King of Kongs: Going Ape in the Spirit of '76

illustration by Danny Hellman

It did not look up at Ann upon her pedestal. It looked down.
—From the King Kong novelization by Delos W. Lovelace, 1932

A giant, prehistoric ape falls in lust with a modern blonde and then ravages the world to get at her. That’s the stuff of naughty late-night folklore, dirty jokes and cliché—how did it become one of the seminal works of American cinema? On the other hand, perhaps that question answers itself. Nevertheless, devout fans of the big-monkey genre need only look at the 1976 Dino De Laurentiis version of King Kong (directed by John Guillermin) to see what happens when the tale is placed in the wrong hands. Director Peter Jackson, whose version of the film was released in 2005, was so disgusted by that effort that he vowed to “pretend the 1976 version doesn’t exist.” Wired wrote that discussion of it was taboo on his set. “We never talked about it or referenced it,” Jack Black told the magazine. “Never. Not once.”

Yet for me, the 1976 version is the fascinating one. Sandwiched between the groundbreaking original and Jackson’s overblown if visually arresting remake, this shoddy, ill-conceived, horrendously scripted, ridiculous film is so unintentionally relevant that, while it falls short of any kind of genius, it manages not only to be enjoyable in unintended ways, but devastatingly satirical. Perhaps it’s a film only a critic could love, yet it is also the Kong by which all others should be judged—not for its artistic merit, but because one wonders if the others have the velocity needed to escape the event horizon of the black hole left in the wake of its implosion.

In an article at KongIsKing.net, critic John Michlig reminds us that the “1976 remake of KING KONG—like it or hate it—was a BIG DEAL. … Suddenly, King Kong was everywhere. In the months leading up to the December 1976 release, you couldn’t swing an elasmasaurous without knocking over a Kong soft drink cup, Halloween costume, poster or whiskey bottle.” The movie even made the cover of Time magazine. However, as another apologist for the film, James Berardinelli, was forced to admit in his online review, “Certainly, this version of Kong doesn’t have more than an echo of the original’s magic associated with it.”

Snake Oil Salesmen
Part of what makes the original 1933 film magical—and this is something Jackson recognized when he put together his remake—is that it is set in the ’30s. Big things were happening in the ’30s. Fascism was on the march, and the world was about to be plunged into a horrific war in which man’s most primitive instincts for destruction would be matched with his highest scientific achievements and meted out upon, if not New York City itself, then countless other equally modern cities across the world. Yet the war in the Pacific had not taken place, and there were still uncharted waters and Americans with an interest in exploring them.

The film industry of the day actually sent crews of filmmakers to capture the wildlife of such remote regions. Original Kong directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsak were precisely these types.

That’s how Cooper and Edgar Wallace came up with the idea in the first place, and that’s what gave the idea its plausibility. But these things are no longer plausible; in modern times, even suspension of disbelief is difficult. The 1976 Kong was reduced to offering bogus explanations for the “chemical composition of our mysterious, low-hanging fog bank” surrounding Skull Island.

However, faux science is a minor problem in a debacle of this magnitude. The 1976 script by Lorenzo Semple Jr., in its attempt to overcome the limitations inherent in updating an outdated story, also had to find something more than cheesy, tongue-in-cheek one-liners and Jessica Lange’s breasts to carry the story. In the end, it resorted to being some sort of pointed political allegory about the Middle East oil crisis, which had ended a mere two years before. Fascism was dead, islands and exotic animals had lost their mystery. What else was left to make Kong important?

She thinks her luck may have finally changed, because her horoscope told her she was about to “meet the biggest person” in her life. However, once the “gigantic turned-on ape” kidnaps her, she decides that he’s nothing more than “chauvinist pig ape” and tells him that it could never work between them, even after he protects her from a big plastic python. Meanwhile, the oil hounds decide Kong will “make a hell of a commercial.”

In all the other versions of King Kong, the ape is brought back for simple entertainment, but not this Kong. He’s brought back to be a shill for the oil industry.

Black Gold
All of this might seem innocuous if it weren’t for the special effects, which consist mainly of a man in a gorilla costume. CoolTrashCinema.com points out that “at the time of the film’s release the ‘suit-mation’ technique used in the production was generally regarded as low-tech. Seeing Kong tromp through miniature island sets brings to mind the campy exploits of his rubber-suited cousin from Japan, Godzilla. So why would the producers, who are making a serious attempt to update a classic film, choose to go with a guy in a monkey suit?”

There’s an answer to CoolTrashCinema’s question. The effects may stink worse than monkey dung in the hot subtropical sun, but the filmmakers obviously wanted to make a point with their ill-suited visuals. You see, in this version of the story, Kong comes from an island where the dinosaurs have been replaced with oil deposits, and it cannot be a coincidence that the gorilla suit also looks like it’s been coated in a layer of crude. This Kong is not just any old primitive force unleashed upon the world; he is the avatar of oil itself.

Kong has always been understood as a victim of man’s rape of the world, and what better symbol for this than oil, the fuel which makes almost all of modern technology possible and yet pollutes the oceans and the sky? For that reason it seems appropriate when Kong—the ape made of oil—climbs not the Empire State Building, but the World Trade Center.

Of course, there’s no way that anyone involved in the De Laurentiis project could have known how much impact that an enormous, enraged ape made of oil climbing the Twin Towers and knocking helicopters out of the sky would have on audiences 25 years after he filmed it, but watching it now, it’s a devastating indictment of all that America had become at the end of the 20th century, and a prophetic warning of all that it appears we will suffer at the beginning of the 21st century.

Jeremy Russell’s serialized novel, Episodes, is now appearing online at AdventureJourney.net. Check it out via the fiction page here.