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...]

Yes, Jack! A Prehistoric Beast... Let's Kill It! [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 4]

[Before stomping on any further, read Pt. 1, Pt. 2, and Pt. 3 here...]

Getting back to the real Kong, once I managed, with great difficulty it seems, to sneak around the readily apparent charms of Fay Wray, there was still the matter of the dinosaurs, my raison d'être for wishing to view the original 1933 version of King Kong again in the first place. Besides seeing the original Kong three years earlier, I had filled the dinosaur void in my soul with other films featuring the prehistoric creatures. 

My first experience with dinosaurs on film was like to have been The Beast of Hollow Mountain, which I saw at the age of five and which served to solidify my dinosaur love. In the previous summer of 1976, I had discovered Ray Harryhausen's The Valley of Gwangi for the first time and found myself unable to function at all for a few weeks. At that time, I never really knew the connection between both of those films and Kong until much later (both Beast and Gwangi, which feature battles between cowboys in the Old West and dinosaurs, were derived from an unrealized story treatment by Willis O'Brien, the man who brought King Kong's creatures to glorious stop-motion life). I had also fallen in deep love with Godzilla by that point, mainly because of John Belushi, who introduced an NBC showing of Godzilla vs. Megalon in prime time by wearing the same Big G costume he had also used in a famous sketch on Saturday Night Live that season. Sure, Megalon is one of the lower entries in the entire Godzilla series, but we loved it all the same. (And still do...)

I poured my youthful energy and attention on practically every book on dinosaurs and paleontology that I could get my hands on, in a way that I really wished, in retrospect, I had reserved for school work. I had also spent every Saturday morning the previous couple of years devouring every single episode of Sid and Marty Krofft's Land of the Lost, which not only gave me plenty of stop motion dinosaur action, but also supplied me with the still frightening concept of humanoid reptilian hybrid Sleestaks.

I was, to put it mildly, dinosaur mad. It's true that I was also baseball mad, but once you pushed aside the piles of Baseball Digest magazine and the boxes of trading cards that I had collected, you would run into my array of Snap-Tite dinosaur models, with which I would recreate repeatedly a horrible battle between my Tyrannosaurus Rex and my Triceratops, flipping a coin to determine the outcome. Eventually, I would devise a dice system, much like my self-rigged baseball game, which would become the deciding factor in moves and attacks. I was sure that once I published my game, I was going to make a mint and the world would be mine. I also had a more advanced motorized model that I built of my all-time favorite dinosaur, the Ankylosaurus; more than one, in fact, because I built a second model to use in a diorama that I had built for school, using artwork based on Charles R. Knight.

On that summer afternoon in 1977 staring at the cathode tube, I found myself ashore on Skull Island, fresh with the flush of shipboard puppy love, ready to take on all comers in defense of the lovely Ann Darrow. At some ill-fated hour of the night, she was kidnapped from the Venture by the way-too-sneaky natives of the island, and I was the only crew member to have noticed it, but my cries of alarm from my deckchair are to no avail! Deaf to my pleas, my fellow shipmates don't notice the transgression until the sacrificial fires are already lit and the drums are rolling out their steady thrum-thrum-thrum as a call to the Mighty Kong. Our response is to hit the boats and rush to the village, but upon our arrival at the gate of the supposedly Kong-proof ancient and giant wall, it is too late to save Ann. She is whisked into the dense jungle with a fiercely roaring and enormous rush of fur and sinew, lost to the wilds of Skull Island. Frightened, we pursue nonetheless...

At this point in the film, despite my advance knowledge of what would be encountered on this trek, I had no idea how this return trip through the jungles of Skull Island would affect me for the remainder of my days. Kong seems to be a simple adventure: a ship, a girl, an unknown island, an awesome monster, a tragic end. But just like the 1939 The Wizard of Oz, the trip is backloaded with trick after trick after trick, image after image after image. The layman remembers these films as mere fantasies, but they are thick with entertainment, and made by craftsmen who knew exactly how to deliver that entertainment at a high level. And it is only natural for subjectivism to take over for the eager viewer and make them believe that maybe there is something else in this as well besides simple melodrama and heroics. For me, Skull Island, built on studio sets with creatures brought to life with magic-like puppetry, was alive like no place I had ever seen in a film. I sensed it the first time that I saw the film, I felt it even more on that second viewing three years later, and I still feel that way to this very day. To turn Gertrude Stein on her ear, that simple jungle rescue trek has so, so much "there there". There was so much subtext lurking for me in King Kong, beyond the obvious Freudianism of the title character and the racism inherent in jungle pictures that rely on encounters between native cultures and pearly white, trigger happy Americans.

It was Carl Denham and the crew of the Venture that proved it for me. Yes, the greatly oversized stegosaurus charges them early on in their search, and its attack and their reply could be construed as a case of kill or be killed, so I don't entirely fault them for their response. The thing that must be remembered when watching King Kong is that, while the film has themes that will play to the Ages, its dialogue and plotlines are fully indicative of its time: 1933. However groundbreaking the film may be in the area of action storytelling and special effects, it is rooted firmly in the cliché and attitudes that pervaded the movies (and culture in general) in 1933. The world was a much larger place then, and there were still many mysterious, unexplored regions to dream of at that time. Rambunctious adventurers and fearless explorers, then as now, were the heroes of the day, and sadly, big game hunters were much admired, too. And while Carl Denham is clearly cut from the "Bring 'Em Back Alive" mold, the "Shoot First, Ask Questions Later" attitude is the more apparent logic at work here.

