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No escaping this ape!
"Monkeys, apes, they all hold stuff with their feet, man! We're talking freaks of nature!"

Apes and monkeys with human-level intelligence, whether artificial or natural, have a recurring tendency to be antagonists in fiction. If the protagonists are humans, they might be suffering an inherent sibling rivalry with the human race, and want to either wipe it out or subdue it. If it's a story with a cast of animals, they might see themselves as "superior" to the other species and try to rule over them. Either way, these monkeys are used as signs that something bad is about to go down.

This trope is distinct from Killer Space Monkey in that these monkeys are usually Super Intelligent Mad Scientists who want to Take Over the World or at least make life difficult for humanity. Another possibility is that they are Genius Bruisers determined to both overpower and Out Gambit their fellow primates. However, often they are just highly aggressive animals that attack humans (which may be Truth in Television for some primate species).

This here is the opposite of Silly Simian. Compare Mischief-Making Monkey, where the trouble the monkey causes is more harmless. Killer Gorilla is a subtrope, as gorillas (and other great apes) are particularly often portrayed as malevolent, due to their great strength and menacing appearance. For the underwater equivalent, see Devious Dolphins. For primates in general being depicted as intelligent, regardless of whether or not they're dangerous, see Intelligent Primate.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • The Beast Titan, from Attack on Titan. It's 17 meters tall, with Creepily Long Arms, a cruel, brilliant mind, and the ability to turn humans into Titans he can control. Its appearance heralds very bad things. He's the Warchief of Marley's Titan warriors and is rather fond of baseball.
  • Etemon from Digimon Adventure. And Makuramon from Digimon Tamers.
  • The Saiyans from Dragon Ball Z are like this. They are galactic conquerors who can transform into giant apes during the full moon. Their only simian-like characteristic in their normal form is their monkey tails.
  • One of the first monsters seen in The Fruit of Evolution are primates literally called "Clever Monkeys". Not only are they massively more powerful than you'd expect for something that looks like a chimpanzee with a spider monkey's tail, being Level 150, they back it up with high stats, high speed, and powerful attacks, including a Razor Wind kick attack called Guillotine Kick. Their highest stat is actually their intelligence, which allows them to craft (and use!) well-made tools and all kinds of herbal medicines and potions. The Clever Monkeys that Seiichi meets are encountered working under a Kaiser Kong, but it's unclear if that's normal for them.
  • Jojos Bizarre Adventure: Forever from Stardust Crusaders is an orangutan who gained human-level intelligence after acquiring the Stand Strength, and antagonizes Jotaro and his comrades.
  • The apes in Princess Mononoke, who distrust and hate San.
  • Seton Academy: Join the Pack!: Pan Saruhara is a chimpanzee beast-girl who is portrayed as conniving and malicious, using her mastery of man-made tools and weapons to cheat in order to get ahead in competitions while taking out her rivals.
  • In So I'm a Spider, So What? the Anogratch are a species of aggressive monkey-type monsters. They will attack anything that enters their territory and if a member of a troop is killed the rest will pursue the killer endlessly, no matter how many die in the pursuit. Given their troops can number in the thousands, the Revenge Monkeys are exceptionally dangerous. Their evolved form, the Bagragratch, is a much larger and stronger baboon-type monster but is actually considered less of a threat as it lacks the Vengeance and Wrath skills of the previous form.
  • Aozaru from The Twelve Kingdoms.
  • Ushio and Tora has two notable examples: The Namahage, a monster who skins women and devours their intestines in an attempt to turn into a human, is revealed to be the transformation of a macaque, who originally wanted to become a human for the sake of his childhood human friend but eventually lost himself in villainy. A later arc has some monstrous babboons lead by a gigantic white elder monkey, who enjoy eating young women. They are a nod to the tale of Shippeitaro.

    Asian Animation 
  • One of the rival teams faced by the Sunny Farm F.C. in Dreamkix had several spider monkeys who'd physically impede their progress, even in blatant displays like covering Roy's eyes and trying to drag George down. Yet they were apparently not committing fouls because they were deemed "too small and weak to really physically assault anyone".
  • Happy Heroes: As shown in episode 31 of Season 2, among planet Gray's graduate monsters is a giant ape that Big and Little M.'s commander describes as "ferocious".
  • Rimba Racer: OoAa the chimpanzee is never shown to speak intelligibly, unlike the other Funny Animals on the show, and tends to screech and grab people when annoyed.

