Five Monstrous Fun Facts About King Kong
Godzilla may have gotten first billing in latest Monsterverse entry, Godzilla vs. Kong, but Kong is our protagonist, and in many ways, it’s more so his movie. To celebrate “the eighth wonder of the world” and one true king, the 88-year-old beast, King Kong, we’re going all the way back to the film that captured everyone’s imagination, the 1933 RKO classic, King Kong. The film hits its 88th anniversary on April 7th, and despite its growing age, it continuous to maintain a majority of its magic. Come play with us as we dish out five monstrous fun facts about cinema’s OG movie monster!
The film was reverse engineered around its iconic ending.
The first image Merian C. Cooper had for the film was a giant ape on top of the world's tallest building, thwarting off airplanes. The idea for the film came to him in a dream he had about a giant gorilla terrorizing New York City. He woke up and immediately wrote it down with the intention of using it as a basis for a feature. He and co-creator Edgar Wallace then worked backwards to build a film around this incredible spectacle.
Part of what helped King Kong filmmakers Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack create the magically mythical world of Skull Island was their background in documentary film. The pair were essentially anthropologists that documented ancient cultures with their cameras. Their personal experience and feelings shaded and defined King Kong. In fact, when a pair of Komodo dragons (which both men viewed as an example of “the primitive spirit”) grew sick and died, Cooper felt their death was a direct result of human civilization itself. He used his personal reaction to the dragons’ death to enrich the ending of their film.
When thinking of most iconic representation of modern civilization, Cooper went back to his dream and the image of the monster on a skyscraper. He viewed the film’s use of the Empire State Building and airplanes (which at that point was still a pretty modern invention) as a symbol for the height of civilization and a nice symbolic foil for his monster.
Funny enough, it was Cooper and Schoedsack, the monster’s creators, who pilot the plane that guns him down, sending him falling to his demise.
Sound design ingenuity gave us that fierce roar.
To create King Kong’s roar, sound effects artist Murray Spivak went around recording various animals for inspiration. After recording several, Spivak slowed them all to half-speed to give each animal noise a prolonged, otherworldly rumble. However, it wasn’t until Spivak played a tiger roar in reverse against a lion’s roar running forward, which produced the uncanny howl we all know and love today. For Kong’s “love grunts,” Spivak didn’t turn to any animals noises; he just made those himself using his own voice. To create the T-Rex’s hiss, Spivak combined a puma scream he had recorded with a recording of high-compression air. Spivak’s methods would impact sound effects artists to come, like Jurassic Park’s Gary Rydstrom who would adopt Spivak’s approach of manipulating animal sounds to create BIG primordial sounds.
The film had a colossal opening weekend.
The film grossed $90,000 in its opening weekend, which was the biggest opening ever at that the time. This might not seem much to us nowadays; however, you’ve got to consider that tickets were only 25 cents in 1933 and adjust for inflation (which brings Kong’s opening haul to a staggering $1,820,866.15). Also, it’s worth noting that many viewers would pay their 25 cent admission and hang out, watching the film over and over at continuous showings, which kinda muddles a bit of Kong’s impact.
Despite the film’s strong opening weekend, it wouldn’t quite climb to the top of the highest grossing chart, but out of all the more successful films to come out that year, Kong would prove to have the more lasting legacy and cultural impact. The film’s success also contributed to lifting R.K.O. Pictures out from under the looming threat of bankruptcy. Without Kong, RKO wouldn’t have been able to give us Orson Welles monumental debut, Citizen Kane.
Kong has been linked to the Loch Ness Monster.
That’s right, we may have King Kong to thank for the myth of the Loch Ness Monster. In their 2013 book Abominable Science, authors Daniel Loxton and Donald Prothero posit that the UK release of King Kong, which dropped in the spring of 1933, led directly to the supposed sightings of the infamous sea monster in Loch Ness, Scotland. Interestingly enough, the first sightings of the alleged mythical creature occurred within six months of the Kong’s release. The witness accounts and blurred photos that came out also appeared to take inspiration from King Kong’s prehistoric water beast, a "meat-eating" Brontosaurus that attacks some humans on a raft.
It was the first ever re-released film.
The film was actually successfully re-issued around the globe on numerous occasions, in 1938, 1942, 1946, 1952 and 1956. In the 1938 re-release, several scenes involving excessive violence or sex were spliced out to comply with the Hays Code, which was implemented in 1934. Luckily, when Janus Films restored the film in 1971, they added many of these censored scenes back into the film; however, one deleted scene has never been found — and it was only ever publicly screened once in January of 1933.
This is the film’s infamous spider pit sequence, which depicted Kong shaking four sailors off a log bridge until they fall into a ravine and are graphically eaten alive by giant spiders. The scene caused such a stir that audiences either left or couldn’t stop taking about the grisly sequence, both of which disrupted the film. Merian C. Cooper said, "It stopped the picture cold, so the next day back at the studio, I took it out myself.”
The scene was never shown again, and there are no known copies of the missing reel (in fact, it was common practice to just burn cut footage in those days, which is presumably what happened); however, filmmaker Peter Jackson recreated it for the DVD release of his 2005 remake. Jackson used the traditional stop-motion effects from the time to rebuild the scene, and he even used one of the film’s original triceratops models (which he personally owns) in his recreation of the sequence, which you can check out below:
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