Magilla Gorilla
Magilla Gorilla is a fictional gorilla and the star of "The Magilla Gorilla Show" by Hanna-Barbera that aired from 1963 to 1965. Character description. Magilla Gorilla (voiced by Allan Melvin) is a fun-loving yet trouble-prone anthropomorphic gorilla who spends his time languishing in the front display window of Melvin Peebles' pet shop, eating bananas and being a drain on the shop's finances. Peebles (voiced by Howard Morris and later by Don Messick) frequently marks down his price considerably, but he is invariably only purchased for a short time, typically by some thieves who needed  a gorilla to break into a bank or by an advertising agency looking for a mascot for their new product. The customers always ended up returning Magilla, forcing Peebles to give a refund. In the case of being bought by thieves, he was seized by police for being used in criminal activity and sent back to Mr. Peebles, the rightful owner. Magilla often ended episodes with his catchphrase "We'll try again next week." Like many of Hanna-Barbera's animal characters, Magilla Gorilla sported human accessories; a purple bow tie, red shorts held up by green suspenders, a purple  undersized derby hat, and brown dress shoes. The only customer truly interested in owning Magilla was a little girl named Ogee (voiced by Jean Vander Pyl and pronounced "Oh Gee!"). During the cartoon's theme song, "We've Got a Gorilla for Sale", she asks hopefully, "How much is that gorilla in the window?" (a twist on the old standard, "(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?"), but she was never able to convince her parents to let her keep him. In Yiddish, a "megillah" is a long tedious or embroidered account, from the Hebrew "megillah", a story written  in a scroll. One episode has Magilla saying, "Such a megillah over a gorilla." Inception. As pointed out on the Rhino Records' CD liner notes for their collection of Hanna-Barbera theme tunes, part of Magilla's purpose was to sell likenesses of himself. The show was sponsored by Ideal Toys, which produced a "Magilla" stuffed toy. Interpretation. According to one reading of the show, the trials of Magilla mirrored the attitudes that some American citizens had towards racial integration during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Christopher P. Lehman, in his 2007 book "American Animated Cartoons of the  Vietnam Era: A Study of Social Commentary in Films and Television Programs, 1961-1973", writes that "The Magilla Gorilla Show" perpetuated the idea that non-whites should be segregated, with Peebles selling Magilla (the gorilla iconography thus evoking a reference to 19th-century racist artwork portraying blacks as subhuman primates) to white customers who would invariably return him to the pet shop by the end of each episode.