"My Jurisdiction Only Extends to His Navel...": Kong vs. Bob [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 10]

At every stage of my life, Bob Newhart has been there. First with seeing him on numerous variety and talk shows in my youngest days; his years on his own sitcoms: The Bob Newhart Show, Newhart, and finally, Bob (all of which I consumed heartily, even the last one); appearances in films as diverse as Catch-22, The Rescuers, Elf, and Horrible Bosses; acclaimed appearances on shows like ER, The Simpsons, and Desperate Housewives; and even now when he is one of the few actors that could convince me to watch an episode of The Big Bang Theory (sorry, like most of Chuck Lorre's shows, I find the humor forced and too obvious). But no matter what type of show or film, Bob has been there throughout my life, his gentle (though often agitated) take on low-boiling comedy keeping me amused through even the hardest of times.

It is my belief that his assumed gentleness and quiet nature has served to cause the world to grow complacent about Bob Newhart. We came to just accept him too much. I feel that Newhart is a monumentally underrated performer, not just on television and in film, but especially in his stand-up comedy years early on in his career. It is easy to forget, but Newhart was the very first comedian to top the Billboard charts with a stand-up comedy album. 

This happened in 1960, when he released The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, a landmark in comedy, which not only won the Album of the Year award at the 1961 Grammy ceremony, but also earned Newhart a Best New Artist award. It was the only time that a comedian (or at least an intentional comedian) has won Best New Artist, and it was also the first time a comedian won Album of the Year (though impressionist Vaughn Meader would win Album of the Year two years later with a parody LP of the Kennedy clan called The First Family. Coincidentally, Newhart starred in a film called First Family, also about a presidential family in the White House but no relation to this material, in 1980. And yes, I saw that film in a theatre.)

The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart established the comic's simple but astoundingly effective persona: that of a man, often a cog or subordinate in somebody's machine somewhere, who finds himself in an odd situation, and then has to explain his actions over the telephone with the unseen and unheard receiver of his call (sometimes even Abraham Lincoln, years before the telephone was invented). Bob would usually begin with a set-up of the situation, and if you have ever heard a comedian say, or even mock, a sentence like, "And I think it might go something like this...," such a line was likely inspired by Newhart's comedy.

This formula worked remarkably well for Newhart throughout the sixties. While his first album was still on the charts, he released The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back, and the two albums sat at #1 and #2 on Billboard at the same time. He won another Grammy (this time for Comedy Performance - Spoken Word). And then, throughout the Sixties, he continued to release album after album.

But while I saw Newhart perform many times on TV in my youth, I did not hear any of his comedy albums until I was well into my teens. I was barely cognizant of this particular stage of his career, and I came upon his stand-up material in the same manner that I discovered most of my favorite bands: by accident. A friend's house, in fact, where I happened upon a couple of old LPs of his. They were not in the best shape, but my friend had listened to them hundreds of times, according to how much he used to recite sections of Newhart's routines to me in our spare time. (This was roughly the same manner in which I discovered most of the early Bill Cosby stand-up albums, but the less said about that for the moment, the better. I will reflect upon it in time.)

And there was, naturally for me, one routine that stood out above the rest amongst the tracks that my (then) friend would play for me. It was called King Kong (Something Like This). If ever there was a comedy routine -- perhaps even more so than Abbott and Costello's famous Who's on First? bit -- that was squarely within my comic wheelhouse, it was this one. The track appears on Newhart's 1965 album, The Windmills Are Weakening, and is a perfect summation of the Newhart style: succinct, precise, and with the absurdist details sold by Newhart's perfectly timed stammer and responses, imparting to the listener that the oddball situation -- that of a newly hired night watchman dealing with the arrival of King Kong on the Empire State Building -- was very real indeed.

Here is the track:

If this is not your type of stand-up comedy, I do not apologize for making you listen to it. Newhart's style, much like his sitcom persona, is measured and methodical, and serves the strangest lines up with absurdist glee. This is a comic style that has served him well in his late '80s, where he is still making comedy tours today.

And with Newhart, it all comes down to precise details, that not only comment on the situation and the participants, but on the underlying fabric of the American landscape. One of my favorite bits in this routine is how the unheard boss nags the new Empire State Building guard to strictly follow company procedure even while faced with what has to be the most ridiculous story he has ever been told:

"I know how you like the new men to think on their feet, so I went to the broom closet and I got out a broom, without signing out a requisition on it....I will tomorrow, yes sir..."

Of course, the boss cannot help but to comment on the guard's efforts, but naturally, once again, the company's rules forbid such actions from being truly successful:

"Did I try swatting him in the face with it? Well, I was going to take the elevator up to his head, but my jurisdiction only extends to his navel..."

And once more, the boss' main concern is not so much the safety of the guard or the girl in the ape's clutches or the residents of the building, but the very reputation of the place:

"Well, sir... the first thing I did was I filled out a report on it. Well, I don't want to give the building a bad name either, sir, but I doubt very much if we can cover it up, sir. The planes are shooting at him, and people are going to come to work in the morning and some of them are going to notice the ape in the street and the broken window, and they will start putting two and two together."

The payoff comes with a double gag. The first is the boss' asking of a truly goofy question and the guard's response: 

"I doubt very much if he signed the book downstairs."

And then finally, the guard's idea to coax King Kong away from the Empire State Building:

"You don't care what I do. Just get the ape off the building. Well, I came up with one idea. I thought maybe I could smear the Chrysler Building with bananas..."

Brilliant...

