Johnny Weissmuller Trivia
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48 free Johnny Weissmuller trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Johnny Weissmuller trivia quiz covers both halves of an extraordinary life: the swimmer who never lost a race and the actor who became the definitive screen Tarzan. The easy questions cover the basics: the sport, the five golds, the ape man, Cheeta and Jane. Medium questions get into the polio that put him in the water, the coach who made him, the record he took from Duke Kahanamoku, the underwear contract MGM had to buy him out of, and how the famous yell was made. The hard questions are for film buffs and swimming historians: the vampire bat scene cut from Tarzan Escapes, why Boy had to be adopted, the Acapulco shoot of Tarzan and the Mermaids, the Jungle Jim films where he played 'Johnny Weissmuller', the Kellogg diet, the 1927 rescue of eleven people, his five marriages and the yell played three times at his graveside. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on Weissmuller, his co-stars and the individual films, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our Tarzan quiz covers the whole franchise from Elmo Lincoln to Disney, and our Olympic and classic Hollywood quizzes make good follow-ups.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Weissmuller won five Olympic golds with a high-riding version of which stroke?
Front crawl
Front crawl: he rode it with his chest high out of the water, a style credited with revolutionising freestyle swimming in the 1920s, and titled his 1930 book Swimming the American Crawl.
Q 02Weissmuller won three golds at the 1924 Paris Olympics, the Games dramatised in which film?
Chariots of Fire
Chariots of Fire follows Britain's sprinters at the same Paris Games, where Weissmuller's three golds included a narrow win over Sweden's distance star Arne Borg in the 400 metres.
Q 03Weissmuller's Olympic bronze medal came in which team sport?
Water polo
Water polo: the bronze came in Paris in 1924, within days of his three swimming golds, which made him a medallist in two sports at a single Games.
Q 04Weissmuller was born in 1904 in Szabadfalva, then part of which kingdom?
Hungary
Hungary ruled the Banat village then; today it is Freidorf, a district of Timișoara in Romania. He was seven months old when his family sailed for America in 1905.
Q 05Weissmuller later admitted the tale that swimming cured his sickly boyhood was put about to do what?
Inspire children
Inspire children: he told Sports Illustrated in 1970 that the yarn was 'something we put out to inspire the kids', adding that he had been skinny but never sick.
Q 06Weissmuller lied about his age at 11 to join which organisation and start racing?
The YMCA
The YMCA wanted members to be twelve, but he was tall for his age, got in at eleven and went on to become its champion swimmer.
Q 07Why did Weissmuller learn to beat his world records by only a fraction each time?
To leave himself more to break
To leave himself more to break: crowds, and the promoters who paid his coach appearance money, expected a new record at every meet, so he trimmed his times a tenth of a second at a go.
Q 08At the 1924 Olympics Weissmuller and team-mate Stubby Kruger delighted the crowds with what kind of exhibition?
A comedy diving act
A comedy diving act: the clowning helped make Weissmuller one of the most popular athletes in Paris, and Kruger went on to a career as a Hollywood stuntman.
Q 09Weissmuller was the first man to swim 100 metres freestyle in under what time?
One minute
One minute fell in July 1922, when he was 18 and swam 58.6 seconds. The legend that he never lost a race is only partly true, though: he did lose in his early days.
Q 10Who took silver behind Weissmuller in the 1924 100 m freestyle, with his brother taking bronze?
Duke Kahanamoku
Duke Kahanamoku, Hawaii's surfing pioneer, had won the event in 1912 and 1920; Weissmuller took first his world record in 1922 and then his Olympic crown.
Q 11What did an MGM producer want to change about Weissmuller until told he was the world's greatest swimmer?
His surname
His surname: the producer thought Weissmuller too long for a marquee, then relented on learning who he was and had extra swimming written into Tarzan.
Q 12In 1927 Weissmuller helped save eleven people from which Lake Michigan disaster?
A capsized boat
A capsized boat: the excursion boat Favorite went over in a sudden squall off Chicago with dozens of women and children aboard, and Weissmuller, out training for a marathon swim, went to their rescue.
Q 13Weissmuller's first screen role, in little but a fig leaf, was as which mythological figure in Glorifying the American Girl (1929)?
Adonis
Q 21Which comedienne would perform the Tarzan yell on request during her TV show's weekly Q&A?