    Comic Books 

    Fan Works 
  • After Calvin opens a circus box in Calvin & Hobbes: The Series, he releases a monkey and Hilarity Ensues.
  • The Kim Possible fanfic An Old Foe Returns gives us Mastermind, a sinister super-intelligent chimp who intends to make simians the dominate species on Earth. It's revealed that he used to be Bobo, the Camp Wannaweep mascot that created Ron's monkey phobia.
  • The Psychonauts fanfic Later, Traitor introduces a new type of mental enemy, Intrusive Thoughts. They manifest as black-furred monkey-like creatures with barbed tails, sharp claws, and glowing jack-o-lantern-like faces that attack in packs and spew vile insults. Frazie encounters swarms of them in Clem Foote's mind.
  • Near the end of the Lord of the Rings fic Sary, a monkey suddenly appears in Rivendell and brutally kills Aragorn for no reason.

    Films — Animated 

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The science fiction film Ad Astra features a bizarre segment when the main character played by Brad Pitt responds to a distress signal at a Dutch research station that has been overtaken by a pair of overly aggressive baboons. The implication is that the baboons were used in experimentation. One of the baboons ends up eating the face of an astronaut accompanying Pitt.
  • The gorilla in Baby's Day Out doubles as this and also an ape version of a Papa Wolf.
  • The main antagonists of Blood Monkey are a bunch of super-smart, utterly ravenous apes picking off college students in the jungles of Thailand.
  • The Killer Apes of Zinj from Congo.
  • The Simians from Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla and Terror of Mechagodzilla are green chimpanzee aliens who attempt to use Mechagodzilla to Take Over the World.
  • In Jumanji, the game introduces a troop of monkeys to wreak havoc: "This will not be an easy mission. Monkeys slow the expedition". Though the monkeys aren't so much dangerous as a sheer nuisance.
    • Then in sequel Jumanji: The Next Level, the danger is very real with a huge group of mandrills who attack the protagonists (as they need to cross fragile rope bridges, no less), down to throwing one of them in the Bottomless Pit below.
  • 1986 film Link had a killer chimpanzee butler.
  • Ella in Monkey Shines is an assistant to a paralyzed man who develops a psychic connection with him. Whenever he lashes out at someone, she is soon out to get them.
  • Nope: One of the characters is a survivor of an incident in which a chimp went berserk during the filming of a TV sitcom, and killed and mutilated several people.
  • An infamous scene from The Omen has Damien and his mother at a drive-through safari park when a troop of Hamadryas baboons suddenly go berserk and attack their car. We eventually learn that the baboons, much like an Evil-Detecting Dog, were responding to Damien's diabolical aura.
  • A heroic aversion in Phenomena with Inga, a chimpanzee of normal intelligence who helps Donald Pleasence's character Professor McGregor (who is disabled) get around. Inga spends most of the movie as a fairly gentle, amiable primate, but in the film's climax, after her master has been killed, she goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge and decapitates the villain with a straight razor. This is one of those movies where Humans Are the Real Monsters.
  • The apes from Planet of the Apes, who have replaced humanity as the superior species, although the whole point of the franchise is that they're no worse - or, despite what they think, better - than humans.
  • In Primal, the cook is killed by the pack of monkeys that have taken over his galley after he grabs one of the babies, despite Frank's warning not to.
  • A Capuchin monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark works as a spy for Those Wacky Nazis. No, really. She ends up inadvertently helping the heroes when she eats a date and dies, tipping Sallah off that the bowl of dates is poisoned.
    Bad dates.
  • In Sands of the Kalahari, the survivors of the plane crash are menaced by a troop of baboons inhabiting the area. Initially content to holler at the intruders from the distance, the animals gradually become more aggressive as they realize the people are only a physical threat to them when they have weapons.
  • In The Shadow Of Kilimanjaro, thousands of aggressive baboons ransack villages and attack humans because a drought has depleted their natural food sources.
  • The title primate in Shakma is a genetically altered baboon with a murderous attitude.
  • A segment from the anthology horror film Terror Tract features a killer capuchin monkey named Bobo, who has a talent for stabbing people offscreen.
  • David Lynch's short film What Did Jack Do? revolves around a talking capuchin who is suspected of murdering his girlfriend's lover. Downplayed, however, in that Jack's possible motive has nothing to do with him being a monkey, and he is mostly presented as just a poor dumb schmuck who got in over his head and made some bad decisions, rather than some kind of Ax-Crazy maniac.
  • The Flying Monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. Though they're actually Punch Clock Villains.
  • In Creepshow, the monster in the segment titled "The Crate" resembles a grotesque, fanged baboon.
  • In Braindead, the Flesh-Eating Zombie outbreak is the result of the bite of a hideous critter called a Sumatran Rat-Monkey. A zookeeper mentions a folk story that the rat-monkey is the product of ship rats raping island-dwelling monkeys.

