Sydney’s story VOODOO depicts an ape of indeterminate species but who nonetheless has a complex and interesting pedigree. While clearly not a gorilla he is, on the other hand , too large to be a chimpanzee as he can carry a human being. While of no known species his form seems familiar to us.Sydney attributes his design to the influence of many popular depictions of apes in popular literature that he saw when young. This ape of popular imagination( half-chimp half-gorilla) has his roots back in the mid-nineteenth century and his first progenitor might be said to be the French sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet. His sculpture of an ape carrying off a woman (1859) a rather sensationalist piece , became the inspiration for popular art and illustration for many years afterwards. Fremiet himself had a professional connection with the Jardin Des Plantes in Paris, where he was professor of anatomical drawing. That venerable institution had obtained the first Gorilla corpse to be seen in France. In 1859 Fremiet was given the task of reconstructing and animating it.

While the gait and pose of the creature were accurate his interpretation of the overall shape was not entirely correct( in the same way that early English paleantologists misinterpreted the Iguanadon). The head was not quite right and his gorilla had monstrous fangs . This reconstruction became the basis of his sculpture APE CARRYING OFF A WOMAN ,an absurd composition which owed as much to Poe’s MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE , a work which Fremiet knew well , as it did to the reconstructed gorilla skeleton. This sculpture  in turn became the model for many subsequent depictions , especially in popular illustration given its salacious tone .Edgar Rice Burroughs used this hybrid ape in TARZAN OF THE APES (1912) ,representing them as Tarzan’s own adopted tribe. By the time of his writing,of course, in the early twentieth century, the appearance of real apes and gorillas was well known and Borroughs named this hybrid the Mangani as if they were a real and distinct species.Thus from the fictional Mangani does The ape in VOODOO derive his origins . And true to the apes of popular fiction he carries off his own share of struggling women. Skipper Prossitt