Pull the String! No, Not Bela's String... King Kong's! [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 9]

[This is the ninth part of an ongoing (and resurrected) series called The Ballad of Kong. To read the previous parts, start with Pt. 1 from December 2005.]

In once again picking up my multi-part memory slideshow regarding the early years of King Kong's influence in my life, I have encased in amber within my stupid brain a prehistoric notion of Kong that far precedes any viewing of a Kong film or video, or any reading of a book or magazine on monsters, or any sneakily clandestine ogling of Jessica Lange on Topps trading cards. It is a vivid memory of my playing with a King Kong puppet as a small child. Not just a generic, stuffed gorilla that some money-grubbing opportunist says is King Kong, but rather an actual merchandising tie-in to a late 1960s television cartoon that I most certainly have viewed on Saturday morning television when I was a child, but I truly have no actual recollection of the show. I only remember the toy.

But the toy was not played with in Alaska, where we lived for most of my childhood. I remember playing with the puppet, but I did not possess the thing. I am a tad fuzzy on the details from here on out, but I do dredge up a picture of Kong belonging to a cousin, or a friend of a cousin, in Wisconsin in the early '70s. The locale might even be my Granny's house. I do have slight memories of playing at other houses in Wisconsin in that period, but my memory of the Kong puppet incident is set somewhere between the organ and the big stone fireplace setting at Granny's wonderful house. This leads me to believe that the Kong puppet might have belonged to a cousin. 

Since I still possess a great many of the toys that I owned in my youth, I find it hard to believe that it belonged to my brother Mark or I, though that is not out of the question. Perhaps it was a toy purchased but left behind in the trip before we headed back to Alaska? It's sad if it is so, because that puppet is worth a mint now.

The King Kong Talking Hand Puppet, sold by Mattel, was bright blue and yellow in color, while his face was made of a hard rubber. Why he was blue and yellow doesn't make sense to me since in every picture that I see from the TV series, Kong is clearly black or blackish brown in coloration, with a lighter tannish color on his underside. The puppet had a string imbedded in the cloth comprising the sleeve for one's hand. A steady, long tug of this string (using what the box calls a "Chatty-Ring," would cause Kong to say many assorted phrases -- such as "I'll swat that airplane! or "Hang on! Here we go!" or "Let's leapfrog over a mountain!" Bobby's squeaky kid voice (far squeakier than in the cartoon, where he seems a bit older) also comes out of the puppet, which is a big strange sounding if Bobby is no longer attached to the toy (he comes buttoned on Kong's arm, but can be easily removed). For Kong himself, a thunderous voice emanates from deep within the bowels of the plush simian, a sound which must have passed for crystalline clarity in those days but has that slight echo that seems to come with most pull-string toys. [Note: What Kong spoke, or rather, roared is beyond my memory, and is entirely unimportant to that memory. I have relied on the internet for that information.] The Kong that I actually grew to love did not speak somewhat like a human, and it is proper that my earliest memory of the creature is similarly bound in a lack of English.

The show that the puppet was based on was called The King Kong Show, and ran for three seasons starting in fall of 1966. I would have just turned two when it came on the air, and five when it went off, so I fell into the target audience of the show eventually in that span. If indeed I had seen the show as a child, I am not sure if I would have made the connection between the show and the puppet, since the colors of the different Kongs are so different from each other. And yet, the puppet did come with a boy character named Bobby Bond, whom I do not recollect in my memories of the puppet, and he is the same boy who has adventures with Kong in the cartoon show. The other confusing thing about the talking puppet is that Kong does not actually talk in the show (at least the few episodes I have found online). He grunts and makes other sounds back to Bobby and the other humans who converse with him, but does not actually talk as we do. 

If I would have remembered anything about this cartoon from my childhood, it would have been the theme song. But even here, my memory is negligent. I was able to find people singing the song on Youtube, and even a clip or two of the song with its cartoon opening, and it is pretty catchy. Here are the lyrics...

"King Kong!
You know the name of
King Kong!
You know the fame of
King Kong!
Ten times as big as a man!

Throughout the land,
you've heard about this wonder!
Listen closely and
you will hear the thunder
of this mighty ape,
and he's a friend of man!
So goes the legend...
the legend of..

King Kong!
You know the name of
King Kong!
You know the fame of
King Kong!
Ten times as big as a man!

One day, a boy
too young to know the danger,
Made a friend of
this giant fearsome creature,
and the life they led
on their island home
became a legend...
the legend of . . .

King Kong!
You know the name of
King Kong!
You know the fame of
King Kong!
Ten times as big as a man!"

One other note... The King Kong Show was produced by Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass, whom you may know better as the creators of such stop-motion animated specials as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and The Year without a Santa Claus. They co-produced a feature film with Toho (the studio of Godzilla and his pals) in 1967 called King Kong Escapes [Kingu Kongu no Gyakushū]. The film had its roots in this show, which does have an episode featuring a battle between Kong and a mechanized double, a plotline directly used in the film version. I saw King Kong Escapes as a teenager, but had no idea of the connection with the older cartoon show. I just thought it was a direct sequel to 1962's King Kong vs. Godzilla, also co-produced by Toho. From the beginning, though, it was easy even then to tell the similarities in design between the robot Kong in the film and many other characters designed for Rankin-Bass productions, of which I was a fanatic since a wee child.

