With the recent box office success of Legendary Pictures’ Monsterverse franchise, by far the biggest breakout star has been King Kong, arguably even outshining Godzilla in their shared films.
Also known simply as Kong, the giant gorilla has not had the same presence in modern pop culture as its lizard rival until recently, with far less media representation. However, this isn’t to discredit Kong’s legacy, the King of Beasts is still one of the most enduring and iconic movie monsters of all time, with a nearly 100 year history.
Debuting in 1933, the first King Kong film was the brainchild of Merian C. Cooper, a filmmaker, explorer and former wartime aviator who had a fascination with apes, especially gorillas, which were not very well known animals at the time. While the resulting film would be well known decades later for its pioneering stop motion animation, the initial idea was to pit a real gorilla against a komodo dragon, another recently discovered exotic animal of the time.
Special effects
Filming real life animals and pretending they were giant bloodthirsty monsters through special effects was a common genre of monster movie in that period of filmmaking, nowadays called slurpasaur movies, but the logistics behind getting a real life gorilla and komodo dragon together for filming in Africa was near impossible during the Great Depression.
Instead, Cooper would coopt an existing film project that was planned as a remake or sequel to the 1925 adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World. The similarities are obvious in retrospect, with a group of people traveling to a mysterious island inhabited by dinosaurs, and bringing one back to civilization.
The two films even have the same stop motion animator, Willis O’Brian, a pioneer in the field whose works would directly inspire animators today. Cooper’s plans for a gorilla flick joined with the groundwork already in place, coming up with the idea of a giant gorilla to fight equally enormous dinosaurs, all brought to life through special effects and stop motion. And the rest was history, with King Kong (1933) becoming one of the biggest movie spectacles of all time.
Son of Kong
Despite the initial explosive success of the first film, any attempts at a franchise or adaptations by other studios largely fell flat. A direct sequel to the first film, called Son of Kong, was released the same year as the original and had no ambitions of surpassing it, quickly fading into obscurity after a modest success in theatres.
Another proper depiction of Kong wouldn’t happen for decades, until Toho repurposed a concept by the original King Kong animator Willis O’Brian which had Kong fight Frankenstein’s monster. Toho would swap out the latter for Godzilla, and the resulting film King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) would quickly become the second highest grossing film in Japan at that point, and was responsible for reviving the Godzilla franchise from its own spell of dormancy.
But while the King of Monsters would go on to enjoy sporadic franchise success, the King of Beasts would struggle to find its footing, with just a few obscure movies until 2005, not helped by the legal battles between the original owners, RKO, the creator Merian Cooper, and Universal Pictures.
Despite the rocky cinematic history, Kong would maintain a strong presence in pop culture with just the influence of that first masterpiece film. King Kong is a household name around the world, and would be referenced and parodied in popular media for decades.
Now, with the success of the Monsterverse movies, Kong is back in the mainstream at the forefront of modern pop culture, and with luck, would continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