Denham hasn't even seen his first dinosaur for more even ten seconds before he asks for a "gas bomb" to be handed to him. One of the crew has a box strapped to his back (marked "Gas Bombs," just so you are sure of where they are) that holds, judging from the size of the box, at least eight of the spherical grenades. When the stegosaurus charges, there is a hail of bullets from the crew, and then Denham hurls the bomb. The stegosaurus goes down from the combination of weaponry, but instead of continuing on a separate path or merely steering the party widely clear of the beast, Denham marches the crew directly towards it. And instead of leaving it alone, Denham fires another shot at the still-gasping creature. This riles it even further, but as it stands and twirls to make another charge, it is brought down again with another hail of bullets. Carl and the crew advance even closer, and when the dinosaur dares to make one more roar of defiance, Denham puts a final bullet into its brain. Only after Denham has proclaimed "That got 'im", does the "bold" adventurer ponder his position. "If I could only bring back one of these alive," he wishes all "aw, shucks" and dreamily. Yes, if only... I wonder when you will get a chance.

The fact is that he could have brought that stegosaurus back alive. If you are going to go after something the size of Kong, and you have boldly announced the "fact," without any proof whatsoever, that your "gas bombs" can bring him to his knees, why not test their effectiveness on something of a similar size? Maybe the first dinosaur that you run into, let alone the first prehistoric creature that you or any other man has ever witnessed in real life? You throw one gas bomb, Denham, but not a second? You had at least eight in the box, and you have used one and it did not knock the stegosaurus out, even with that unnecessarily added dosage of bullets. If gas bombs two, three, and four don't work, then you had better rethink your Kong capture plan at that point, because you would only have four left, the stegosaurus is still kicking, and that Kong is one baaadaasss mutha'! If you use less than four on the stegosaurus, then you might have plenty to work with on the ape, and perhaps you will have some extra for any other dinosaurs you are likely are going to run across. But Denham never throws a second bomb, instead relying on his trusty ol' shotgun. He never considers whether they are actually going to work on the giant gorilla that they are trying to capture, and basically treats the death of the dinosaur practically as if it were just another minor animal on yet another big game hunt. His immediate reaction to an unknown species is to kill it. How very... American of him.

You can say "You were only twelve. Surely, you were simply watching a monster movie?" and you would be mostly right. I myself was not there to ruminate on the cruelty of man and his supposed right to ransack the Earth, American or entrepreneurial imperialism, the suppression and infiltration of native cultures, and the "Big Gun = Happy American" equation. I was there to watch giant apes and dinosaurs. Period.

And I got giant apes and dinosaurs. What I also got was a lifelong crush on a movie star almost sixty years my senior, a savage dislike of guns and the people who insist that they are the only way to live a proper life (I have no dispute with people who use them genuinely as tools, not even hunters, as long as they are hunting for sustenance), and several more floors in my skyscraper of steadily growing misanthropy. None of these side effects distracted me very long from the swell monster battles and adventure that were set to take place in the next hour, but they combined with other forces at work in my life at that time. I do remember my reactions very clearly on my second opportunity to see King Kong, so moved was I by the experience, and I have found myself thinking about them quite a lot any time that I watched the film from that day onward.

These feelings are not necessarily implied or even meant by the film (Creator and producer Merian C. Cooper was, after all, a big game hunter, and Denham is basically a stand-in for Cooper.) But that is what I read into it then, and that is what I read into it now. Such feelings made a movie like King Kong come alive even more for me, even as a kid. And they are probably why it made such an impression on me. It adds to the tragedy of the film's ending, where Denham places the blame for Kong's death on a Manhattan street as being due to "beauty" (meaning Ann Darrow), when in fact, he is the progenitor of Kong's demise. The Big White Hunter has been tamed by tragedy, and he can't bear the load.

It's only a monster movie, you know...

[To be continued in Part 5 here...]

Some Gigantic, Turned-On Ape... [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 3]

[Before traipsing deeper into the jungle, read Pt. 1 and Pt. 2...]

A side-trip to another Kong: As I hinted at briefly before, something else happened in the summer of '77 that didn't start out as having anything to do with King Kong, but ended up furthering my giant ape obsession regardless. Star Wars fever had slammed into the earth like a meteor, and my brothers and I were no exceptions to the rest of humanity that year. I had already read the paperback novelization (with the original, purplish Ralph McQuarrie-painted cover released the winter before, not the gold-colored movie poster-draped cover that was in circulation that summer) five times, I had the first couple issues of the comics, and was already buying the trading cards. I was a primed and raring-to-go convert to the Lucas cult before I had even stepped into the theatre.

Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for our parent's pocketbooks, we lived in a town without a movie theatre. In fact, we lived a good fifteen or so miles from the nearest movie theatre, and thus our sojourns into the big city were far and few between; we only saw new movies maybe four or five times a year, if we were lucky. So, when we went, we made sure that we were seeing something we really wanted to see. Usually, it would be, due to our tender ages, the newest Disney flick (like the Witch Mountain movies) or the latest in the Pink Panther or James Bond series (thankfully, my mother was a fan of both). I had started to push things a little more as I reached my teen years, and was able to convince them to see new science-fiction or fantasy movies like Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. So, it was not even a light certainty that we would get the opportunity to see this movie that well-timed mass merchandising had already brainwashed us into believing that we had some sort of moral imperative to go see.

This story would have no purpose if we hadn't gone to see it, and yes, after a small amount of pleading and begging, my brother Mark and I eventually wore down my mother's resolve. Meanwhile, my best friend Rusty and his little brother Rodney worked a similar magic on their mom, and thus, we found ourselves crammed into one vehicle one Saturday afternoon, heading into the "big city" of Anchorage, Alaska to make our acquaintance with R2-D2 and the rest of that motley crew of rebel heroes. It would have been a sad situation if the movie had sucked, but even if it did, we did not possess the critical faculties to say so, inexperienced in the ways of movies as we were at that time, and really, we were kids. If someone in the media had convinced us watching paint dry was the hottest and greatest new fad, we would have adopted the consumer lock-step and marched to the nearest house, staring at freshly-brushed walls all summer. So, whether Star Wars was actually any good was beside the point. It's just a happy coincidence that it actually was good.

So, where do you take five sugared-up, buzzing kids who have just spent the late afternoon and early evening watching droids, aliens, lightsaber fights, spaceships, and laser blaster battles? To the local ice cream parlor to get them even more sugared up and buzzing! The parlor, in this instance, was a local establishment (and failed attempt at franchising) called Soapy Smith's, named after the ever so-popular Gold Rush gangster and conman Jefferson "Soapy" Smith. (Because, if there is anything that goes perfect with a banana split, it is extortion and murder. "Would you like a cold case of murder with your strawberry parfait?") But, sugared-up and buzzing Star Wars fanatic kids aren't worried about such ironies; we just wanted more candy and ice cream. As I recall, the plan was actually to get us to eat some actual food, and I do remember having a hot dog, followed by the previously mentioned and murderously intentioned banana split. But I also had five dollars to spend on candy, and because I was deep in the early throes of a both a burgeoning card collecting habit and movie fandom, I bought a couple packets of Topps King Kong trading cards from the candy counter.

These cards were not for the 1933 version that had somewhat recently begun not just my Kong obsession, but also my jonesing for Fay Wray, a woman 57 years my senior. No, these were for the 1976 Dino de Laurentiis version, a film which I had not been given the chance to see (though in a couple years I would get a chance to see it and regret it highly). But standards of quality were not a factor that evening, instead it was the simple fact that I had the opportunity to purchase an item that had a snarling, roaring Kong on the wrapper, and the hope that inside of that wrapper, I would see numerous cards featuring dinosaurs galore. This hope reared its head only because I was unaware that Mr. De Laurentiis did not see fit to loading his Skull Island up with prehistoric beasts, but rather merely with a giant python. (And the man's name is Dino? Talk about not living up to your billing. Tsk tsk...)

So, I bought the cards, but did not open them until we were in the darkness of the car ride home, where Rusty and I began flipping through the cards, the only illumination provided by our pocket flashlights and intermittently glowing streetlights that our vehicle passed. What we discovered, to the complete opposite reaction of horror, was that we had in our hands little cardboard pieces of what to our parents' eyes would have been damn near pornography: a progression of images of a young and scantily clad Jessica Lange being drenched with a waterfall and in various other states of undress that seem like nothing now, but were certainly provocative enough for a couple of young boys at the time. Especially of interest to me was the "waterfall" card, where Kong douses Dwan to wash the mud off of her. Dwan sits with her legs under her on the palm of the giant gorilla's hand and takes her shower. On the card, while it is clear that she is wearing garments, it was easy enough to trick one's mind just enough to convince oneself that she was completely nude. While I have never been that into the Jessica Lange type, at the time, she worked for me just fine.

I said that our parents (or at least one of mine; my mom would have been fine with it) "would have" considered those cards nearly porn, but they never hard the opportunity. We never let our parents see the more intriguing cards, and we managed to keep our cards to the same level of secrecy that our little neighborhood gang eventually managed to keep our fairly well-stocked Playboy collection, which we obtained through means of having sharp little eyes always on the lookout for displays of female pulchritude. Playboy, Penthouse, Oui, Gallery, Genesis, Nugget, High Society, Hustler... we had them all. Never to be discovered by the elders of the village, our "comic book" collection was revered by the neighborhood boys. If you heard us say to one another, "Hey, you want to read some comics?," three out of five times we were heading off to look at titty mags.

But that was in the very near future; that collection would come about in the next year or so. For this moment, all that we had were these, for all purposes, completely innocent trading cards in our pervy little hands. I managed to keep my set of those cards -- completely innocuous by even the standards of that day, but that didn't matter to me then -- hidden from my parents. And I still have each of those cards today. [The images on this page are from my collection.]

