King Kong 85
March 2, 2018
On March 2, 1933—85 years ago today—the cinematic heavyweight King Kong premiered at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall. One of the most famous monster movies in film history, King Kong then opened to much fanfare three weeks later at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. King Kong the giant ape—billed as the “eighth wonder of the world”—then proceeded to climb cinema screens across the country and around the world. The movie has captured audiences’ imaginations ever since, and it remains a classic adventure story and a masterpiece of animation and trick photography. King Kong was re-released numerous times, inspired a few sequels, and was remade in 1976 and 2005.
The title of the film is the name given to a giant ape called Kong who lives on remote Skull Island. An American film producer leads an expedition to capture the animal and return it to New York City to be put on exhibition. After violent confrontations on the island between the ape and the film crew, the Americans capture Kong and transport him to New York City. There he escapes and goes on a destructive rampage through the city.
King Kong is actually a variation of the fairy tale about Beauty and the Beast. The ape falls in love with a young woman who accompanies the expedition to Skull Island. On the island, Kong saves the woman from attacks by prehistoric animals. In New York, he kidnaps her and carries her to the top of the Empire State Building, where he is killed by fighter airplanes. The film producer in the movie observes, “It wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.”
In King Kong, Fay Wray played the young woman, and Robert Armstrong played the film producer. The co-directors were Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack. Willis H. O’Brien supervised the film’s highly praised special effects. King Kong was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress in 1991.
A sequel to King Kong, called Son of Kong, appeared in December 1993, and a similar motion picture, Mighty Joe Young, came out in 1949. Kong crossed the Pacific to Japan to take on another popular movie monster in 1962′s King Kong vs. Godzilla. Kong battled a robot giant ape and other monsters in the 1967 Japanese film King Kong Escapes. Returning to Hollywood, Kong rattled turnstiles again in the 1976 remake, King Kong, a film that featured the World Trade Center towers in place of the Empire State Building in the film’s climactic end scene. Few people remember the 1986 sequel, King Kong Lives, but 2005′s King Kong remake was another smash at the box office. Another sequel, Kong: Skull Island, appeared in 2017. A Godzilla vs. King Kong remake is in the works for 2020.