Getting back to the King Kong Talking Hand Puppet, this memory may explain why I have been so drawn to puppets over my lifetime, even becoming a puppeteer for many, many years within the Moorish circus my friends and I performed in annually at our local renaissance faire. I still own many, many puppets in my personal toy collection, retain a perfectly happy relationship with all things Muppet even nearing middle age, and am fascinated anytime that I find old puppets in antique stores and even new ones in toy shops. If I had indeed owned the King Kong Talking Hand Puppet when I was a kid vacationing in Wisconsin, then it is a very sad thing that it didn't survive the transition back to Alaska.

So it had to be an accident if it was mine. I would have never parted with it willingly. Not King Kong. A boy and his gorilla need to be together.

RTJ

*****

To see an episode from The King Kong Show for yourself, check this out...

And to see the King Kong Talking Hand Puppet talk, watch this video...

[Editor's Note: The pictures in this piece were found on a French King Kong fan forum -- http://king-kong.fansforum.info/t193-THE-KING-KONG-SHOW.htm -- and also on Ebay, where a King Kong Talking Hand Puppet (or even the stuffed doll that looks very similar) in fine condition will run you a few hundred dollars. So it is very doubtful I will ever get one of my own. But if I ever win any size portion of the lottery, that puppet is mine.]

Yeah, I Sat Through It Again: A*P*E (1976)

A*P*E (1976)
Director: Paul J. Leder
TC4P Rating: 2/9

"Imagine. Almost 36 feet tall... wow..." - Freighter mate on ship transporting A*P*E across the ocean at start of film.

You are going to run into this film on just about any "So Bad You've Gotta See It!"-type of site or book... and yeah, it is... and yeah, you gotta see it. Its fecundity is only matched by its stupidity, but in its tattered, zipper-up-the-back way, its actually quite clever. But only if director Paul Leder actually meant the film to be this bad. Could there be a chance that this chintzy, decrepit South Korean production is actually the most brilliant spoof in the history of movies? A film that not only mocks giant ape movies and current movie trends, but does it in the way that most common citizens "think" of or expect giant ape movies to be? Is the entire film a complete put on, and to a large degree, a cynical attempt to flip off the audience (which the big simian does at one point, though story-wise, he is actually flipping off the attacking military helicopters) and separate you from your money at the same time?

Hard to tell, but I'm banking on it just being a dumb, bad example of low-budget inept filmmaking. Not just a stumbling attempt to remake King Kong (and definitely tied to the fact that Dino de Laurentiis was legally filming his own remake around the same time for release in the same year), all the while mocking the big guy within the film to show the distance between the two apes, A*P*E also takes aim at a couple of other cultural phenomenons of the 1970s.

In the opening sequence of the film, after the ape (who is never given a proper nickname in the course of its action -- a supreme mistake on the part of Leder -- ALWAYS name your monster...) tears apart the bathtub-grade ocean liner in which he is being transported from his unseen and unremarked upon island home, the ape then immediately, without any buildup or reason, battles a giant shark to the death. Well, it would be "to the death", but the giant shark had clearly been dead long before the cameras started rolling, and the guy in the ape-suit has to do a lot of splashing and thrashing about with the shark's body in the shallow waters in which he is standing to make us believe even for a second that water is still flowing through the shark's gills, thus allowing the fish to breathe. Which the ape-suit actor absolutely fails at accomplishing. But there, in the first two minutes of the movie, Leder has not only invoked the imagery of King Kong in the viewers' minds, but has also included Jaws, of which there was still quite a mania in the media at the time.

The other cultural reference? This is never mentioned -- at least, I have yet to run across it -- but while many sites (including IMDB) note the title as Ape, every video copy I have ever run across (and every film guide as well) has given the film's proper name as A*P*E. Since the film was made (and takes place) in South Korea, to me it seems to be quite obvious that the title is a reference to one of the biggest TV shows of the era (or any era, for that matter): M*A*S*H, the show (and book and movie) with military stars between the letters of its titular acronym and which also took place in Korea. If, indeed, this is intentional and meant subliminally, then it is by far the most subtle thing that Mr. Leder ever attempted in his career.

On top of title concerns and clumsy film mash-ups, Leder also chose to make the film in that cherished format which gets a resurgence now and then, especially when filmmakers are exceedingly desperate for attention: 3-D. Now, I love 3-D, but for much of mankind, it's more the idea of 3-D that is so agreeable, not necessarily the execution. I have yet to see this film in 3-D, but it is easy to see the bits that are supposed to thrill you in this manner. Arrows, helicopters... all manner of effluvia come flying at the screen and are meant to rock you back in your seat.

And speaking of rock... there is the finale of the film where the ape engages the army in a massive battle, and the monstrous ape flings a series of rocks down from his mountaintop stand. Yes, there are visible wires on the rocks as they glide not so smoothly towards the camera, just as there are visible wires on just about every flying thing in this movie. But the beautiful part is that Leder (who also edited the film) uses the exact same gliding rock shot three times in a row! Talk about filmmaking economy! Best of all are the shots of the soldiers walking straight out at the audience, stabbing their rifles in your face over and over again. This makes little sense unless the audience is supposed to have the ape's viewpoint, and if they did, they would be looking down on the soldiers. In other words... brilliance.

I could literally fill this blog for days remarking on the problems with size and scale in this film. Yes, one can imagine he is "almost 36 feet tall... wow...", but not when he is suddenly towering over 20-story tall buildings. But this film is not about such minor concerns. It's about worldly matters and heartfelt emotions. When the ape meets his fate at the hands of the cruel military, the third-rate Fay Wray actress character (played by a pre-Growing Pains Joanna Barnes, known here as "DeVarona") mentions sadly that "It's just too big for a small world like ours."