It is always astounding to me the moments that stick with you as you shuffle through life. Embarrassing moments, squandered opportunities, and early small perversions all seem to exist in the same file cabinet in my head, while what most people would consider the larger, more important events in a life, like weddings and such, seem to have filtered out of my brain almost as soon as they happened. Somehow, this whole Kong card thing, along with most other movie-related "trivia," has convinced my gray matter that it is of far more revelatory importance to me than those other mislaid events. Somehow, this reveals more of my eventual character than I would realize at the time. And it is probably right.

[To be continued in Pt. 4 here...]

Say... I Guess I Love You... [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 2]

[Before plodding forward, read Part 1 of this article here.]

So... you finally end up taking that long ocean voyage back to the legendary Skull Island, whose mysteries have built up in your youthful imagination in the three years since you last saw it, and you know that from the tales that you have heard and from the pictures that you have seen that the dinosaurs and pterosaurs and plesiosaurs that you will encounter will be bigger and grander than you remember them. But before you can finally make landfall on the beach of that much vaunted island, there is the not-so-small matter of making that voyage through thousands of miles of dangerous, barely charted waters. Such voyages take a lot of time -- at the beginning of the 1933 King Kong, it takes somewhere in the vicinity of twenty minutes or so -- and you don't know if you can stand the wait any longer.

But then the strangest thing happens during that seemingly endless twenty minutes while you wait to finally see the monsters and dinosaurs of Skull Island again... you fall in love with Fay Wray.

You don't forget about the island or the dinosaurs or the pterodactyls or the plesiosaur or the giant prehistoric gorilla that you know are waiting to be rediscovered on that mysterious place... no, they are the reason you came and you will make damn sure to get your money's worth (even if it's free). But there's this girl on the ship, you see, and she's beautiful and blonde and sad and lonely, and one look into her dewy, longing eyes and you are lost. Hell, you were lost before anyone even made it onto the ship and took to the sea. Her presence on the ship merely added extra paper to the package as she wrapped you up forever. What's that? Land Ho? Oh... are we there already?

I'm no Jack Driscoll, but I'm a damn sight closer to Jack Driscoll than I am to Kong. Despite the differences between the two male corners in this tragic love triangle, they both shared a passion for Miss Ann Darrow, and I came to understand very quickly everything that those two big lugs go through for that love in the course of this adventure. Because, after the destitute and shivering Ann looks up helplessly into Carl Denham's eyes on that fateful encounter on that New York street; after viewing the hope and excitement that fills every feature of her face in that coffee shop as Denham takes her into his company; after she stands on the deck of the "Venture," defending herself against Jack's bluff-filled tirade against women on ships; and especially after her on-camera full-dress rehearsal, glamour-dolled up and gorgeous, as she screams to shocked alertness (and erectness?) Driscoll and the rest of the crew, I found myself fully caught in the grip of deeply amorous feelings for this beautiful blonde innocent played by the eternally underrated Ms. Wray.

To sell the basic conceit of the story, that a big ape is going to go even more ape over the heroine of the picture, and to not sell it as a basic jungle picture, with a mere gorilla-girl-hero storyline, but as an epic adventure spanning half the globe, with her honor and safety constantly being fought for against giant dinosaurs and monsters, and with Kong meeting his doom at the top (and then the bottom) of the Empire State Building, all due to this girl... well, that girl had better be pretty incredible. And in the short time, of which I thought would be an unwanted eternity as it was the first time that I saw it, I was given a re-introduction to that girl, and it was like I had never seen her before. It may be the difference between my concerns when I was ten and how I felt as I nearing thirteen, but Ms. Wray sold that girl to me so solidly that I was ready to follow her for the rest of my life, and not just across that imaginary island. Even today, in my head, I am married forever to a girl with that face: Ann Darrow's face; Fay Wray's face.

But, there wasn't just innocence in that face. I picked up on this even as a youth: Ann and Jack are finally pitching woo to each other but then Jack is called away for shipboard duties, and just seconds before she is captured by the scheming Skull Island natives, the look on her face, flushed with her excited breathlessness and contorted ever so slightly with her lip curling in anticipation -- Woof! What that shot still does to me even thirty years later! Down, boy! I know that such scenes were a common trope of romantic films in earlier eras, with even the toughest female becoming all weak-kneed and swooning the instant the hero touches her, (and I personally prefer my movie heroines to be a lot less damsel-in-distress and far more tough on their own terms), but in this film, Wray nails down the lid on that traditional scene forever,. Those deep, lustful, post-buss gasps emanating from her breast meant that, from that point on, I was severely hooked. Everything that either of the males vying for her affection do in the film was completely understandable to me, and sold the film to me outright... before I had even seen monster or dinosaur one!