    Literature 
  • In After Man: A Zoology of the Future, several species of deadly predator have evolved from monkeys, including the fish-eating swimming monkey, the cheetah-like horrane, and several species of theropod-like raboon.
  • Ape And Essence by Aldous Huxley uses apes to symbolize the decline and fall of human civilization.
  • In Catching Fire, the Hunger Games arena contains genetically-modified killer monkeys with claws and fangs.
  • Apes were a common monster in Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories, being prominent antagonists in "The Phoenix on the Sword", "Iron Shadows in the Moon", and "Rogues in the House".
  • In His Dark Materials, Mrs. Coulter's dæmon is a handsome golden monkey with long, lustrous fur. Considering how your dæmon signifies your true self, that shows that Mrs. Coulter is very intelligent, cunning, and charming; then again he also likes to pull small creatures limb from limb when he's bored. Mrs. Coulter is not good.
  • In The Enemy, the Holloway kids are attacked by diseased monkeys and apes which have escaped (or been released) from London Zoo, resulting in them losing five members of their group.
  • The Wickersham brothers from Horton Hears a Who!.
  • Journey to Chaos: Looming Shadow boasts of a monkey beastfolk who becomes a Life Drinker with necrocraft and goes on a screeching and insane rant about how he has become a god.
  • The Bandar-log (Monkey-folk) from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book capture Mowgli so he can teach them human things and help them become masters of the jungle. It's a subversion because the Bandar-log's attention spans aren't long enough to complete their plan.
  • The Pak in Known Space are the ancestors of mankind, and are known to Earthly science as Homo habilis; young Pak look like somewhat leggy chimpanzees. Their life cycle is odd, consisting of an animalistic "breeder" phase followed by eating a poisonous root, Tree of Life, that mutates them into Protectors, hyper-intelligent, super-strong sociopaths concerned only with the protection of their progeny. Most of them regard human beings as competitors, and therefore as appropriate targets for genocide.
  • Last and First Men: The sapient monkeys of the Second Men's time are possessed of a large selection of unpleasant traits, including immense avarice, high aggressiveness and bellicosity, a delight in chaos and mischief and an almost sociopathic inability to process the experiences of other beings. They consequently tend to be very cruel to theie subhuman livestock, which they routinely force into humiliating, obscene or painful situations, and react with offended rage when they lash out. They also often bait, trick and harass each other in gleeful and sometimes deadly confrontations.
  • The talking ape Shift serves as an Antichrist figure in The Last Battle.
  • Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot once faced the "Mecha-Monkeys from Mars".
  • In Daniel Pinkwater's Snarkout Boys books, the criminal mastermind Wallace Nussbaum relies on kidnapped and mind-controlled orangutans to do his bidding.
  • In Erin Hunter's Bamboo Kingdom series A Troop of Snub-nosed Monkeys kill Root Rising-Tree by knocking the panda into a flooded river leaving his mate Orchid and soon to be mother a widow. Sunset Deepwood forges and alliance with another troop of monkeys lead by Brawnshanks who cause trouble for Rain and Ghost (2 of Root's posthumous children). By the end of the second book, Brawnshanks Troop intends to betray Sunset.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In Helix, the hunt for lab monkeys infected with The Virus is critical to the CDC team's effort to figure out how to contain the outbreak at a remote research base. Though their existence is at first vociferously denied by Arctic Biosystems staff, Dr. Boyle discovers infected macaques are the source of zoonotic transfer after she's attacked by an unusually intelligent and violent escaped specimen. Balleseros later finds the rest of the infected lab monkeys frozen outside the base.
  • The third season Finale of Malcolm in the Middle entitled "Monkey" had one. After Lois' coworker Craig is injured and confined to an electric wheel chair for 6 weeks, he chooses to get a free Capuchin Monkey Butler for the permanently disabled instead of using his insurance money to pay for a nurse. At first the Monkey seems friendly and helpful, but is soon revealed to be Deranged and Homicidal as he harms Craig and attempts to murder him in cold blood. Luckily, Hal is able to stop the Monkey and Calls animal control off screen.