Instead, I'd like to yet again invoke the words of the freighter mate, who followed up his "wow..." remark with this one of stunned surprise when A*P*E escapes the freighter:

"Oh... shit..."

RTJ

My Favorite Films of 2005: Not Quite a "Best of"...

I don't watch films the way everyone else does. No two people watch films the same way. Everyone brings to the theatre all of the knowledge and pain and memories and weightiness of their lives, and when they view a film, all of this baggage ricochets around the cargo holds in their brains as they process the imagery before them. Their opinion will depend entirely on their previous life experiences. Some people don't like to think at all when they go to the movies, and would like to deny this behavior, but they are wrong. All forms of art, including film, are dependent upon the understanding and opinion of the observer, and that opinion is formed by the individual's personality, which, in turn, is forged by their life experience. Because of this, no two people agree about everything.

Jen and I don't agree on every film. We agree on a lot of them, but not all, and we sometimes agree but for entirely different reasons. I know that some of my favorite films of the year are hers, too; but not all of them. Since we are unlikely to get her to post a list of her favorite films of the year, this means that you, dear reader, are left with my humble list. You may not agree with all of them, and if you don't, feel free to comment. I will listen to your opinion, as long as it is reasonable, but my list is not changing. Unless I forgot something...

In alphabetical order, since I don't like numbered lists, are my choices:

BATMAN BEGINS - Christian Bale and Christopher Doyle give me renewed hope for the franchise containing my favorite comic book character of all time. And by this, I mean Bat-Mite... Great villains, gloomy and sometimes scary atmospherics, the right Bruce/Batman (finally), and Michael Caine's perfect Alfred sum up the experience: sublime. Still can't buy Katie Holmes as a D.A., unless it means "Dumb Ass," but you can't have everything and she's cute. Comic book movies are supposed to leave you wanting more, but this is a case where it is completely warranted. I am almost literally drooling over the possibilities that this series could yield up on the screen; unfortunately, wrongheaded rumors are driving me crazy almost daily, and I have had to cut off my pipeline of these mumblings. I will simply wait, be patient, and watch this film endlessly for the next three years. Hope the disc holds up...

CAPOTE - Read many of Capote's works growing up; seen Capote in a lot of interviews and a couple of movies, too. Still not prepared for the voice that Phillip Seymour Hoffman brought to the role. (I don't mean his literal "voice", but that is terrific, too; it is far more than mere impersonation.) A mind-blowing, painful performance, but everyone in this film gives one, including Catherine Keener, justly nominated for playing Capote peer and assistant Harper Lee. But Hoffman is the real show, and he proves this throughout, especially in the later prison scenes where his guilt slowly eats away at him.

THE 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN - The funniest film of the year, and the second most romantic on my list ( has that title, but only by the narrowest of margins. (Brokeback Mountain is probably the deepest and most painful romance story, and it is very good, but it is not on my list because it has little second viewing power over me.) It seems at first, like the similarly wacky Wedding Crashers, to be just a gross-out guy's movie, but like that other swell comedy, this one is really a romantic comedy in disguise. I just liked this one a bit more than Crashers. Virgin never downplays Steve Carell's geekiness, but neither does it allow him to become the butt of the joke, either. His geek is an engaging, cheer-worthy hero; likewise, a very sexy Catherine Keener plays the hell out of her MILF role. This is the sort of film that could make the world safe for R-rated comedies again.

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK - Would have been my favorite film of the year if I hadn't already been entranced by the Cronenberg flick below. I grew up with a tape of Edward R. Murrow's London recordings, and they fascinated me as I listened to them at night before bedtime on countless occasions. (The cadences of his voice still ring as very fresh in my mind.) Having read a couple biographies of the man, and being ashamed of our government's behavior in not just the McCarthy era, and fully agreeing with the ties that director George Clooney is making to our current corrupt administration and gutless news media, I might seem like I am a ready-made target audience for this film. And you would be right on all counts, but you can also throw in that I am a sucker for black-and-white films, too. Guilty as charged.

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE - David Cronenberg knocks one of the park, and it's a tape measure shot. That this film is not up for Best Picture, and that D.C. won't be riding home with the Best Director award under his arm are vicious slaps in his face from the Academy. As much as Capote begins with Murder in the Heartland, this film internalizes that concept to the point that the protagonist, played with surface-bubbling intensity by a stellar Viggo Mortensen in the best role he will ever get, doesn't either know, remember or wish to remember that he was once Murder's most adept spokesman. Cronenberg has always been about mankind's evolution into a sleeker, crueler beast; here the New Flesh is grown on the inside, and growling and waiting for its call back to action.

KING KONG - No surprise here. Peter Jackson pulled off the impossible: impossible for anyone else but him, that is... His new Kong will now live happily in my mind next to the 1933 original, not so much as a remake as much as it is a re-visioning. It is not designed to wipe out the memory of its older cousin, but merely to complement it (except for that stupid running down the mountain with the dinosaurs scene). And Naomi Watts? Yet again, robbed of Oscar glory...

SERENITY - This one saddens me, because no one went to it, even with all of the publicity surrounding its revival and release. This is exactly the sort of film that all of the Star Wars geeks have been wanting out of Lucas for the last 20-some years, and the critics loved it almost to unanimous acclaim, and then it shows up... and NO ONE FUCKING GOES TO IT!!! Screw you, American audiences!!! Hope you enjoyed Flightplan in its second week, assholes, because you certainly helped that far lesser movie beat out Serenity on its premiere weekend. I still haven't seen if Serenity has been released in the Pacific Rim areas, because I suspect it will do pretty well there, but the damage is done. The franchise has probably been killed off for good, and if there were a couple of other films to come, they are most likely over now. Serenity is what the original Star Wars would have been if it had made now. So, go ahead and cry that no one makes great sci-fi anymore, because you freakin' missed it...