There are far more legendarily risqué scenes in the picture: the filmmakers' unprecedented nerve on display in Kong's gentle but forceful disrobing of Ann's garments, which leads to his tickling of her (which, sadly for the big boy, only results in her screaming even louder); Ann, clothes torn and writhing almost orgasmically, as she is bound to the top of the sacrificial altar to meet her would-be groom; and in a scene for which I would have killed for VCR remote control to have been in my twelve-year old hands, Ann's fall off of the cliff and into the river, where she emerges from the water in her now-shredded garments, only... let's just say that the clinginess doesn't really allow you to notice her garments. Despite all of this, it is still that shipboard scene that gets to me the most, and the one that will keep me returning to this film year after year, just for another taste of that introduction to that delightful woman.

So, go ahead, critics who wish to reevaluate this picture with today's critical standards and "modern" sensibilities. Mock the hammy acting, when it was played exactly the way it was meant to be played; rip on the racism inherent in the film, as in nearly Hollywood picture of that era, because while it is indefensible, it was part of the times and can't be avoided without avoiding the film altogether (and shouldn't be avoided if we are ever to learn anything from that unenlightened time); and go on and take a hot, steaming squat on the "primitive" special effects, when in fact they were "state-of-the-art" for their time and for many years hence, and will continue to shock and thrill for many more generations to come, even after many of today's more "advanced" pictures will be forgotten, along with your reviews.

And go ahead and rag on the fainting and screaming Fay Wray, because despite all of the post-feminist critiquing of the character (and, as stated earlier, I, too, wish she were a little more quiet and proactive in her behavior towards the big guy, a situation I am sure will be amended in the remake), Ann Darrow is actually the one in charge in this picture. Even with all of Kong's killing, rampaging, roaring, rending, and his great and terrible gnashing of teeth, Ann is the one ultimately in control.

After all, according to that Denham guy, she is the one who kills the Beast...

[To be continued in Part 3...]

Where a Whole Army Couldn't Get at Him... [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 1]

[Before you go on, read the prologue to this article here.]

Yeah, the sizing is completely wrong in this promo photo.
But this picture has always fascinated me...

Whatever possessed my parents in those days to allow me such latitude, especially given my more than occasional admittedly horrid behavior, is beyond me to this day. Maybe it was the impending divorce they were going through at the time. While massively upset about this, I was still able to close my mind to that situation enough to embrace my afternoons away on my lonesome in 1977, the summer before the close of my twelfth year.

Allowed to leave my younger brothers in our then babysitter's stead (Mrs. B.), whose home was a couple blocks away, I struck out after lunch most days to arrive home and in my own care for a few hours. I did have a handful of chores with which I had been entrusted to complete, such as feeding the dog and cats, which I took care of invariably, and cleaning up the dishes and removing the garbage from the kitchen, which I took care of rather sporadically. I would then sometimes go outside to hang with my best friend Rusty and his brother Rodney, or I would read books and comics, draw, or play the trading card-and-dice baseball game simulator that I had designed (with special rules adjusted for both 1-vs-1 and solitaire play).

The Manster (1959)

But what I discovered quickly that summer, almost completely by accident, was the afternoon movie matinee show that the local CBS affiliate, KTVA, would air each day at 3:00 p.m., right after my beloved Match Game '77 and the less knee-slapping but still oddly fascinating Tattletales (I was a big fan of Bert Convy and Orson Bean in those days). Turning on the TV well after I normally watched those game shows, I chanced upon the black-and-white image of a man with a large eyeball growing out of his shoulder. I repeat: GROWING OUT OF HIS SHOULDER! This was no Match Game '77! Completely by happenstance, I had tripped on an image which blew my twelve-year-old mind, and, of course, meant that I would not only be returning to that channel every single day for the rest of the summer, but I also immediately needed to watch the rest of this brain-searing broadcast from another dimension.

The movie turned out to be The Manster, a less-than-OK film by most people's standards, but one which opened yet another door in my burgeoning interest in movies. After the hero/villain split in twain and battled himself to the death on the edge of that erupting Japanese volcano, I knew exactly where I would be the next afternoon. I admit that I do not remember exactly what the next film turned out to be, nor do I ever recall any films that weren't of the horror, science fiction, or mystery genres. (There may have been some other films in the mix, but I haven't any recollection of such an occurrence.) There just seemed to be a monster or alien movie day after day after day, and I was utterly delighted. I would throw a blanket and pillow on the living room floor, use our popcorn maker to heat up a fresh batch of crunch-crunch (always with melted butter), and tune in to the goodness.

I do recall many of the prime Godzilla and other Toho productions (including, most importantly to me in my Kong enthrallment, King Kong vs. Godzilla), my first meetings with the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolf Man, the Invisible Man, Dracula, and Basil Rathbone's rendition of Sherlock Holmes. I even recall what is considered a minor effort of monster mayhem, but one which I will defend most vociferously, The Monster That Challenged the World. It is also where I saw three films in my personal cult, the equally ridiculous War of the Gargantuas, Fiend without a Face, and The Green Slime. But the film that I was most excited about seeing on those most edifying and monstrous afternoons? The mighty Kong, himself!