    Music 
  • Denki Groove: The music video for "30th Anniversary Song" features a lab monkey that caves in a scientist's head and escapes, doing the same to a punk before meeting the love of his life. After the monkey wins a marathon, he has a reunion with the former scientist...and beats his skull in.
  • The Lemon Demon song "Fiberglass Monkey" is about a man tormented by visions in the night of "a fiberglass monkey with glowing red eyes", who is eventually driven to bring a baseball bat to bed with him in order to fight the monkey off.

    Pinball 
  • The "Monkey Mayhem" table of Extreme Pinball is all about this trope.
  • The Crazy Monkey in Stern Pinball's Family Guy; hitting him repeatedly starts "Crazy Chris" mode.
  • In The Wizard of Oz, the Flying Monkeys carry the pinball from the lower playfield to the Wicked Witch's Castle.

    Professional Wrestling 

    Religion 
  • Medieval bestiaries often portrayed them as allegories of the devil, and sometimes illustrated satyrs (another source of Satanic imagery) to look very ape-like. This may be where C.S. Lewis got the idea for his example listed above under Literature.
  • Chimpanzees are rarely depicted in African mythologies (supposedly its because they're "too close for comfort"), but when they are they're almost invariably symbols of violence and sexual depravity, with the Hemba and Gio people using them as motifs for war masks. Averted with Ghekre, however, which is a just afterlife judge depicted as a gorilla.
  • In Beti-Pahuin Mythology and culture chimpanzees were widely hated. They represented what humans would be if we lived according to basic impulses. The hero Oyono Ndana slew their king Mesi Me Kot Endong, thus kicking off the great chimpanzee war.
    • Gorillas were in contrast seen as peaceful weirdos best left alone. In the legends they were used as Slave Mooks for different tribes.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons has had a wide variety of ape and monkey-based monsters appear in it during its history, such as the psionic, carnivorous Su-Monsters and four-armed, carnivorous, gorilla-like Girallons.
  • Among the factions of Feng Shui are the Jammers, intelligent apes working in concert with the few humans immune to the influence of Chi. They're a faction of Mad Bombers who do not care one whit about who they blow up, so long as they get to blow up Feng Shui sites and bring about Battlechimp Potemkin's dream of a world without chi.
  • Freedom City has several, including Dr. Simian, criminal refugee from a city of intelligent apes, and Dr. Geistmann, a Nazi scientist trapped in the body of an albino ape.
  • Pathfinder features a city of evil sentient apes called Usaro. Their ruler, Ruthazek the Gorilla King, is one of the setting's major villains.
    • A swarm of less lethal but very annoying monkeys is summoned by the spell "Mad Monkeys".
    • One of the setting's major demon lords, Angazhan, appears as a huge demonic gorilla who associates himself with primates, jungles, and tyranny. The aforementioned Gorilla King is one of his worshipers.
  • Given that Terra Primate is at the least a loose shoutout to Planet of the Apes as a whole, this is quite applicable.

