. These informative, straightforward, nature documentaries piqued interest, but primate media stayed changing. In the 1980s they focused on an individual in the wild, in the 1990s they included celebrity presenters, and more recently primate media has seen a combination of these factors. 

In comparing data, Dr. Koenig found that of the 4 most represented species in entertainment media, only 1 of them was portrayed fairly accurately, though some disparities remained. Primate media didn’t accurately represent the amount of time the primates spent resting and feeding, but instead focused on the ‘other’ behaviors, as well as travel which Dr. Koenig noted perhaps to help further the story. In her research, Dr. Koenig found that there was a large emphasis on large-bodied species with a conservation status of Endangered or Least Concern, systematic differences in the behavior of primates in entertainment media compared to in the wild, numerous inaccuracies, and a frequent portrayal of a pristine world, with no human impact. In fiction films, there is a trend of “species inappropriate things, they’re there either to frighten you or to be comedic relief”.

In concluding, Dr. Koenig outlined the broader implications of primate representation in media, and what it means for primate populations. She found that audience’s perceptions of primates are impacted by specific portrayals, for example, a primate wearing clothes on TV must be common in the wild, the portrayal of primate pets drives higher demand for primate pets, there is a lack of straightforward, honest representation of primates, which suggests that audiences are only receiving a skewed, optimistic portrayal of primates. “This is important because the conservation plight of primates is more serious all the time, it’s never been more serious since primates have existed. And primates really can’t afford this kind of false sense of complacency where we think that they’re okay because that’s what we’re seeing on our television.”