SIN CITY - Brilliant. Savage. Disgusting. Hilarious. Heartbreaking. Gorgeous. I haven't bought the DVD yet (much like Kill Bill, because I was waiting for a Special Edition, which has now come out for this film but not the Tarantino epic), but when I soon do, I know I am going to watch it about a trillion times over. The acting by the cast is nervy and fun, even Jessica Alba (who is proving to at least be a special effect of her own), and is even better considering just how little the actors had to interact with in filming it. More so than any of the latter Star Wars flicks, this is the film that proves that digital filmmaking can push films in general into exciting new directions. It's not the tools, George, it's how you use them... Robert Rodriguez can make great films, not just fun action films; this film is the proof. And welcome back to Mickey Rourke, whose role of Marv (thanks, Mr. Lowe -- see comments box for proof of my idiocy) went unrewarded by Academic mention. Just another place where they are dead wrong... Kill 'em all, Marv...

WALLACE AND GROMIT IN THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT - I called The 40 Year Old Virgin the funniest film of the year, which I stand by, but this one sent me into equally dangerous fits of laughter, as well. I haven't seen Howl's Moving Castle yet (a horrible error in timing on my part), but I would give this film the Oscar for Animated Feature simply because Miyazaki already has one (though he should get an Honorary one for each and every film he has ever made). Of course, Nick Park already has three Oscars for animated shorts, so call it a toss-up... just like the bunnies flying about inside the vacuum tube in this film. The film is just too much fun to believe. It's a shame that it will always be labeled a "children's" film... most of the children that I know don't deserve the honor.

That's the list, folks. There are many stragglers that I haven't seen yet, like Broken Flowers, North Country and The Aristocrats, so my list is always up for revision. If there is, you know where to find it. It is only an accident that there are ten films on the list; it could easily hold twenty or more if I felt like sitting here and making it that long. And also if more films deserved it. It's called "The Best Films of the Year 2005" not "All of the Films of the Year 2005". You gotta stop somewhere, but I could add a couple more when all is said and done.

See you at the Oscars...

Well, What'dya Know! A Little Kong! [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 8]

[Kong crazy? Read Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 3, Pt. 4, Pt. 5, Pt. 6 and Pt. 7 too!]

My copy on VHS.

The general consensus regarding sequels is that they are invariably disappointing. The Empire Strikes Back and The Godfather Part 2 are generally considered by most critics of note as being those rare exceptions, actually not just equaling their progenitors, but also slyly improving on their respective formulae in many ways.

Such is not the case with The Son of Kong, the quickie buck-grabber that RKO squatted out late in 1933 after Baby Kong's Big Daddy took the world for the biggest cinematic thrill ride yet seen at that point in history. It rides the usual course of sequels, especially those that attempt to follow the successful first film too quickly to grab those too appealing consumer dollars. The original King Kong took a couple years to plan and produce, so it is not surprising that a followup jammed into theatres only a few months later was not going to fulfill the promise of the first one.

The only real problem with this go-around is that The Son of Kong is just not King Kong. That's it. There is nothing overtly terrible about the film. It has the same producers, the same special effects team, and much of the same crew. The pedigree is the same, but The Son of Kong simply fails to fill the insanely huge footprints that were left in its predecessor's wake. The film itself is exactly a half hour shorter than King Kong, and because of this brevity, along with the slow build getting back to Skull Island, the main characters, and the viewers, are practically off the island as quickly as they arrived on it. And not by choice, as the film also leads to a sad and memorable ending, but one which shows off the cheapness with which the project was approached from the beginning. Producer and Kong co-creator Merian C. Cooper had little input in the production whatsoever, leaving the work almost solely to original co-director Ernest B. Schoedsack and stop-motion wizard Willis O'Brien, and with a much smaller budget to boot.

What is right with the film? The expected elements are there: Robert Armstrong is back as a now remorseful Carl Denham, finally taking the blame on himself for the elder Kong's death, as he should. (C'mon, Carl! I thought "'twas Beauty killed the Beast!" You really must have been in denial at the end of King Kong.) O'Brien's effects work is still impressive, if a bit short-cutted in a few scenes due to budget and time restrictions; Frank Reicher makes a welcome return as the loyal Captain Englehorn; and Victor Wong also shows up again as Charlie the Chinese cook, in an expanded role this time, with a good amount of fractured dialogue that should create expectedly nervous results for the modern viewer.

Due to a lack of Fay Wray, the Betty Boop-ish Helen Mack fills in as the cutie pie ingenue, who this time only has to befriend a much smaller (just twelve ft.) albino "baby" gorilla who is the supposed progeny of Kong. Where's is Kong's original intended mate in this film? Was Ann Darrow simply a fling, or are there nine months of post-NYC "outtakes" hidden somewhere? Mack also has to play love interest to Denham, something that wasn't even a consideration with Wray in the original film. The romance between Mack and Armstrong, though, is kept low-key and sweet, and adds to the film's aura of being a mere child's entertainment. Such a mood is in the same tone as the violence on the island, where the fights between the young Kong Jr. and Skull Island's monstrous denizens is quite as savage as the battles his father engaged in for the original.

