KING KONG IS BACK! E D I T E D B Y David Brin with Leah Wilson
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DeCandido by Don DeBrandt “Ann, Abandoned” © 2005 “Thirty-Three” © 2005 by Rick Klaw by Adam-Troy Castro “King Kong and 1930s Science Fiction” © 2005 “Scream for Your Life” © 2005 by James Lowder by James Gunn “Divided Kingdom” © 2005 by Robert Hood “The Making of King Kong” © 2005 “Queer Eye for the Ape Guy?” © 2005 by Bob Eggleton by Natasha Giardina “Improbable Antics” © 2005 “’Twas Beauty Killed the Beast” © 2005 by Dario Maestripieri by John C. Wright “Darwin, Freud and King Kong” © 2005 Illustrations © 2005 by Bob Eggleton by Joseph D. Miller, Ph.D. Additional Materials © 2005 by David Brin “Dragon’s Teeth and Hobbits” © 2005 by Robert A. Metzger All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. BenBella Books, Inc. 6440 N. Central Expressway, Suite 617 Dallas, TX 75206 www.benbellabooks.com Send feedback to [email protected] Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data King Kong is back! : an unauthorized look at one humongous ape / edited by David Brin with Leah Wilson ; illustrations by Bob Eggleton. p. cm. ISBN 1-932100-64-4 1. King Kong films—History and criticism. 2. King Kong (Motion picture : 1933) 3. King Kong (Fictitious character) I. Brin, David. II. Wilson, Leah. PN1995.9.K55K56 2005 791.43'75—dc22 2005024157 Proofreading by Jessica Keet and Stacia Seaman Cover design by Todd Michael Bushman Text design and composition by John Reinhardt Book Design Printed by Victor Graphics Distributed by Independent Publishers Group To order call (800) 888-4741 • www.ipgbook.com For media inquiries and special sales contact Yara Abuata at [email protected] Acknowledgments A grateful “thank you!” to Raymond A Dowaliby, Jr., and Jay Lamantia, webmasters of King Kong’s Stomping Grounds (www.kkstomp.com), John Michlig of Fully Articulated Productions (www.fullyarticulated.com) and Bob Eggleton for their assistance in reviewing the manuscript for this book. Contents Introduction: The Ape in the Mirror 1 David Brin I. KING KONG THROUGH TIME: NOSTALGIA, TECHNOLOGY AND THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Over the River and a World Away 13 Nick Mamatas The Big Ape on the Small Screen 19 Paul Levinson Not the Movie: King Kong ‘76 27 Steven Rubio King Kong 2005 37 Bruce Bethke Three Acts of the Beast 49 Don DeBrandt II. THE WORLD OF KING KONG: SCIENCE, ART AND THE MAKING OF A CLASSIC Thirty-Three 61 Rick Klaw King Kong and 1930s Science Fiction 69 James Gunn vii KING KONG IS BACK! The Making of King Kong 77 Bob Eggleton Improbable Antics 85 Dario Maestripieri Darwin, Freud and King Kong 93 Joseph D. Miller, Ph.D. Dragon’s Teeth and Hobbits 103 Robert A. Metzger King Kong Behind the Scenes 113 David Gerrold III. THE PHILOSOPHY OF KING KONG: THINKING ABOUT THE GREAT APE Of Gorillas and Gods 123 Charlie W. Starr Why Does My Daughter Love King Kong So Much? 135 Adam Roberts ’Twas Stupidity Killed the Beast 147 Keith R. A. DeCandido Ann, Abandoned 153 Adam-Troy Castro Scream for Your Life 165 James Lowder Divided Kingdom 173 Robert Hood Queer Eye for the Ape Guy? 187 Natasha Giardina ’Twas Beauty Killed the Beast 197 John C. Wright King Kong “Sequels” and Inspired Films 213 Compiled by Bob Eggleton viii Introduction The Ape in the Mirror David Brin ONG BEFORE THERE WERE TWIN TOWERS in New York, destined Lto rise and then crash down upon beleaguered Manhattan Island, two other great wonders loomed over that storied skyline—behemoths that were uneven in mass but appeared as equals in our hearts, and to our watching eyes. One was real, a building named after imperial ambition, erected in a fever of zealous optimism that defied even the depths of the Great De- pression. Propelled by the renowned American appetite for commerce, technological achievement and hubristic accomplishment, the Empire State Building symbolized—far better than the later, doomed, World Trade Center towers—a brash Modernist Agenda. The other titan was mythical, a fabled embodiment of all that contrast- ed with modernism. King Kong. An ape, but so much more. A proto-man, primitive, solitary and fiercely proud, representing everything about us that the architects and builders aimed to ignore, or leave behind. But we cannot simply leave it all behind. The legacy follows us everywhere, even into our prim urban landscapes—the pure-but-dangerous innocent that we find both attractive and terrifying, especially when we look in a mirror and realize how few generations separate us from the jungle, from the cave. Movies last an hour or two, but legends need time to grow. Though King Kong was a commercial success in 1933, the giant gorilla flickered only briefly on a few hundred screens before giving way to other stirring tales, or real-life concerns. As some of the contributors to this book relate, Kong’s story had to be repeated on television’s smaller screen for new gen- erations of youth and adults to embrace it fully as their own, making it a core fable of our culture, recognized by all. 1 KING KONG IS BACK! At the surface, there is little to this simple story that cannot be described in a single paragraph. A movie impresario, modeled after Kong’s own ad- venturer-producers, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, takes a brave crew and beautiful ingénue to a distant, uncharted isle. There, na- tives barely stave off prehistoric beasts through liberal use of sacrificial virgins—the stuff of pulp adventure fiction at its lowest ebb. (Even Ed- gar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard gave their distressed-but-plucky damsels more to do than simply scream and writhe enticingly, the pathet- ically simple role assigned to poor Ann Darrow, as played by Fay Wray in the original King Kong.) When natives kidnap our blonde temptress as an offering to their ape-god, the impresario sends a hunky hero-type, who leads movie-expendable crewmates into the jungle to battle a mé- lange of exaggerated Mesozoic and Cenozoic monsters in order to rescue her. Meanwhile, Beast has a few bonding moments with Beauty . includ- ing a bit of titillating, involuntary disrobing amid several desperate battles to protect his newfound treasure. All right, make it two paragraphs. When Hunk steals Beauty away from Kong’s pinnacle lair, Kong makes his fatal error and follows. Leaving his domain, crossing the threshold “into town,” he becomes vulnerable to ur- ban humanity’s power, a power made manifest by the impresario’s mar- velous sleep-gas bombs. Whereupon—through the wonder of cinematic cutaway—Kong swiftly finds himself put on humiliated display in a dif- ferent kind of jungle entirely. And it is here that King Kong becomes more than just another early talky adventure film, or a notably clever experi- ment in stop-action photography. For here, at his humiliating nadir, Kong wins the movie audience over, forcing them to abandon all ambivalence. It seems, at that crucial moment, as if he draws as much strength from our sympathy as from primal rage. Shattering his bonds and reclaiming his in- génue prize, he scales the highest pinnacle that he can find. Seeking ref- uge? Or a sacred height to make his last stand? Kong’s hopeless struggle, against a swarm of machine-gun equipped bi- planes, has to be one of the great moments of heroic imagery, not just in cinema, but on a par with Hector confronting Achilles on the Plains of Il- lium, or the Old Guard standing hopelessly erect at Waterloo.