    Video Games 
  • Alundra: The monkeys are bloodthirsty, violent and murderous little bastards.
  • Ape Escape is about tracking down and catching dozens upon dozens of mischievous monkeys and thwarting the schemes of their leader, an uplifted circus monkey named Specter.
  • Dominions 4: The Early Age nation of Lanka is composed of various castes of different sorts of primates, from chimps to gorillas, ruled over by gluttonous demon ogres. They're heavy users of Blood Magic and one of the few nations that can benefit from increasing the Turmoil in the land.
  • Donkey Kong Country: Although apes are predominately the heroes of the games, there are the occasional primate pest;
  • Eastern Exorcist: The Mandrill King, a powerful demon with a babboon motif, is the game's Big Bad and a the overlord of the monsters terrorizing the land. There's also an early boss, the Snow Ape, an albino simian demon who serves the Mandrill King.
  • EXTRAPOWER: Giant Fist: The frenzy wind that affects the animals in the first stage has even the monkeys aggressively attack the player, jumping in at an angle from above.
  • Einhänder: The Mini-Boss "Ausf A Gestell" is a Humongous Mecha ape. It attacks the player's ship like a deranged robot monkey would as well as having a number of dangerous weaponry. Befittingly enough, its battle theme is called "Madness".
  • Freedom Planet 2 features a hyperactive tarsier assistant named Aaa, aptly named for his tendancy to scream whenever asked for his name. He aids Corazon Tea in fulfilling Merga's plans to resurrect Bakunawa and built lots of contraptions to slow the heroines down.
  • Kuon: the Yang Chapter has the heroines going to the mountain shrine through a dark mountain path infested with both Yamabito (zombies) and Mashira, massive, ferocious undead monkeys which will attack Sakuya with great speed and ferocity. Their boss, a massive monster erroneously called "Yeti" in some sources, patrols a ruined hut where a plot-relevan item is kept and will later ambush Sakuya in a glade as a boss fight.
  • The Legend of Spyro: The villains of the first two games, the Apes, are an army of aggressive and violent mandrill-like monkeys trying to take over the world, and most of them tower over Spyro.
  • Mario Party 7: The minigame Apes of Wrath begins as two dueling characters eat apples... and a group of Ukikis watch them and get mad (since they own the territory and don't like others eating the surrounding fruits). Cue the characters running for their lives. Whoever gets captured by the Ukikis will lose the duel, and render the other player victorious.
  • Monster Eye have swarms and swarms of vicious chimpanzees in the amusement park area, which the player will need to shoot at. And at the end of that stage, the players will battle the boss, a King Kong Copy giant gorilla.
  • The Outfoxies: Dweeb isn't just a simian murderer, he is a simian hitman for hire. And he doesn't protest against killing off his cohorts.
  • Pirates: Legend of the Black Buccaneer have hostile, savage monkeys as one of the game's most recurring enemies, oddly enough, where they appear all over the beaches and ruins to attack you.
  • Pokémon: Mankey and its evolution, Primeape are characterised for their Hair-Trigger Temper and violent outbursts, making them notorious for going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge for minor slights. Various renditions of Primeape describe it as being willing to "chase you down forever" in order to give you a thorough beating if you piss it off. It gets even worse once it evolves into Annihilape, where it transcends physical limits through sheer rage and becomes a Fighting/Ghost type.