Carol Burnett
Carol Burnett taught herself the yell as a girl, called it a good vocal exercise, and once got opera star Beverly Sills to try it.
Q 22What is the name of the chimpanzee sidekick in Weissmuller's Tarzan films?
Cheeta
Cheeta was invented for the screen: Burroughs's novels have no chimpanzee at all, only a little monkey called Nkima.
Q 23The 1934 sequel to Tarzan the Ape Man scandalised censors with what scene?
A nude underwater swim
A nude underwater swim: Olympic swimmer Josephine McKim doubled for Jane, and censors had the sequence cut from prints soon after release, so it went unseen for decades.
Adonis: he stood as a living statue in a Ziegfeld revue number, three years before Tarzan swapped the fig leaf for a loincloth.
Q 14To free Weissmuller from his BVD contract for Tarzan, what did MGM agree its stars would do?
Pose in the company's ads
Pose in the company's ads: MGM let stars of Greta Garbo's rank be photographed for BVD, and the $500-a-week swimwear salesman became its ape man.
Q 15In Tarzan's New York Adventure, Weissmuller's ape man escapes the police by diving from which landmark?
The Brooklyn Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge: the plunge into the East River was really a dummy, filmed from a tower on the MGM lot.
Q 16Who played Jane opposite Weissmuller in six Tarzan films from 1932 to 1942?
Maureen O'Sullivan
Maureen O'Sullivan, an Irish-born MGM contract player, left the series after 1942 to raise her growing family, which soon included the future star Mia Farrow.
Q 17What was Jane's surname in the Weissmuller films, as opposed to Porter in the novels?
Parker
Parker: the films also changed her nationality, making Jane a well-bred Englishwoman where Burroughs's Jane Porter came from Baltimore.
Q 18Why were elephants in Weissmuller's Tarzan films fitted with fake ears and tusks?
Indian rather than African animals were used
Indian rather than African animals were used because film-makers found them far easier to work with, so MGM strapped on outsize ears and tusks to pass them off as African.
Q 19Weissmuller always said the Tarzan yell was his own voice, built on which boyhood skill?
Yodeling
Yodeling: he recalled doing it at Sunday picnics as a boy in immigrant Chicago, and said the studio merely modified the call he gave them.
Q 20Which all-purpose command did Weissmuller's Tarzan shout at animals?
Umgawa
Umgawa was invented for the films as a command for every occasion, and Weissmuller liked to translate it as Tarzanese for a rather saltier version of let's get out of here.
Q 24Which 1934 film, the first sequel to Tarzan the Ape Man, joined the US National Film Registry in 2003?
Tarzan and His Mate
Tarzan and His Mate is the only film MGM's art director Cedric Gibbons was ever credited with directing, though Jack Conway took over part of the shoot.
Q 25Which creatures did Tarzan fight in a sequence cut from Tarzan Escapes (1936) after test screenings?
Vampire bats
Vampire bats: a preview left children scared and mothers outraged, so MGM cut the swamp attack and reshot much of the film, which had once been titled Tarzan and the Vampires.
Q 26Why is Boy a foundling, not Tarzan and Jane's own child, in Tarzan Finds a Son! (1939)?
The couple were unmarried
The couple were unmarried in the eyes of Hollywood's morality watchdogs, so a baby of their own was ruled out; screenwriter Cyril Hume had one survive a plane crash instead.
Q 27Which child actor played Boy in eight Tarzan films alongside Weissmuller?
Johnny Sheffield
Johnny Sheffield said the star picked him for the part himself and then taught him to swim; he later led his own series as Bomba the Jungle Boy.
Q 28In Tarzan's New York Adventure (1942), why do Tarzan and Jane travel to Manhattan?
Boy has been kidnapped by a circus
Boy has been kidnapped by a circus whose boss saw him performing with young animals; in New York, Tarzan turns the big top's own herd loose to wreck it and get him back.
Q 29Tarzan Triumphs (1943), the first RKO entry, pits Tarzan against whom?
Nazi Germans
Nazi Germans: paratroopers seize a lost city for its raw materials, and the film ends with Berlin mistaking a chimp's radio chatter for Hitler.
Q 30Which actress played Jane in Weissmuller's last four Tarzan films?
Brenda Joyce
Brenda Joyce got the part only after the first Jane, pencilled in for a 1945 comeback, dropped out; she then stayed on for a fifth film opposite the next Tarzan.