Arka Mukhopadhyay
Directed by Todd Philips, the 2009 buddy comedy movie ‘The Hangover’ has gained the status of a classic of the genre over the years. Doug and his three best men take a trip to Vegas to have a memorable bachelor party just before Doug’s marriage. Well, the partying does not pan out as timidly as Doug would have thought. But who knows what Doug would think since he has gone missing the following morning.
The hotel suite is a wreck, and Stu apparently got hitched the previous night. However, has anyone noticed a tiger in the bathroom, even if we do not mind the chicken in the hallway? Alan indeed has, and after the appearance of Mike Tyson at the one-hour mark, things only get more awkward. Well, does Mike Tyson own a tiger in real life? If the question has bugged you, let us investigate further into the matter. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Is Mike Tyson’s Tiger Real?
Well, as it happens, Tyson did have three pet Bengal tigers in his care, named Boris, Storm, and Tanya. ‘The Baddest Man On The Planet’ had this wild hobby of petting tigers, but the jungle cats were not completely domesticable. If you are guessing people actually broke into his property to steal the tigers, you are not far from the mark.
While nobody was daring enough to steal a tiger, a woman indeed jumped over Tyson’s fences and started playing with one of the tigers. In the process, she was injured, which led to Tyson paying $250,000 in compensation. It all started when Tyson was serving a prison sentence, and he sparked off a conversation with his car dealer. While Tyson was astonished that he could trade cars for horses, the car dealer explained to him that he can have cougars, lions, and tigers. However, he later ex realized the naivete of his hobby, and let go of the wild pets. He now owns a poodle called Mars, who even has a social media profile of his own.
However, the tiger adds a new level of intensity to the story. With a tiger and a chicken (presumably to feed the tiger, as Todd later explained) on board, it rarely gets wilder. All the animals featured in the movie got training. Moreover, the crew put safety equipment in place so that the actors would be comfortable filming the scenes. They later removed the trainers and safety instruments digitally in the post-production process. They opted to use some prop animals and the real ones, like in the sequence where the tiger hid under the bed-sheet and the one where the three musketeers move them down to the hotel lobby. American Humane Association for the monitoring and treatment of the animals praised the efforts of the crew to care for the animals as “outstanding.”
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