  • RuneScape: The monkeys and apes of Ape Atoll form a terrifying militaristic faction bent on world domination. And during the Do No Evil quest, where the desert god of monkeys has her senses split into 3 parts, and they take the form of 3 dark and powerful gorillas.
  • Smite: Hun Batz, the Howler Monkey God of the Mayan pantheon, is a rather sinister monkey driven with vengeance of being humiliated by the Hero Twins. While at first being introduced to replace Sun Wukong as the latter received a Darker and Edgier overhaul, at least Wukong's old kit was meant to be silly, Hun Batz made the kit more sinister as he's more serious in cracking the enemy's skulls wide open. Also, he babbles about The End of the World as We Know It because he's Mayan.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Star Fox:
    • Andross is an evil genius primate who leads an army of Maniac Monkeys and has two of them as his proteges, and is also the page image.
    • His nephew, Andrew Oikonny, is a highly incompetent Maniac Monkey, a character trait which is Played for Laughs.
    • His grandson Dash Bowman appears to be a subversion of this trope, as he joins the Star Fox team to clear his family name and right Andross's wrongs, but two of the possible endings of Star Fox Command have him follow in his grandfather's footsteps to become another galactic overlord. So far, there hasn't been a single ape or monkey in Star Fox who hasn't turned evil in some form.
    • Star Fox 64: The Meteo Crusher pilot, yet another monkey who works for Andross. Falco even calls him a monkey in an insulting, derogatory way.
      Pilot: I am no match for you. I admit defeat.
      Falco: Are you gonna listen to that monkey?
  • Super Solvers: Morty's Cyberchimps in Super Solvers: Gizmos & Gadgets can steal your vehicle parts and pick up parts on the floor, making them very irritating. Feeding them a banana makes them sleep and drop their parts. Later on the slow, fat Chimps are replaced with fast, wheeled Chimps that sleep for a much shorter time.
  • System Shock 2 has screeching monkeys with cryokenitic and pyrokinetic powers, who still have their heads cut open and their brains exposed from experimentation.
  • Temple Run: The demon monkeys chasing you.
  • Thief: The Monkeymen patrol many of the later levels. They're actually easier to deal with than regular guards, due to the fact that they don't count as humans, meaning you can freely kill them even on Expert difficulty.
  • Top Hunter: Roddy & Cathy contains a fierce, gigantic Black Faced Macaque Mini-Boss with sharp claws and More Teeth than the Osmond Family, who escapes a cage to fight the titular characters.
  • Vigilante 8: In Vigilante 8: 2nd Offense, the Secret Identity of Astronaut Bob O. is none other than a NASA chimpanzee who was sent to space and went insane in the process. Hinting at this is a line in his character bio revealing his favorite foods as being oatmeal and fruit, as well as a scene where the Garbage Man tries to bribe him with bananas in exchange for his stolen moon rover. He manages to hide this with his spacesuit and by speaking through a vocoder, as well as insisting that his name is Bob O., not "Bo-Bo".