I had seen Kong once before, at the age of ten. Just a random film on a random Saturday afternoon broadcast where it rained and so I was stuck inside. It turned out to be most fortuitous for me, as Kong was the most amazing thing that I had ever seen. Honestly, I didn't know what hit me. And it seemed, for about three years, that I would never see the 1933 King Kong again. I continued learning about the original mainly from what would turn out to be latter-day editions of Forrest J. Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine, of which I had managed to trade with a buddy and stash a couple copies. The stashing was a form of self-preservation, which was a necessity lest my parents discover the "fur bikini" shots of the surely divine Raquel Welch, whose treasures I had already discovered at that tender age, even though I was still a few months away from actually seeing One Million Years B.C. (There were also a number of rather provocative shots of some other Hammer girls that I found most titillating, but I digress...) While I had seen Kong already, all of the information that I knew about the film came from mentions in Famous Monsters. Luckily for me, Ackerman himself had been equally influenced by King Kong in his own youth. To find a grown man with a similar obsession to mine was fascinating to me. Wasn't he supposed to be a grown up?

One such magazine that
influenced me in those days.

Additionally, in the back of Famous Monsters (and other Warren magazines of the time, such as Eerie and Creepy, which I was also seeing for the first time) were advertisements for 8mm and 16mm films, which I was primarily interested in because I was searching out a shortened version of a Hammer Frankenstein film which had been shown to us by our teachers at the end of our sixth grade graduation camp the previous year. (We also saw short scenes from others, including The Man Who Could Cheat Death and Horror of Dracula.) I not only discovered that film could be purchased, but so could a couple of ten-minute long snippets of King Kong, along with condensed versions of many other horror films that I longed to have not only the money to purchase, but also the clams with which to buy a camera to view them.

There was another side influence at that time that was affecting my personal King Kong mania... the 1976 version of King Kong. I had not seen it, of course; there was no VHS yet and my parents did not take me to it in the theatres. But it was advertised everywhere when I was eleven, there was merchandising around (glasses, lunchboxes, etc.), and that summer of 1977, in conjunction with the night when we first saw the original version of Star Wars, obtain several packs of Topps King Kong trading cards that would become even more fascinating to me when I reach puberty. [More on this in a later installment of this article...]

This was a time, O young and X-treme ones, that when you ran across a film that you wanted to see, you watched it then and there. Cable TV was indeed available in the '70s (even in Alaska) but not in the capacity nor range that we know today. The technology for the VCR had been developed but was not quite readily available to the casual public. The only real choices that you had (outside of the movie theatre) to see movies at all were the four VHF channels on your television dial. There were a couple of local UHF channels hanging about, but they never came in very clearly, especially in those days, and I don't remember much on them from the '70s besides a few extremely fuzzy Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckle, and Gandy Goose cartoons. (We had two television antennae with tinfoil formed into flags hanging off of them -- how good do you think the reception was?) It was pretty much the ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS affiliates, and that was it for choice. You really had to take advantage when they showed a movie that you were interested in, because you never knew when it would come down the pike again, if at all.

And so I believed, with my naive head lacking any knowledge of the burgeoning wave of technology due to hit the world in the next few years, that I was fated to never to see this that original King Kong movie again. I longed to see it and scanned the TV listings for another showing, but never happened across it. I had resorted to remaining enthralled over the big ape by scanning the pages of cheesy monster rags and scrounging for tidbits on the film in the local library. Of course, I was also privy to endless King Kong gags in the pages of MAD Magazine, often due to the magic renderings of Don Martin and Sergio Aragonés. And then, in a day that shall forever be titled, in the silly Martin style, "ONE FINE AFTERNOON IN FRONT OF THE TV," I found to my delight once again the film that I thought, at that time, would be withheld from my sight forever...

[To be continued in Part 2...]

Crackin' Up and Goin' Sappy... (Prelude to the Arrival of a Kong)

Let me make this plain... in the next month there is going to be an awful lot posted here about King Kong. Not just the new King Kong or the original King Kong or King Kong vs. Godzilla or the 1976 remake or the sequel to the 1976 remake or the sequel to the original King Kong or the films with Kong in the title which are actually "rip-offs" or "tributes" (depending on who is being asked about it) or the films without Kong in the title which are actually "rip-offs" or "tributes" (once again depending on haphazard opinion) or the films with Kong in the title that have nothing at all to do with King Kong or... well, you get the drift... 

Normally, I put every film that I see in the period between Recently Rated Movie entries into the most current post, whether or not I plan to write my musings on an individual film at a later date, but I did leave a film off of Edition #8. Of course, after the ape-laden preamble above, it doesn't take a scientist of even the most simply designed rockets to know that such a film would be the original 1933 King Kong. 

With my new King Kong DVD collection on the way in the mail, and knowing full well that I would probably never look at my set of original tapes again, tapes which I have held dearly in my monster-loving heart for at least the last twenty years and which have brought me great joy in even my most sorrowful of moments, I chose to undertake what I presume may well be my final viewing of said antiquated and outmoded software. Watching the film for the zillionth time, or thereabouts, I found nothing revelatory, nothing different to shake up my knowledge or understanding of the film, nothing that made me rethink what I had seen the previous zillion (or thereabouts) -minus one times... that is, I found nothing on screen that affected me in such a way...

