Sometimes, even the logical explanation for something doesn’t seem enough—case in point, The Mighty Kong, an animated family musical film released direct to video in the late nineties, in the waning days of the VHS glut I wrote about in another post. I don’t remember ever seeing this video on store shelves around the time, but at some point during the Internet age I stumbled upon it and learned that it was the “cartoon version of King Kong that has a happy ending”, and that was about the tall and short of my knowledge. That description reminded me of the massively hacked up 1930 movie version of Moby Dick , where Ahab is a hero with a love interest and an evil brother, that a friend told me about.
Co-distributed by Warner Bros. (who, many years later, would distribute a bigger King Kong reboot, and will be providing us with the long-awaited new version of King Kong vs. Godzilla) and a company that went out of business a year after this released, the basic idea here would be to make a watered-down family-friendly version of the Kong story (a movie that was beloved by children for decades because it was not family-friendly), and because people are familiar with it, they’ll use it as an electric babysitter for their dumdum kids. On paper, that makes some kind of mercenary business sense—but the actual product raises even more questions. For starters, considering the obvious cash-in nature of this thing, which is an officially licensed version of the movie complete with all the proper character names and truncated but mostly accurate recreation of the original plot, why did they spend all the money necessary to not only get Dudley Moore on as a marquee voice, but also hired the Sherman Brothers (of Mary Poppins and a bunch of other classics) to write the songs? It’s almost as if they were serious about this project—but I can tell, after watching it, that they were most certainly not.
As I said, the story follows most of the original’s plot beats, but saddles it with standard animated family movie bilge to lighten up the mood. Dudley Moore, at his most Dudley Moorest, is careerist hype master Carl Denham, with the only other somewhat major name in the cast being Jodi Benson, Ariel herself, as the voice of Ann Darrow, who is a slightly more assertive character in this version, but only just. After his corny Wild Animal Revue is kicked off of Broadway, Denham and his comic relief sidekick (a glasses-wearing sycophantic nerd who is always shown tripping over film or film equipment) hire Ann off the street to star in their mysterious film on Skull Island, alongside square-jawed sailor man Jack Driscoll, who starts off as an irascible chauvinist but in no time and with no real motivation falls in love with Ann. There’s also a kid and a monkey in a sailor suit along for the ride, who are the exact thing a generic family film would add, but otherwise contribute very little to the proceedings (the monkey does get to salute Kong’s comatose body in the end, so there’s that.) Things generally happen as you expect, although I think it takes them about as long to get to the island and Kong as it does in the Peter Jackson remake, despite being over one hundred minutes shorter. When they do get there, though, things happen at a rapid clip, with Kong’s appearance and the entire dinosaur fighting sequence being condensed to under five minutes (including a recreation of the cheesy waterfall scene from the De Laurentiis remake), and then Kong is in New York (they don’t bother to show how they transported him there in this one) for the finale.
To be honest, considering that the idea here was to make this both family-friendly and a musical, the fact that Mighty Kong followed the plot as closely as it did is a bit surprising. Usually, in parodies or pastiches of King Kong, they only really adapt the most important plot beats and then mix up everything else, and you’d especially think they’d find ways to make the relationship between Kong and Ann more blatantly friendly so that her sympathy towards him would be more understandable. I mean, they’ve been trying to make Kong cuter and nicer in every incarnation since the first one (and even the original crew from the 1933 movie did it in both Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young, with the latter of which being the original “King Kong, but with a happy ending”), so doing that in this wouldn’t have been without historical precedent. But everything in the latter half of Mighty Kong happens so quickly that we never see Kong develop a personality, or establish why Ann suddenly feels sorry for Kong when he’s being exploited in the big city (aside from just general empathy, I guess), not unlike how her romance with Jack is magicked into existence by a single saccharine musical number. You’d also think they’d try to actively involve Kong in a musical number, but they never do, which seems like a missed opportunity to me.
