09/23/2026
The dolphin who starred as Flipper was really a girl named Mitzi, and she lived in a lagoon on Grassy Key. 🐬
In 1958 a former fisherman named Milton Santini opened Santini's Porpoise School in the Middle Keys. He caught bottlenose dolphins in Florida Bay, blasted deeper pens into the coral rock shoreline, and with his wife Virginia trained them to perform. His star was Mitzi. Florida Memory's photographs from the 1960s show her leaping for crowds at the little school.
Ricou Browning was an underwater performer, the man inside the Gill-Man suit in Creature from the Black Lagoon. He later recalled coming home one day to find his children watching Lassie, and deciding to tell a story about a boy and a dolphin. He found his dolphin at Santini's. The movie Flipper, written from a story by Browning and Jack Cowden and produced by Ivan Tors, was released by MGM on August 14, 1963, and became a surprise hit, earning about $2.5 million. Mitzi played the title role, with Santini's school as her home base. 🎬
The NBC series that followed, from 1964 to 1967, was made farther north, and its Flipper was played by several other dolphins, mostly females named Susie, Kathy, Patty, Scotty and Sq**rt, plus a male called Clown for the tail walks. Generations of children grew up believing Flipper was one boy dolphin.
Mitzi died of heart failure in 1972, the same year Santini sold the school and the same year Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which ended the easy capture of wild dolphins from the sea. The site changed hands and purposes, and in 1984 it opened as the not-for-profit Dolphin Research Center. Mitzi is buried in the courtyard beneath a dolphin statue, and her plaque reads simply, the original Flipper, 1958 to 1972. 🌊