The Son of Kong does have considerable, early '30s atmosphere, and for a good while in my youth, this was enough to convince me of its worthiness as a film. The low-rent vaudeville scenes at the beginning of the film almost seem like they were cut out of Freaks (which is a plus), and the murderous drunkard bastard of a villain is perfectly hissable and deserves his fate. While there is much less screen time, the battle scenes between little Kong and his fellow stop-motion opponents come one right after the other, which means the film moves pretty quickly and well through its final two-thirds. All of this appealed to me greatly in the summer of '77 when I first saw The Son of Kong as part of that afternoon monster matinee slot that I tuned into every weekday. Thanks to Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine, I knew of the existence of The Son of Kong, but never thought I would get a chance to see it. Overall, the film is not a bad entertainment at all, and I quite like it.

It is just not Kong. No matter how many times it is attempted by various parties to equal that original film, or how they try to modernize the effects, costumes, acting, and everything, they all fail to match it. While I greatly enjoyed the new Peter Jackson version, and it has much that is of a high excellence, it is still a remake. While I was watching it, and even while loving most of what I was seeing, I was always aware that my feelings in watching it would be the same as when I watch The Son of Kong. That is, there would always be a sense that, as soon as I finished watching this other version, that I would probably have to return to the original to capture that full feeling when I saw it as a kid.

The Ballad of Kong is over... for now.

My Corns Always Hurt When They're Near A Monster! [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 7]

[Want more Kong? Read Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 3, Pt. 4, Pt. 5, and Pt. 6 first!]

Let's get this straight right from the beginning: Even in a flat-out test of pure strength, Godzilla is going to nail King Kong to the wall. Godzilla, even in his clownish hero persona of the late '60s-early '70s, is still going to clean the clock with the mighty Kong. Godzilla, even at the lowest estimates of his height (say around 200') is still several times bigger than the true Kong, who ranges from 25 to 50 feet, depending on the scene in which he appears.

Remember, Godzilla is sung about in the theme song to the '70s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series as being "40 stories high". Using ten feet as an average for a story in a building, that's 400 feet tall right there, people. Even at half that size, Godzilla can easily step on Kong and then scrape him off his foot onto Mt. Fuji, if he chose, and I haven't even begun to factor in his radioactive breath, which is far more effective in his current incarnation. [Editor's note: "current incarnation" referred to his status as of 2005. The most recent Godzilla film was Godzilla: Final Wars, where the Big G full-on blasts the American 'Zilla from 1998 into the Sydney Opera House in about 30 seconds of screen time. In that film, Godzilla kicked major ass.]

But, the Kong that Toho rented from RKO in the '60s was a different breed of cat... er, ape. He suddenly equaled Big G in height and strength, and mostly shrugged off the fiery blasts from the Japanese King of the Monsters. (Kong's arm catches on fire briefly at one point, which seems to bother him, but then he picks up the fight again.) I was shocked by this behavior when I saw the film not long after first watching the original Kong fall off the Empire State Building. In my head, Kong was dead, and then suddenly there was this ill-suited, scruffy imposter calling himself King Kong and fighting a giant octopod on a South Seas island, and eventually careening in and out of battles with the Big Green Guy around Tokyo. Even then, I noticed the decided lack of quality in the Toho version when measured against the RKO classic, and was especially disappointed in the use of the standard man-in-a-suit for Kong, rather than the far more impressive use of stop-motion animation. (I was already used to Godzilla being a guy in a suit; it was, and is, part of the charm of the character.)

No, this was not my Kong. This one was the same size as Godzilla! I already knew Godzilla to be of unimaginable proportions (around 150 feet tall in the '60s films), and suddenly the big ape that still had to climb laboriously up the Empire State Building was now going to be over a tenth of the size of it? To be sure, there is a plotline about some berries on Kong's island (that is never called Skull Island, so perhaps he is a further-removed offshoot of the species?) that allow the creatures to devour them to grow to monstrous sizes. Maybe this Kong was once normal Kong-sized and ate enough berries to be Godzilla-sized? (The berries also conveniently cause Kong to fall asleep, thus providing a plot device with which to transport the beast.) It also causes Kong to look constantly like he just woke up from a three-night bender.

Who designed me? Idiots...

Whatever the cause for his inflation, this suited version of King Kong battles Godzilla to what most Americans would consider to be a clear victory for the big gorilla, as he is the only one seen swimming off at film's end. There is no sign of the giant green monster at all across the surface of the ocean's waters. Of course, Godzilla is famously amphibious, and can walk or swim underwater without coming up for air for an amazingly long time, so to forget this point in order to declare a sure victory for the fuzzy primate with perpetual bedhead is foolish at best.

I had two copies of KKvG on VHS,
including this version.

For much of my life, I and much of the western world was under the belief that there were separately filmed outcomes to the battle for the American and Japanese markets, owing to Kong somehow being considered representative of America, and thus Americans would only accept an ending where Kong was the winner. While it is probably because the original movie Kong was filmed by an American studio, and merely as simple as that, there are some people who take perverse pride in claiming pop cultural figures as being their own kith and kin. I have indeed met many a person who have seen this silly kaiju film and exacted a firm measure of patriotism from its conclusion. I say they only can claim this due to the fact that America KILLED Kong; after all, Americans capture, ship and enslave Kong to perform against his will, and then Americans KILL him when he misbehaves. Setting aside parallels of the slave trade that is one of this country's many great shames, the way I see it, Kong only represents our country because his trophy head sits prominently on a wall in America's National Man Cave. So, if you rabid knee-jerk patriots need an easy victory to salute because you think one movie monster "killed" another movie monster, then you have more problems than just being... well, you.