In my head, what I did during the film is constantly think to myself, "My Kong DVD is on the way! I can't wait to see how gorgeous this is going to look on the DVD!" Not just once, not just twice, but for the duration of the entire picture! Sure, in the past I would watch the video and think "Boy, I wish this were on DVD!" and then get back to the viewing at hand. This was different. This was proceeding with the knowledge that in just a few days, the way that I have grown accustomed to looking at King Kong was going to change, not merely with the addition of a couple hundred lines of resolution on my screen, but it was going to clearer, sharper, brighter, and with the imagery popping out at me like it never had before. It was going to change my perception forever of this film. And I was trying to placate my internal impatience with the viewing of an inferior product?

I still enjoyed the film, but the DVD thoughts bounced about my noggin ceaselessly until well after Kong hit the New York City pavement. And then, through the Thanksgiving holidays up in Santa Rosa, in my most headache-y of moments, I found solace in the belief that when I returned home, a clearer, sharper, brighter, poppier Kong would be waiting there for me. And, as in all moments when I have relied on anything in my life, I found myself boundlessly disappointed. For when I did return, there was no Kong waiting for me.

He finally showed up Tuesday evening, but it was too late to alter the course of events lain out for the night. And with the McCartney concert eating up Wednesday evening (that's right... I have to placate myself by going to a Paul McCartney show), I knew that I would not get to spend any time with my favorite primate until Saturday afternoon.

And, boy, are we gonna tear it up!

Recently Rated Movies #9: Birthday Drums but a Non-Drumstick Thanksgiving in Santa Rosa

"This is exactly the sort of music that could get me pregnant!" - J-Men Forever (1979)

Every time that I travel somewhere, whether a new city or a town which I have visited numerous times (such as Santa Rosa), and no matter what I am doing and how much I am enjoying it, my eye is always automatically drawn towards every movie theatre that I pass. We could be passing through the schlumpiest village, with no intentions on ever stopping in the accursed hole, and if I see even the most bedraggled movie-house, invariably trapped in between some antique store and some Mom and Pop Hardware Stop, my heart will immediately yearn to stop for a look-see at the joint and, if time permits, a movie. But my love for the movies doesn't merely end at viewing a film. 

I enjoy collecting visits to movie theatres nearly as much as I enjoy going to museums and zoos and the other touristy things that I tend to do on vacations. Especially older theatres from the early or middle part of the 20th century, but I even find a thrill in hitting modern cineplexes, if only to gather extra fuel on how much I continue to despise the postage stamping of the cinema (though I fully acknowledge the upsides of cineplexes, too, minor though they may be). In any hobby, collectors set their own standards: philatelists may prefer to only gather materials from a certain area or era of stamp collecting, or they can try out stamps from any and all eras, countries and types. Such is the way it is for myself and movie theatres. I wish to check out any theatre, and by proxy, any movie, anywhere that I can find one.

Unfortunately, we were so busy that we were unable to hit any theatres on this past weekend's trip up to my brother's house, especially with most of the time taken up with preparing and pulling off my nephew Aerin's (also known as Rupert or the Rupe) awesome fifth birthday party. There was talk of a visit to the Rialto in Santa Rosa to see a midnight show revival of Young Frankenstein, talk which only served to drive me mad: happily insane at first at the possibility of such an occurrence, which then switched to despondency once we discovered that the Brooks-Wilder classic had actually shown two weeks earlier. Drat... and double drat.

Despite this horrid setback, I did manage to view a near handful of DVDs while happily ensconced at The M'Otis Arms (and pick up two interesting discs on our travels into San Francisco). An inaugural viewing of The Princess Bride for the Rupe was nearly as much of an adventure as the film itself. Armed with shield and wooden sword, the self-proclaimed "fearless" five year-old found himself much tested on the field of battle. My brother Otis and I spent the majority of the film calming his anxieties regarding bad guys that start out looking like good guys, good guys that start out looking like bad guys, a hero who dresses in the garb of a masked pirate, the torture machine in the Pit of Despaiiiirrrrr, and especially, the R.O.U.S.'s in the Fire-Swamp.

Refreshingly, though not for the Rupe, the scene that was most upsetting was the savage bit of violence involving Count Rugan's throwing of the dagger into Inigo Montoya's stomach. I recalled my bad dreams after I saw Flynn's Captain Blood at an early (though slightly older) age, even though the film led me to a love for swashbucklers. Of course, despite his fears, the Rupe wouldn't let us turn off the film. And, of course, I spent the majority of the rest of the weekend being lassoed and dispatched in my new role as an avuncular R.O.U.S., though I was often joined in my monstrous service by my Brother Rodent of Unusual Size. As for the film itself, seeing it alongside a much younger pair of eyes that thrilled to its every turn of plot, reminded me of just how nearly perfect Rob Reiner got the original book's tone, and also of what a grand adventure The Princess Bride remains to this day.

Later on Thanksgiving evening came time for the adults (ha!) to watch Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Un long dimanche de fiancailles (A Very Long Engagement), which I missed in the theatres because I was too deeply involved in my move to So Cal, and which I was really pissed off about missing because I adore Audrey Tautou. Marci (my sister-in-law) said that she had heard that Ms. Tautou wasn't really the sweet thing that she portrayed in Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (also Jeunet), and that she was supposedly a twat. I answered "Precisely..." 

