Thursday, November 17, 2005

John Robinson Circus 1928/ Mabel Stark

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

A series of photos were made in this setting, some including tigers Boston and Beauty. If old captions named the tigers in correct order, the stripes pattern indicate this is Boston. Mabel's fans know on the '28 Robinson show, she barely survived one of her worst attacks. In Bangor, Maine, tigers Zoo and Sheik took her down. Terrell Jacobs went in for Mabel and fought off their repeated assaults.

Anonymous said...

Anyone seen the 1933 Paramount movie
KING OF THE JUNGLE.
Mabel Stark did the stunt work in that(she can also briefly be seen,as"woman in the park" uncredited.
That movie was a rip off of Tarzan.It starred Buster Crabbe(who lost out to Johnny Weismuller for the MGM Tarzan movie role)
Buster Crabbe found raised by lions in Africa and brought back to work in the circus with his jungle friends,the lions.

Anonymous said...

You have to have a quick eye, but you can spot Mabel Stark managing an escaped tiger in GSOE's train wreck sequence. Another Jungleland trainer seen heading off a lion, in a scant few frames, is Chet Juszyk. "Uncredited" labeled most of us Compound trainers around pictures. The exception was Mel Koontz, who enjoyed great fame as a movie big cat trainer. To his everlasting credit, he never surgically or chemically altered his animals.