Why is Donkey Kong named "Donkey" Kong

lol, I didn't know that.

I thought they wanted "Stupid Monkey" and they mistranslated Stupid->Donkey and Monkey->Kong ...

Had they named him stupid kong, I have a feeling the series would have gone in a completely different direction

I heard it was "stubborn monkey." Seems this myth has several variations...

yes, now that erik says it, it was "stubborn monkey" if I remember correctly...which changed to "donkey kong" in translation. But yes...it would certainly be different if the game was called stupid kong or stubborn monkey or anything but Donkey Kong.

There seems to be no consensus, here's what wikipedia says. Yamauchi wanted to primarily target the North American market, so he mandated that the game be given an English title. Miyamoto decided to name the game for the ape, whom he felt to be the strongest character. The story of exactly how Miyamoto came up with the name Donkey Kong varies. A popular urban myth says that the name was originally meant to be Monkey Kong but was misspelled or misinterpreted due to a blurred fax or bad telephone connection. Another story claims that Miyamoto looked in a Japanese-English dictionary for something that would mean stubborn gorilla or that Donkey was meant to convey silly and that Kong was common Japanese slang for gorilla. A rival claim is that he worked with Nintendo's export manager to come up with the title, and that Donkey was meant to represent stupid and goofy. They probably could have named it anything like Jackass Kong or maybe Watermelon Kong and it still would have had people waiting to shove quarters into the machine.

Anyone else think "Stupid Kong" would have been an appropriate name for any of the characters introduced in DK64? Especially Lanky Kong... that guy pissed me off.