Kong Kongson

Recently I watched the original King Kong and its less celebrated sequel, the swiftly-made and execrable Son of Kong. The latter is poor all round, but for me it was the moment when Kong Jr, having already scratched his head to express puzzlement at what’s happening around him, looks straight at the camera and shrugs in a comedy fashion, that had me thinking “This is not the stuff of which legacies are made”. Not the least of the sequel’s problems is that there’s considerably less scope for amazement. “You’ll believe that an ape can be… a bit bigger than a human.” You’ve no doubt got your own favourite Worst Sequel nominations, but this one is definitely up there.

Anyway, it was something in the original that suddenly bothered me. Not the fact that the natives apparently use chloroform to drug Fay Wray, although that’s also problematic. They’re meant to be a tribe that has slipped back from the more advanced civilisation that built the giant wall that protects them from Kong, yet somehow they have chloroform? Oh, okay, it’s a mixture of herbs that has the same effect, doubtless concocted by their wilier ancestors, and they happened to keep the recipe. Personally I’d have thought their ancestors would have been kept busy enough with beta-testing their giant wall designs.

And it’s their final choice of design that puzzles me. Problem: enormous rampaging monkey. Solution: enormous wall to keep him out. A simple formula. So which genius suggested adding an enormous wooden door the exact size of the giant monkey? Was this an administrative error? Or some young architect who hoped to make his mark with a bold and outrageous design? “No, look, hear me out…”



One google later: it turns out, of course, that this question has been asked before. And the answer is that the wall and its gates were actually built as part of the Temple of Jerusalem for Cecil B DeMille’s King of Kings seven years earlier. (Plus, the answer to a question I hadn’t even formulated: the reason Kong appears to have muscles rippling on his head all the time is that the model was made of rabbit fur, which the technicians kept disturbing every time they moved the model.)