    Web Animation 

    Webcomics 
  • In Freefall chimpanzees were uplifted a century previous, but they retained their aggressiveness and lack of impulse control. The more recently uplifted Bowman's Wolves were engineered to be much more sociable, and Florence is a little uncomfortable to discover that her creator is actually a chimp.

    Web Original 
  • Bad Two Sentence Horror: Don't open the monkey closet. If you do, evil monkeys will come out and they will eat you to death and there will be blood.
  • The YouTube channel The Budget Museum did a video entitled "Baboons!", in which - in between educating the viewer on baboons - the host is apparently being held captive by a troop of extremely threatening monkeys.

    Western Animation 
  • Coconuts from Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog is a robotic monkey who serves as a member of Dr. Robotnik's Super Special Sonic Search and Smash Squad. His goal is to capture Sonic so he can get on Robotnik's good side and get off of janitorial duties. Coconuts is smarter than Scratch and Grounder and sometimes sees through Sonic's plans, whereas Scratch and Grounder rarely succeed in capturing Sonic.
  • One episode of Back at the Barnyard dealt with a space test monkey who pretended to be friendly for awhile before revealing his true colors by somehow intending to take over the entire farm in front of the horrified animals due to his opposable thumbs (which is sort of Fridge Logic as Otis and his friends never had problems with manipulating objects before despite not having opposable thumbs), although it could all be down to playing the entire scenario for comedy.
  • Batman: The Brave and the Bold has all DC Gorillas team up to form G.A.S.P., Gorillas and Apes Seizing Power.
  • Dr. Wasabi's ninja chimps from Chop Socky Chooks.
  • Simian from the Dexter's Laboratory "Dial M For Monkey" shorts, though he gets a Heel–Face Turn.
  • During the first The Fairly OddParents! TV movie, AJ's monkey takes a bite out of a magic muffin that grants its eater any wish, regardless of Da Rules. The monkey's wish is—you guessed it—to make apes Take Over the World. Or it could have been a banana. Cosmo always mixes those two up.
  • Evil Monkey from Family Guy, though he and Chris eventually become friends and he moves on to another boy's closet.
    • As a throwaway joke, in the episode where the family finally discovers his existence, Meg reveals she also deals with an evil monkey, this one being bigger and scarier looking.
  • Fangface had an episode where the Monster of the Week was a city of "ape men" who straddled the line between this trope and Frazetta Man. They lived in an Underground City inside a mountain on an Island of Mystery and practiced ritual Human Sacrifice to their "ape idol".
  • Literal example from Invader Zim
    The letter M: Dib's screaming like a Maniac... monkey.
  • The Monkey King from Jackie Chan Adventures.
  • Monkey Fist and his army of monkey ninjas from Kim Possible.
  • Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: Scarlemagne's a twisted, controlling Mandrill who wants to enslave all humans for his own entertainment. So he fits the "Maniac" part pretty well. He outright admits that he's insane, too. His mooks are also various species of primates.
  • Mr. Bogus: "Hipster Tripster" featured a trio of monkeys who Bogus plays around with in the first act, but in the second act, they become this after Bogus releases them from their cage. At the end of the second act, Bogus is able to corral the monkeys back into their cage by luring them away from the zoo's gift shop while hiding under a banana peel.
  • My Little Pony 'n Friends: The gizmonks, the villains from "The Great Rainbow Caper", are a pair of monkeys whose obsession with invention and technical gadgets leads them to cover the Rainbow of Light and to kidnap innocents to hold as hostage for it.
  • Onyx Equinox: Episode 5 features gorilla-sized howler monkeys that were once the gods attempt at creating people, only to turn to their base desires. Even nowadays they're highly vicious towards both humans and each other, tearing one another to pieces for whatever reason.
  • Mojo Jojo from The Powerpuff Girls (1998) is an evil genius chimpanzee with an oversized brain and one of the girls' oldest and greatest foes. He used to be Professor Utonium's assistant helper monkey, but exposure to Chemical X caused his brain to mutate and grow, and the Professor's newfound love for the girls led to his path of villainy. In The Powerpuff Girls Movie, he has a whole army of uplifted simians, but they object to him being the one in charge and start fighting over who should rule Townsville.
    • Even before Mojo Jojo became sapient, he was a menace that did nothing but smash everything the Professor owned and shoved him while he was working, inadvertently creating the Girls. He is really not happy to be informed of this in the present day.
  • Primal (2019): The eponymous ape-men of the episode "Rage of the Ape-Men" are a tribe of savages with a violent culture, holding some kind of fighting tournament in an arena and having a magical serum that enhances size, strength and aggression. Their champions are gorilla-like brutes, but the commoners are smaller monkey-men (somewhat resembling Japanese macaques or Barbary apes) who Zerg Rush their opponents.
  • Runaway Brain: Dr. Frankenollie, the Mad Scientist who swaps Mickey's brain with that of his creation, is a chimpanzee.
  • In one episode of The Simpsons, Ned Flanders ends up in a baboon enclosure. The creatures are portrayed frighteningly straight (parodying a similar scene from The Omen with violent baboons), and they almost wind up killing him.
  • Baboon and his army of monkey ninjas from Skunk Fu!.
  • Mister Smarty Smarts from Spliced, the show's resident Ineffectual Sympathetic Evil Genius, combines this trope with Devious Dolphins.
  • Addicus from Thunder Cats 2011. A serial murderer (with a dose of I'm a Humanitarian), rescued from the death row by Mumm-Ra's forces to serve as a Psycho for Hire.
  • In Xiaolin Showdown, Jack Spicer's favorite Shen Gong Wu is the Monkey Staff, which gives him the appearance and characteristics of a monkey.
  • Young Justice (2010) has had robotic monkeys, Cobra venom mutated monkeys, Monsieur Mallah, the Ultra-Humanite, and Joker monkeys in the tie-in comic. You can understand Conner's hatred of these buggers.