I enjoyed A Very Long Engagement, as much as I can enjoy a film that immerses itself in the human misery that was World War I so deeply and savagely. I get upset by war pictures (as any sane human should) in much the same way that the Rupe was upset by the dagger scene mentioned above, so much so that much of the film was extremely rough going for me. But I enjoyed the mystery in the film, there were some gorgeously filmed set pieces, and there was some well-played dark humor, as well. As with other Jeunet joints, I will definitely get my own copy at a later date.

Friday night was spent putting together an awesome drum set for the Rupe (and seeing the Keith Moonisms erupt at the party the next day -- by which I mean on the drums -- was the high point of the trip, though the music jam that took hold of the party was pretty sweet, too), but I had spent two nights swearing that Mark and I were going to stay up late some night and watch his copy of J-Men Forever, a spoof of Republic serials and conservative mores that two members of the Firesign Theatre contrived in the late '70s. It says quite proudly on the case that it was a staple of USA's Night Flight lineup throughout the '80s and, sure enough, that is exactly the last place that I saw it myself, around 20 years ago, and I was not going to leave Santa Rosa without watching the goddamn thing. So, our path was clear and, tired as we were from the day's travels and travails, we set ourselves down to view it. 

Luckily, for our sleep-deprived heads, J-Men Forever is only 75 minutes long, though Otis zonked for the last 20 minutes of it. Of course, he had already seen it several times recently. I am most happy to report that J-Men Forever holds up beautifully. Only a few of the jokes are truly dated, and most of the film had me howling with nostalgic delight. It also spawned a small civil skirmish in my brain, with one side laughing uproariously at the screen antics and the other side seeking to heroically defend the '40s serials that were being mocked. But merriment reigned supreme in this battle, and I set aside my outrage and simply enjoyed the experience.

Late Saturday night, my brother Chris, flung down from the boondocks of some wilderness village known as Seattle, joined us for a small reunion which we ended with an early a.m. viewing of a DVD from an issue of The Believer, a literary magazine much in vogue at this point in time. 6 short films of varying genre, style, attitude and length, ranging from less than a couple of minutes to over 20, all joined together at the hip in brother/sisterhood due to the fact that they are merely different from the mainstream mindset. 

Chief amongst these films for me was a hilarious short by Guy Maddin (he of The Saddest Music in the World fame) called Sombra Dolorosa, in which Mexican wrestling, voodoo and cannibalism are combined in an odd-tasting but satisfying stew (much like most of the Maddin that I have seen). The longest short, and equally satisfying as a film, was Squash, where the cutthroat business world finds its way onto a racquetball court, and everything is on the line for a much put-upon employee and his hissable villain of a superior. Ethics schmethics! The briefest film, and the one that I have been thinking about most since I viewed the disc, was Sweeter As the Years Roll By (Pt. 3). It consists of a single static shot of an escalator (it could even be from a surveillance camera), and while the escalator continues to roll ceaselessly, a hand holds a white marker down over the safety grip of the device, drawing one long white line that eventually connects once the track is played out completely. I, for one, have never considered just how much track there was in an escalator, and really have never given escalators much thought in general. That has changed.

On our trip into San Francisco to see the De Young Museum, we did take a side trip over to Haight-Ashbury, where we not only ate our fill of neo-Cuban cuisine at Cha Cha Cha's, but I also managed to hit the Giant Robot store across the street. As much as I would have liked to purchase nearly everything in the joint, I only walked out with a box which could have held any number of figures from Shichinin no samurai (The Seven Samurai), but which turned out, happily for me, to contain Kurosawa-san himself (or, rather, a tiny plastic molded figurine of the director). He even has a change of swell hats! 

At Amoeba Records, I made off (legally) with a copy of The Archers' The Tales of Hoffman, a film which I have never seen but has consistently remained on my "To See" list for much of my life. Additionally, while at the gift shop at the De Young, I purchased, at the passionate behest of Otis, a DVD of In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger. Henry Darger was an artist of whom I have read a several retrospective articles, though I have only seen his art in those same magazines. I was even inspired enough by the little that I had seen and by his story to construct a brief poem in which he is a central figure. I am looking forward to viewing the disc given just how ecstatic both of my brothers are about it.

So, to sum up, while I didn't get to any new (or rather, old) movie theatres, I did manage to see or collect a few things on my travels.

And I am still mad about the Young Frankenstein debacle, though...

The List:

The Princess Bride (1987) DVD - 8
A Very Long Engagement (2004) DVD - 7
J-Men Forever (1979) DVD - 6
Deformer (2000) Believer DVD - 5
Is A Woman (unknown) Believer DVD - n/r
Tortured By Joy (unknown) Believer DVD - n/r
Sombra Dolorosa (2004) Believer DVD - 7
Sweeter As the Years Roll By (Pt. 3) (unknown) Believer DVD - n/r
Squash (2002) Believer DVD - 7