Sabor (Tarzan)

Sabor
Sabor in Disney's Tarzan film.
First appearance	Tarzan
Last appearance	Tarzan II
Created by	Edgar Rice Burroughs
Information
Aliases	The leopard
Species	lion tiger leopard
Gender	unstated

Sabor is a generic name for lionesses (originally tigers) in Mangani, the fictional language of the great apes in the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In Burroughs' works innumerable lionesses appear under the name of Sabor. In the Walt Disney animated movie Tarzan, Sabor is a term for leopards, more specifically the leopard that killed Tarzan's parents.

In the initial magazine publication of the original Tarzan novel Tarzan of the Apes, Sabor meant "tiger". Burroughs subsequently altered the meaning to "lioness" for book publication after being informed that there are no tigers in Africa. He substituted "lioness" rather than "lion" because there was an existing Mangani term for lions in the story, Numa. Lions thus attained the distinction of being the only creatures with separate terms in Mangani for the male and female. An ex post facto explanation rationalizing the distinction has been found in the fact that lions are sexually dimorphic; male lions are maned and female lions are not, providing a marked visual distinction between the two.

In the Walt Disney produced animated movie Tarzan, the meaning of the word was changed yet again, to "leopard", despite the prior existence of a different Mangani term for leopard (Sheeta). The alteration appears to have been made for two reasons. The first was for factual accuracy; lions are in fact creatures of the veldt, not the jungle as portrayed in Burroughs's tales; in African jungles, the dominant (and only) large predator is indeed the leopard. The second was more aesthetic; Sabor, they felt, is simply a more evocative and interesting word than Sheeta.

The specific Sabor appearing in the film is the leopard that killed Tarzan's parents and killed Kala and Kerchak's child and is later killed by Tarzan as a result. This occurs during a running fight between the two that culminates when Sabor leaps down on Tarzan and plunges them both into a pit, and is single-handedly impaled on the head of Tarzan's spear tip as the ape man raises it against the leopard. Tarzan then calls out the famous ape man cry, by lifting up the dead body of Sabor.