It doesn't matter. In the Japanese release of King Kong vs. Godzilla, we not only hear King Kong roar in supposed triumph as he swims away toward the horizon, but we also hear Godzilla's roar one more time. As for me, I'm taking no political sides in the King Kong vs. Godzilla debate, except to say that the Kong in the movie is not the Kong that I love and that Godzilla in the film is the Godzilla that I love. I absolutely declare the ending a draw. The Myth of Two Endings is just that: a myth. There were never two endings; just one big ambiguous earthquake-and-tidal-wave-causing fall into the ocean by two monstrous titans of pop culture. And whoever said you can't love them both? Not me, clearly.



Long Live the Kings...

[To be continued in Part 8...]

Video Kong the Second [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 6]

[Did you know this is part of a series? Read Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 3, Pt. 4 and Pt. 5 first!]

About a year after I finally acquired a prerecorded version of the 1933 King Kong on videotape, I ran into a second version, this time from a company called Nostalgia Merchant. As far as I can tell, a lot of Republic and RKO films came out under this label, and through the 1980s, I ended up with many of their tapes, including the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Plan 9 from Outer Space, the 1939 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Thing From Another World, Mighty Joe Young, Son of Kong, the Randolph Scott version of The Last of the Mohicans, Invaders from Mars, and my very first copy of Citizen Kane.

It certainly wasn't the cover of this second copy that sold it to me. The cover was far more garishly colored than my RKO Classics tape; in fact, the cover beheld a colorization of the classic image of Kong's feet gripping the top of the Empire State Building, biplane in hand as he makes his last stand against any human that doesn't look and smell like the beauteous Fay Wray. I believe it was the muddy colors of the cover that provided the chief warning to me of how the proposed colorized Ted Turner version of King Kong would most likely look once it was threatened to be unleashed upon mankind.

That much-discussed issue of the day was looming in the near future, but for the moment I had a decision to make regarding a second edition of Kong. It was actually a no-brainer, and the decision was made for me by one simple declaration on the video's cover: "THE ORIGINAL UNCUT VERSION." My RKO tape only said "ORIGINAL STUDIO EDITION," and if you know me at all, you would realize that there is a world of difference in those statements, even if the running time has remained the same on every edition of Kong that I have ever owned (100 minutes). No, I had to make sure that there wasn't a single scene that I was missing, and thus I purchased a second edition of the movie.

Talking about picture quality differences on separate editions of videotapes is something that I am not going to get into, as I was always at the mercy in those days of whatever televisions and decks that I could either cheaply afford or that were given to me. To elaborate on it would be fruitless, as I would always run this VCR or that into the ground at a fantastically high rate due to my huge consumption of film viewings. I went through VCRs like candy, if indeed I had ever gone through candy like that. I cannot recall if I ever found a difference between the two tapes, because both had the restored scenes that I was not privy to when I viewed the film as a youth: mainly many of the more supposedly "racist" or "shocking" shots from when Kong goes apeshit on the native village, along with a handful of other minor scene outtakes.

What this led me to discover was that I wasn't so much interested in finding the best quality Kong cut, but rather had turned into a minor Kong collector. So, it was also a no-brainer when the frightening Ted Turner brought out his first Kong edition in 1988. Luckily for me, it was not the much-feared colorized version, but a tape which declared boldly on the cover: "NEW ARCHIVAL VERSION. PRODUCED FROM A ONE-OF-A-KIND MASTER PRINT. IMPROVED FOOTAGE! HI-FI-STEREO! STATE-OF-THE-ART AUDIO!" Roll out the hyperbole carpet, why don't ya, Teddy Boy! Sheesh!

I said that I wouldn't discuss individual tape differences, and I will continue to hold to that statement. But this tape did somehow look better than the previous ones, though that could have been due to my switch to a much larger and better television, VCR, and stereo system at the exact same time that the Turner tape was released. As a matter of fact, this edition of Kong was the inaugural tape for my new system, "Hi-Fi-Stereo" and "State-of-the-Art Audio" included. My memory of this tape is tainted by that experience, and while I still possess both it and the RKO Classics version, my Nostalgia Merchant copy somehow has gotten misplaced over the years, so I am unable to run a comparison (not that I would now that I finally have the DVD release). [Note: The Nostalgia Merchant image of King Kong at the top of this page was found on Ebay; the other NM covers are my actual copies.]

By the time I had three separate copies of Kong, I had to make a decision. My collection was already taking up so much room I had little space left for new titles. It was either continue on collecting new editions, or call it quits. Calling it "good" was exactly what I did: even when Turner came out with a 60th Anniversary Edition in 1993, I resisted temptation (though it was really, really hard). No matter how much you love a movie, you have to draw a line. Three copies of any movie is more than enough for me.

As for that apocalypse-bringing colorized version? I saw it one afternoon on WTBS, Turner's famous Atlanta station, and it was OK. It was strange seeing it all dressed up in oddball shades, but the argument that is often used against colorization, that of interference with the filmmakers' decision to film it in either black-and-white or color, never seemed to be an issue with Kong. Merian C. Cooper was one of the earliest proponents of the Technicolor process, and it was his interest in its development that convinced Selznick to film Gone With the Wind in color. So, certainly Cooper would have relished the chance to film Kong in full color if it were a viable option at the time, which it really wasn't in 1933. Color films were relatively rare at that time. (As opposed to Casablanca, which it would have been a crime to colorize though Turner kept threatening to do so, as it was made in 1942, had a director -- Michael Curtiz -- who had already made a few color films, and was clearly designed to be filmed in black-and-white).

