Species: Gorilla

You best respect your elders lest you want to get a cane upside your 32-bit ACM-rendered head.

Cranky Kong is the patriarch of Donkey Kong Junior's family and the original Donkey Kong from the arcade games*. It's been hypothesized that Donkey Kong Island is actually named after Cranky and that he is its legal owner, perhaps passed on to him from his parentage. If so, it's possible the giant gorilla head is modeled after Cranky from his youth. Regardless, long before he adopted the name of Cranky, Donkey Kong Sr. met and married a young gorilla that would take on the moniker of Wrinkly Kong in old age. From their humble cabin in the Kongo Jungle they started a family, the first offspring being a son they would name Donkey Kong Jr. Life was good back then with not much to complain about.

As the original arcade games began, a mustached Italian-American named Mario showed up on Donkey Kong Island along with his girlfriend at the time, Pauline. For reasons unknown, Donkey Kong Sr. snatched her and took her to Big Ape City. It's been suggested by fans that the reason they were there was a cruise ship vacation gone awry, and that the reason DK Sr. kidnapped Pauline was out of vengeance for the environmental damage the two had caused on his beloved island, though that's just fan conjecture based off of the non-villanous personalities that the Kongs were revealed to have in the original Donkey Kong Country. Whatever the backstory, Mario went through a short adventure dodging barrels, springs and other objects DK Sr. sent down at him, and in the end took out the structure underneath the big ape, causing him to fall square on his head. The couple were reunited, leaving Mario to figure out what to do with the pesky gorilla.

Mario decided to cage Cranky in an act of revenge and dragged him back into the jungle. Whatever his plan was, it soon shattered with the appearance of the gorilla's toddler son, Donkey Kong Jr. Junior braved the traps Mario sent his way, collecting the keys that would eventually set his father free. In the final showdown, Junior rescued his father while Mario plummeted from a high ledge, nearly killing him. It was enough to get Mario to return from whence he came.

His battles against the humans (perhaps all from the same beached cruise ship) concluded when DK Sr. showed up at a greenhouse (some suggest it was in this said cruise ship) and wrecked the place, presumably due to the fury of what he had just been through with Mario. An exterminator named Stanley, a friend of Mario's, fought back and defended the greenhouse with some extremely potent bugspray. He forced DK Sr. away (though not before sticking a beehive on his head), and so ended DK Sr.'s struggles against humankind.

As the years passed, DK Sr. watched his firstborn son become a man while he just grew older; no longer strong and versatile, he was now old and bitter. He dropped the Donkey forename entirely and starting going by "Cranky Kong," a name that seems to have its roots in a nickname. Cranky began to, as most fictional old people do, wax about the good old days, and how his exploits with Mario were, somehow, "better games" then the adventures of today. Those that knew him weren't sure if it was senility, but they did their best to humor him.

When King K. Rool first stole DK's banana hoard in Donkey Kong Country, Cranky was onhand in his various cabins to oversee Donkey and Diddy Kong's progress, berating them with stories of days long past before giving up one or two bits of relevant information. When they triumphed, he became jealous of their success against K. Rool, which was much more clear-cut than he ever got with his battles against Mario. This simmering bitterness led him to actually orchestrate the return of K. Rool in a redux of his banana grabbing plot, but when DK and Diddy beat him yet again (on a monochrome 8-bit system at that), Cranky realized he was being petty... although there was nothing wrong with pettiness. When K. Rool enacted his own revenge plot in DKC2, which ironically saw DK Jr. kidnapped in much the same way Cranky had been by Mario decades earlier, the Kongs journied to Crocodile Isle. Cranky gave advice from his Monkey Museum franchise that littered the island, and because of Crocodile Isle's mandatory service charges, he actually got to charge them this time. He also set up a challenge to the side, wherein he scattered numerous Hero Coins throughout every level in the game. The more Diddy Kong collected, the higher his rank as a video game hero would be. In the meantime, he also ran the Expresso Racing mini-game, where you trained an ostrich from the ground up to race against others and win even more Hero Coins. A year later in Donkey Kong Country 3, Cranky relinquished his info-touting rank and served as Dixie Kong and Kiddy Kong's opponent in Swanky Kong's ball toss games while they looked for the missing Donkey and Diddy. This gave Cranky a chance to show off his athletic skills to the younger generation, although the results didn't always come out in his favor. It was also in this period, perhaps inspired by Wrinkly's fitness obession, that Cranky got into martial arts.

Following the death of Wrinkly Kong, Cranky buried himself (never one to show his emotions) in science and had labs built throughout DK Island, much like he had with his cabins and getaway caves. When K. Rool returned yet again and threatened to destroy DK Island, Cranky went about selling potions to the five primary Kongs doing the legwork for reasonable fees of banana coins (chemical substances aren't cheap). He also allowed the Kongs to play his Jetpac game, after they had brought him 15 Banana Medals, which gave them the chance to earn the Rareware Coin. This coin acted with the Nintendo Coin (earned from beating a Donkey Kong arcade game based off of Cranky's exploits against Mario... possibly built by Cranky in 1981?) and let the Kongs get one step closer to victory.

Nowadays Cranky seems to have softened in tone, for he is far more understanding and helpful in comparison to his idiosyncratic roots. Perhaps his advancing years, as well as the death of his wife, have mellowed him out to the point where he doesn't care about his legacy or the past so much as what time he has left with his family. This can be seen most clearly in the Donkey Konga games, where Cranky usually teaches the basics of the game to new players, when he's not hosting a mini-game or even dancing, that is. In DK King of Swing, after King K. Rool steals the medals meant for the Jungle Jam tournament, Cranky (with the help of Wrinkly's spirit) helped teach Donkey Kong the basics of the "swinging" method of travel, which would be used in both levels and the tournament itself.

He's even had to watch his son develop a friendship with Mario, an unlikely one that seems to be extending to Diddy and Dixie as well. While he doesn't approve, it occasionally has its perks, such as when he was able to watch his son beat the hell out of his formal rival from the comfort of one of his labs during the events of the Smash 2 fighting tournament. Who knows? Maybe the present isn't so bad after all.

*This statement is verified on multiple occasions by Rare and Nintendo alike - for example, Rare once included in a biography for Donkey Kong (Jr.) that King K. Rool was "as much his arch-enemy as Mario was Cranky's (so he keeps telling them)," and on the Donkey Kong Country EXPOSED promotional video, Dan Owsen and Tony Hartman, both Nintendo of America employees, called Cranky the "star of the original Donkey Kong game" seconds after first saying his name.

Featured in:
-Donkey Kong Country
-Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest
-Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!
-Donkey Kong 64
-Donkey Kong Country (Game Boy Color)
-Super Smash Bros. Melee
-Donkey Kong Country (Game Boy Advance)
-Donkey Konga
-Donkey Kong Country 2 (Game Boy Advance)
-Donkey Konga 2
-DK King of Swing
-Donkey Kong Country 3 (Game Boy Advance)