Mel Koonz #1 (From Eric Beheim)

Back during the “golden age” of Hollywood, whenever a director needed someone to wrestle a lion on camera, the “go-to” guy was Mel Koontz. Koontz (who trained "Jackie" the MGM lion) once estimated that he had worked on six hundred films, appearing in more than three hundred of them. In 1940 he and one of his Jackie lions appeared in a Paramount short subject titled NOT SO DUMB, a thrills and laugh reel showing the native intelligence of various animals – a raven, a penguin, a kitten, a farm dog and a movie lion. This film was later re-released by Castle Films under the title WING, CLAW AND FANG. Here are some frame enlargements from the sequence featuring Koontz and Jackie.