Cheetah - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

  • In Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne (1523), the god's chariot is borne by cheetahs (which were used as hunting animals in Renaissance Italy). Cheetahs were often associated with the god Dionysus, whom the Romans called Bacchus.
  • George Stubbs' Cheetah with Two Indian Attendants and a Stag (1764–1765) also shows the cheetah as a hunting animal and commemorates the gift of a cheetah to George III by the English Governor of Madras, Sir George Pigot
  • The Caress (1896), by the Belgian symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff (1858–1921), is a representation of the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx and portrays a creature with a woman's head and a cheetah's body (often misidentified as a leopard's).
  • André Mercier's Our Friend Yambo (1961) is a curious biography of a cheetah adopted by a French couple and brought to live in Paris. It is seen as a French answer to Born Free (1960), whose author, Joy Adamson, produced a cheetah biography of her own, The Spotted Sphinx (1969).
  • Hussein, An Entertainment, a novel by Patrick O'Brian set in India of the British Raj period, illustrates the practice of royalty keeping and training cheetahs to hunt antelopes.
  • The book How It Was with Dooms tells the true story of a family raising an orphaned cheetah cub named Duma (the Swahili word for cheetah) in Kenya. The films Cheetah (1989) and Duma (2005) were both loosely based on this book.
  • The animated series ThunderCats had a main character who was an anthropomorphic cheetah named Cheetara.
  • In 1986 Frito-Lay introduced an anthropomorphic cheetah, Chester Cheetah, as the mascot for their Cheetos.
  • Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle has a subplot involving an escaped cheetah, which later smokes cannabis with the pair and allows them to ride it.
  • Comic book superheroine Wonder Woman's chief adversary is Dr. Barbara Ann Minerva, alias The Cheetah.
  • On the CGI animated show Beast Wars: Transformers, Cheetor, one of the main characters on the Maximal faction, had the beast form of a cheetah. This was also carried over as the beast form of the Cheetor Hasbro transformer.
  • The Japanese anime Damekko Dōbutsu features a clumsy but sweet-natured cheetah named Chiiko.
  • The first release of Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X was code-named "Cheetah", which set the pattern for the subsequent releases being named after big cats.
  • In Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light the character Witterquick as the totem of a Cheetah and could turn into one.
  • Titled "Hunting at 60 mph", the PlayStation 3 game Afrika features a Cheetah hunting a gazelle as the game's first "big game hunt".

  • Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian, 1523

  • Cheetah with Two Indian Attendants and a Stag by George Stubbs, 1764–1765

  • The Caress by Fernand Khnopff, 1887

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