When the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie production company was founded in 1924, the company needed to adopt an emblem to convey to the rest of Hollywood that a new movie-making force to be reckoned with had arrived. Turning to in-house designer Howard Dietz for inspiration, MGM opted to choose a roaring lion as their logo—partly because of the message that the king of the beasts would send out (and partly as a tribute to the Lions athletics team of Dietz’s alma mater, Columbia University).
Over the century or so since then, a total of seven different lions have acted as the centerpiece of MGM’s famous “roaring lion” logo. The very first was a creature named Slats, but unlike all those who followed him, Slats did not roar. Instead, in his “bumper” (that is, the short, few-seconds-long clip that rolls before a movie, advertising the studio who made it) Slats merely stared out imperiously around the audience. The reason Slats did not roar? He only appeared in MGM’s earliest silent movies.
After the dawn of sound and color pictures in the 1920s and 30s, MGM decided that their logo needed updating, and so adopted a new lion named Jackie. His roar was recorded using in a gramophone, inside a specially-constructed soundstage built around his cage on the MGM lot. Footage of Jackie roaring was also recorded, and he plus his roar made their debut on MGM’s first sound feature, White Shadows in the South Seas, in 1928. A decade later, he made his Technicolor debut before 1939’s The Wizard of Oz.
Jackie remained the official MGM lion right through to 1956, although a handful of others—named Telly, Coffee, Tanner, and George—were used intermittently on various other pictures from the 1930s through to the late 1950s. For almost every MGM picture since 1957, the MGM lion has been Leo—a captive-bred lion, born in Dublin Zoo, Ireland, who as well as becoming the logo of MGM also appeared on screen in a handful of pictures in the 50s and 60s. It was Leo the Lion, too, who in 1959 made an unexpected entry in Hollywood history.
While Slats the Lion was kept intentionally silent for the soundless movies of the 1920s, every other MGM lion since then has roared before an MGM film. But when biblical epic Ben-Hur finally made its way to the silver screen in 1959, the MGM lion was—for the first time in more than three decades—once again kept deliberately silent.
Quite why Leo the Lion was silenced before 1959’s Ben-Hur has been the subject of numerous theories and over the years. Some people claim that it was a protest to the end of the McCarthyism era of Hollywood suspicion and censorship, while others like to think that it was an in-joke—a knowing callback to MGM’s original 1925 adaptation of the Ben-Hur story, which had, like all of the studio’s earliest movies, been a silent film. The real reason that Leo was silenced before the 1959 film was a lot more straightforward than either of those.
Given its biblical setting and religious context, Ben-Hur opens with a simple recreation of the nativity. Reportedly, director William Wyler (who would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Director for Ben-Hur the following year) thought that preceding that serene opening scene with the rousing roar of Leo the lion wouldn’t quite set the right mood. And so, fearing that this opening scene might otherwise feel out of place, he requested that for the first and only time since the silent era, the MGM lion be silenced.