“The Black Stallion”, a Ma’naqi Sbayli to Ferida
The stuff you learn on Facebook.. Today I learned the registered name and strain of the Arabian stallion that stars in the movies “The Black Stallion” and the “The Black Stallions Returns”.
He is a Ma’naqi Sbayli tracing to the Blunt’s Ferida in the tail female, and his name is Cass Ole. I can already see an ad for my CSA Baroness Lady, the last living Al Khamsa mare tracing to that strain, with the headline: “From the strain of the Black Stallion”.
A related anecdote: A few years ago, while having lunch with a prominent breeder from the Gulf in his stud farm, I asked: “So, where did you get your passion for Arabians? Was your grandfather a Bedouin warrior?”. The answer was not quite what I was expecting: “No, I read Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion”.
I can fully credit The Black Stallion with initially getting me into Arabians. I even remember the day I met the person that would introduce me to real Arabian horses and give me my first Arabian horse — I was watching The Black Stallion and paused the movie because my dad wanted to introduce me to the woman who owned and bred them. Funny, that.
A while back Kate and I went through an, , Black Stallion / Arabian horse phase. It just so happened that our interest in equine actors and in Arabian horses intersected here:
Cass Ole actually wasn’t the only Arabian to play the The Black!
Another Arabian was used in the first movie, The Black Stallion — Fae Jur (Fadjur x La Fana) — and the #1 scene I can think of for him was the footage of The Black stomping on the snake on the island. He’s also the horse on the island that approached Alec Ramsey when the boy offered the seaweed, and he also appeared once toward the end of the film when there was a fight right before the race. Fae Jur was tail female to the Davenport mare *Urfah, thus an Saqlawi al ‘Abd.
The 1971 EAO stallion *El Mokhtar (Galal x Mogha) was one of the three stallions that played The Black in the second film, The Black Stallion Returns, and actually Walter Farley really liked this stallion for the role in the first film but at the time he was considered so valuable by the syndicate that brought him overseas from Egypt to the United State that he wasn’t even originally broke to ride, and thus the role went instead to Cass Ole. However, he was cast in the 2nd film and actually flown to North Africa for the production. Any time you saw a racing scene in the film, you were watching *El Mokhtar. Apparently the epic finish to the race in the film was the product of a real race in the sands! *El Mokhtar died in Africa during filming due to a twisted gut colic in 1983: he was just 12 years old. *El Mokhtar was tail female to Venus (KDV), thus a Hadban Inzihi.
The stallion Thee Cyclone (Thee Desperado x The Minuet), the mare Shaheer Njala (Raafeek x Met-Lus Baralay), and Sidi Exclusive (TR Scarlet Scorpion x Sidi Istasha) also both played The Black in the third movie, The Young Black Stallion (which is a whole can of worms regarding the parentage of The Black ). To quote Kate: “The movie was filmed on location in Namibia and South Africa, and starred Sidi Arabian Stud’s imported stallion Thee Cyclone, a son of Thee Desperado, as Shetan. Thee Cyclone had to be dyed black to play Shetan, as he was actually bay; the yearling Shetan was played by the grey colt Sidi Exclusive. The mare Shaheer Njala was used as a riding double for Thee Cyclone.” Thee Cylone was TF*El Dahma (APS) and thus a Dahman Shahwan, whereas Shaheer Njala and Sidi Exclusive were both tail female to the Crabbet mare Rodania.
And if you want to get more obscure, into the book canon…
According to the canon novel written by Walter himself (The Black Stallion Mystery), and not his son (The Young Black Stallion) The Black’s sire, Ziyada, is not a purebred Arabian horse (and therefore none of The Black’s offspring are asil, and therefore none of Ben Ishak’s horses from The Black are asil.) Ziyada is, I believe, a feminine word, and there is actually an Arabian mareline of Kuhalya/n al Ziyada, whose link from the desert to the West is found through Kuhailan Zaid, an asil stallion that was actually purchased for the Bolbona Stud by Bogdan Zientarski and Carl Raswan during their expedition to Arabia in 1931. I believe there is an earlier blog post on Kuhailan Zaid on this blog.
Both The Black Stallion Mystery and The Young Black Stallion give the name of the Black’s dam as Jinah al Tayr, “wings of the bird”, which probably comes from Raswan whom Walter Farley would almost certainly have read. (I suppose he could have also read Lady Anne…) It’s in Raswan’s “The Barb and the Jennet Horse,” and the relevant quote is below:
“The nomadic nations of the Barbary coast also submitted ot the conquest of the Moslem Arabs and their warrior clans were presented with stallions from the Sultan’s own stables. Special body guards were mounted on imported horses to escort royalty. These were called the Jennetat, because they were mounted on horses of the Jinah’t Tayr strain of the Kuhaylan, which translated means: “wings of the bird” in reference to their powerful shoulders.
So if you really want to try to match marbats, the Black’s dam at least is apparently Kuhaylan. Canonically (or, at least, in book canon), both the dam and the sire of The Black have ties to the Kuhailan/Kuhaylan strain.
Oh my, a chance to be unabashedly nerdy about the Black!
In addition to everything Moira has posted above, there’s also a quote from Lady Anne Blunt, which makes me wonder if Walter Farley ever read her books:
“His gallop, as I have said, is long and low, and faster in proportion to his height than that of any other breed. If one could conceive an Arabian seventeen hands high, he could not fail to leave the best horse in England behind him.”
Doesn’t this sound like the Black, a seventeen hand (mostly) Arabian?
(Not going to touch the magical celestial space stallion from the Horsehead Nebula, especially not the movie version, where he is a Friesian.)
Because EVERYTHING is a Friesian in Hollywood movieland *-rolls eyes-
Pretty much! Their first foray into Hollywood may have been Ladyhawke — at least it was the first time I’d seen film footage of a Friesian.
Ladyhawke, as far as I can tell, jumpstarted what has been 35 years of popularity for the use of a Friesian in film. Alexander the Great? On a Friesian. The Black Stallion’s mystical celestial space father/alien? Friesian. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Sword of Destiny, set in China during the Qing Dynasty in the 43rd year of the reign of the Emperor Qianlong? Bloody darn Friesian. And do NOT get me started on how the GoT show had Friesians as “Sandsteeds,”which were obviously analogous to Arabians or some other desert type.
…But I digress.
It was Karl May’s Kara Ben Nemsi & Rih for me that did the trick 🙂
Rare and Wonderful that the Movie inspired him..sad that the culture is not more fully involved with the breed we all Love so much. Still great to hear that a spark started from a source -a Book- that has brought many to see the Beloved arabian as a worthy pursuit…
My mare is from the same strain and tail mare as cass ole ferida she is the taproot mare to my mare and cass ole