In reality, the only thing that really softens this version compared to previous ones are the gags and the minimally violent dinosaur fight sequences. For the latter, Kong manages to KO the T. Rex by conking it on the head once, while his battle with multiple pteranodons and a giant snake, who gang up on him for whatever reason, isn’t that much more intense. Aside from all the comic relief sidekicks putzing around the actual narrative, the biggest example of the former happens during Kong’s stroll through the streets of Manhattan, comprising a series of quick cartoon-y setpieces that seem at odds even with this fairly cartoon-y movie—pulling out a lamppost to golf club a decorative stone orb into a manhole, picking up up a car with a couple in it and then putting it on the subway tracks (where it seems to imply that they are hit by a train, although it’s so confusingly animated that it’s hard to tell), and at one point, mistaking a sign-holding doomsday prophet who looks like Jesus for Ann. All those things happening in quick succession, alongside the presence of stereotypical Irish-accented policemen, comes off as borderline surrealist.
All that aside, the first thing you’ll probably notice upon watching this movie is not only how not great the animation is, but also how inconsistently not great it is. After a pre-title scene showcasing the islanders’ human sacrifice ceremony in a borderline psychedelic mode (and despite all the promise of this being a “cleaner” version, the Skull Island natives—with their blatantly made-up language and stylized tribal-masks-as-actual-faces look—are even more dehumanized here, so this version is possibly even more racist than the one made sixty-five years earlier), you are bombarded with weirdly gelatinous main characters and background characters who often look like they’ve been pulled from a dozen different low-rent cartoons. The crew of the ship are particularly hideous, made all the worse because of the movie’s tendency towards awkwardly-framed close-ups, and I don’t much care for Jack Discroll’s bizarrely full lips, either. The musical sequences, while better paced than in something like Katy Meets the Aliens (a really high standard, I know) are aiming for the elaborate showstoppers of a Disney film, but of course aren’t up to snuff at all—and while the songs are never particularly memorable, and are often reprised in altered forms throughout the movie, you at least get some a variety (including a Polynesian-inspired number, which involves a fantasy sequence with instrument-playing animals and a moment of Ann underwater wherein she looks almost exactly like Ariel), so it’s only mostly a waste of the Sherman Brothers’ time. The musical sequences often highlight another questionable part of the animation: overuse of video effects, such as sparkly flashes and the incorporation of live action footage of smoke and water. Kong himself has an awkward design, and looks almost like he was pasted in from yet another different animated movie. It’s the kind of thing I fully expect out of obscure late nineties direct-to-video animation, but it does feel weird coming from something with the WB logo and Bugs Bunny on the box.
Then there’s the vaunted revisionist ending, which is really not much of anything—Kong falls off the Empire State Building (not because of the biplanes, which are sent and then called off, but because of a pair of dirigibles with nets, which prove mostly ineffective but also must have cost a fortune, because how many blimp companies are there hanging around in NYC?) and hits the pavement, but after Moore gets to say the famous line, Kong suddenly opens his eyes…and then the movie ends. We don’t even get to see Kong go back home, probably because that would have required an additional minute of animation, and what are they, made of money? Again, for something trying to turn this story into a lighthearted family story, they do the bare minimum to alter the story. The only really surprising thing about his last-minute revival is that they showed him hitting the back of his skull on a railing as he fell, and come on, a giant gorilla surviving that sort of head trauma, without signs of permanent brain damage? Totally unbelievable.
The King Kong story structure is such a simple, universal thing, I generally enjoy seeing how the remakes and rip-offs work with it, where they differ and where they don’t—which is why the oddest thing about The Mighty Kong (yes, even odder than some of its animation quirks) is just how little it actually changes. The premise of a sanitized version of Kong (with musical numbers!) would seemingly lead them to make something a bit more whimsical and goofy, and while there’s certainly a lot of goofy elements in the movie (a monkey in a sailor suit, for example), almost none of them are related to Kong himself, who is played mostly straight. It’s almost like once they got so far in making this sub-sub-sub-Disney animated musical with that license, they suddenly decided that they couldn’t possibly deviate more from the source material. Which is a shame, really—had this been more of an ill-conceived recreation, it would probably have been more interesting as an odd piece of Kong arcana, rather than just some obscure animated ephemera that probably confused a few unfortunate kids before being forgotten completely.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 