    Real Life 
  • Nonhuman primates in general are extremely dangerous animals.
    • Baboons are territorial, and they often raid human settlements to steal food. They tend to travel in groups, too.
    • Inverted with gorillas, who are generally docile and peaceful despite being more menacing in their appearance. In the wild, they’re even known to use diplomacy to resolve disputes amongst themselves and other tribes of their species. Harm them or their families, however, and you will soon learn why they have no natural predators. They also may react aggressively to a human chest pounding, smiling, or even looking them in the eye because these all are insults or threats to them. Unfortunately, these are all common things people do in front of them.
      • This silverback took particular offence at a young girl chest pounding, and quickly made the other humans laughing at him realise just who they were dealing with, courtesy of a punch that cracked the thick interior glass pane of his enclosure. Watch the reflections in the window closely, and you’ll see the exact moment everyone realises they made a serious mistake!
    • Chimpanzees are especially dangerous because the common comical and cute portrayal they get in media has led to a mass underestimation of just how violent they can be. Their stooped and modest frames belie their extremely powerful upper body strength, with which they can easily tear human body parts off. People get them as pets for their "cuteness" and have been mauled to death. Seriously, they've been known to torture other chimps, and other animals, to death in the wild. Males fight for and enforce dominance with brutal fights and aggression. They also have been known, as Jane Goodall can tell you, to go to "war", where two troops stay in conflict for a extended period of time until one is entirely wiped out. They also have been caught killing and cannibalizing other chimps, including infant chimps.
    • It's been well documented and established in the animal kingdom that very few predators, despite the danger they pose, attack with the intent to draw out their prey's suffering; they simply do so to survive and eat, and most wild animals who attack humans do so out of fear or provocation and don't actively try to kill unless they have to. Chimpanzees are an exception. As our closest living relatives and one of the most intelligent animals on Earth, they are one of the few animals to understand the concept of sadism. When they attack other animals - even their own kind - it is often premeditated and planned out by them (individually or more chaotically in groups) and they often go out of their way to inflict as much pain as possible. While many victims of their savage attacks, animal or human alike, survive the encounter, chimpanzees will make them wish they hadn't.
      • Travis was a pet chimpanzee who lived happily and peacefully for 13 years with his human owners. He had been treated like a surrogate son by them and socialized to humans since birth. But one day when he saw his owner's friend holding one of his favorite toys, he savagely mauled her, ripping off her face and hands. His owner tried to stop him by beating him with a shovel and stabbing him with a butcher knife, but he was only stopped when police arrived and shot him.
      • Passion was a female chimpanzee and mother of three infants. She was part of the Kasakela community, studied and pioneered by Dr. Jane Goodall herself (who gave Passion her name), who took note of Passion's savagery. What was so unique about her? She was essentially a chimp female cannibalistic Serial Killer... of babies. She would lure the parents of chimps away using her daughter Pom as a "femme fatale" sort, before capturing, kidnapping and brutally murdering the offspring, then eating them and giving the remains to her three children. She would also viciously maul or kill any parent who wised up to her tactics and tried to defend their babies. Dr. Goodall even noted that her behaviour was very unnatural for a chimpanzee mothers and she was basically the chimpanzee equivalent of Mashilipa, who had no lasting affection for her own infants, when even her daughter Pom, who helped her commit these atrocities, was protective of her own son.
      • Bruno was a chimp who was born during the Sierra Leone Civil War in the 1990s. After his family were murdered by hunters who claimed his habitat for the war effort and Bruno was exposed to the horrors of war and greatly mistreated, he was sold on the black market as a pet, when a kindly couple bought him for a measly $30. Despite this act of kindness, Bruno's experiences left him with a deep-seated hatred for humans and when he was eventually transferred to the Tacaguma Chimpanzee Sanctuary, he grew into a dangerous and violent chimp quite a bit larger than the other chimps, even becoming the alpha male very quickly. One day in 2006, he and thirty-one followers escaped the sanctuary and they relentlessly attacked a group of four men in a taxi driven by Issa Kanu, who was brutally mauled to death and the three survivors were left greatly injured and mutilated. Bruno was never captured or found. While Bruno is admittedly a more tragic example of this trope, he is still a prime example of just how dangerous chimpanzees can be.
  • Human primates are sometimes considered the most dangerous animals on Earthnote , only outranked by one other animal for most lethal to other humans per yearnote . Which makes sense, considering we're the only ones with guns and nukes.
  • Jeff Corwin has frequently handled venomous snakes and other reptiles, but dislikes and fears monkeys; everywhere he goes, monkeys cause him problems.
  • Jacco Macacco was an infamous fighting monkey in London who regularly fought against dogs and won, even dogs that were twice his weight. While his species is unknown, some believe him to have been a rhesus macaque based on this etching of his head.note 

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Green Monkeys

The Xiaolin Warriors are overwhelmed by Jack's monkey army.

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