We’ve seen a lot of different movie genres come to life thanks to the wild lives of the people on TikTok. Be it horror movies or romcoms or that girl who lived out The Hangover. Here’s a new, and oddly specific one to add to the collection, though: corny family films from the 1990s.
TikTok user @mooremaddss grabbed the app’s attention with her post about an alarming sight she glimpsed via the camera of her baby monitor. “Just checking my baby monitor to find a huge gorilla in my living room????!!!!” wrote TikToker Maddy. Sure enough, as you can see via the screenshots above or the photos in her post, that is indeed a surprisingly chill member of the simian family playing babysitter.
As we haven’t seen an ape looking after an infant since the glory days of human/monkey buddy movies that were the 1990s — see such “classics” as Dunstan Checks In and Baby’s Day Out — it looked like Maddy was living out a lost family film from our childhood. Maybe with Danny DeVito as the voice of the gorilla, and Dennis Hopper as an evil zookeeper intent on capturing him. Maddy would probably be played by Catherine O’Hara — or Judith Hoag, if the studio couldn’t afford Home Alone money.
Unfortunately for Dunstan die-hards, but fortunately for Maddy and her family, things weren’t quite as they seemed. When she rushed into the other room to find out how in the name of George of the Jungle a gorilla had gotten into her house, Maddy realized her hilarious mistake: one of her son’s toys had simply been left near the camera.
TikTok is in hysterics over this bit of mom/monkey business, with many admitting they also fell prey to the apelike optical illusion. “Giiiirrll!” one came clean. “My first thought was ‘where do you live for a gorilla to be in your house?'” Others were feeling a little more sarcastic: “Dear diary, today I learned about perspective.”
Some are imagining how they would react in Maddy’s place. A fellow parent knows that they would’ve immediately overreacted: “Mom brain would’ve had me calling 911.” On the other hand, someone else bravely confessed that they would’ve said “screw the kid” and listened to their self-preservation instincts: “I hope this is a judgement free zone bc I absolutely would not have run in there.”
With any luck, Maddy has a short-term memory and her son has a vast array of animal action figures and similar misunderstandings happen in this household on a daily basis (we need a “there’s a T-Rex in the room with my baby!” video). Meanwhile, somewhere in Hollywood, one bored producer scrolling through TikTok just got an idea for the next chapter in a major franchise. “Hear me out,” he’ll pitch to Bob Iger. “Babysitter of the Planet of the Apes…”