(I still believe Turner should do time for even considering colorizing Casablanca. Or at least for owning the Atlanta Braves...)

[To be continued in Part 7...]

Video Kong the First [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 5]

[Stop! Have you read Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 3 or Pt. 4? Well, you should...]

After the summer of 1977 and the couple of summers that followed, where I saw it regularly a couple of times a year, I only ran into King Kong sporadically after that. Odd televised airings of the movie on Saturday afternoons or late night here and there. But with the addition of cable television to my life, I would search constantly for a viewing of the movie, and finally captured the great beast on videotape when I recorded a WTBS airing. This tape became like unto a holy object for me for the next few years, as poor a quality as it happened to be, and I cherished it wholeheartedly. That is, I did until 1985.

I had started out working in the Hallmark warehouse of a news agency in Alaska (or rather, the news agency in Alaska, and in a moment of superlative marketing clarity, such a business happened to be named the Alaska News Agency). Actually, I worked for the Book Cache, a chain of stores that were owned by the same people who owned ANA (and which would eventually, through a morass of corporate gobbledygook which I don't wish to go into any further than I have, sadly go the way of the dodo). Hallmark held a large presence in the bookstores, but I had recently been swept into a new position: that of the Hardback Returns Manager. The title was B.S. though; since there was only one person in the department for 98% of the time, it wasn't really a management position, unless you count the sometime rather unruly stacks of books, which required supreme management on my part.

While I still worked in the Hallmark warehouse, we had started carrying two series of cheap VHS tape lines. The first line was from a company called Outlet Book Company, who then and now specialized in bargain books. I did not know it at the time, but the movies were what is known as public domain titles, ranging from Chaney's Phantom of the Opera to Lugosi and the Ritz Brothers in The Gorilla to Joan Crawford in Rain to Charles Laughton in The Beachcomber. The quality proved to be sometimes substandard, but such is the way with public domain movies. You get what you don't pay for... the tapes were cheap because the movies were cheap. The boxes looked all the same, and comprised of oversized plastic shells that popped loud when you unstuck the plastic from each side. The design of the covers only showed titles on the front and descriptions with a brief cast listing on the back, and were gray and generic.

The second installment of movies, a few months later, came from another bargain book specialty company called Crown, which, while I didn't know it then, actually owned Outlet. (And eventually, Random House would purchase Crown, and thus Outlet, and make it a subsidiary in 1988.) So, really, this was a line within a line. Once again, the movies were still public domain, but at least had actual pictures from the movie on the cover, and had morphed into the size and shape that nearly all VHS tapes had taken on by that point: little video rectangles, compact and neat. The boxes were not quite as generic as the Outlet ones, thanks to the covers having a variety of colors, though the pictures used on them were in black and white. It looks pretty silly now, but I actually found the somewhat "pop art" aesthetic pleasing to the eye.

Many of the titles were the same as with the initial Outlet batch, but there were some surprises: Walk in the Sun stood out for me. Best of all on this go-around though, there was not only a few early English Hitchcock thrillers, none of which I had seen yet, but also a copy of Godzilla vs. Megalon (without Belushi, I was sad to discover, but dubbed in English... though since I saw it initially on TV this way, it was not a problem).

We had some success with these runs of videos, and the decision was made to venture into carrying a larger selection of videotapes in our stores. When the studios started concentrating on retail sales of videotapes, moving beyond the rental market, there were no Best Buy or Suncoast-type stores yet in our state. The rental stores were slow to pick up on the first-run sales market, but we dove into it wholeheartedly at our stores. We made most of our sales on first release titles like when Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial first came out on video. We would several hundreds of copies of those titles in a very short amount of time. But at some of our bigger stores, we carried around a hundred titles or so (not counting local Alaskan videos), finding out which movie titles sold regularly, and restocked them from our warehouse. 

As a side gig to my regular work, because I was the movie buff in the building, I was given control over the warehouse stock for a period. I would eventually become the buyer, along with audiocassettes, in a very short time. While she didn't want me to go crazy, I was given almost free rein by my boss to order whatever I felt we should carry. This was all around 1985. And RKO had just released King Kong onto video.

Of course, apart from getting my own copy, I just had to carry King Kong in our stores. When Paramount released a handful of Godzilla titles like Monster Zero and its ilk, I convinced my boss that we should carry them as an experiment. (They ending up selling pretty well for a couple of years.) But Kong was a no-brainer. We had to carry it. It was a bonafide, acclaimed classic and there was a lot of publicity about its release. Beyond wanting to get one for myself, I wanted the whole world to have access to getting their own copy, and felt strongly we should be selling it. 

The videocassette was proclaimed on the cover as the "Original Studio Edition," put out under RKO's "Film Classics Series," and was led with the famous shot of Kong on top of the Empire State Building facing the onslaught of the biplanes. On the back was the shot of Kong about to charge through the gates of the Skull Island wall. I don't know how many copies we sold, but we ended up carrying multiple editions of King Kong throughout the handful of years that I ran the video line for the Book Cache stores. Whatever changes in taste or preference our customers had in that time, I always made sure to keep the mighty Kong in stock. Kong wasn't cheap at first either. I think it leveled out around $19.95 eventually, but our initial retail price was around $39.95. At least, that is the price I recall from when we first carried it. And the price I paid... before my employee discount that is.

The important thing, though, is that I finally had a copy of Kong of my own that wasn't recorded at an atrociously fast speed, and that was supposedly duplicated from the finest archival print that could be found at the time. And I cherished that copy of King Kong for about...oh...a year.

[To be continued in Part 6 here...]