Kong: The Animated Series

In another time, on another website, I wrote parallel analyses of a Godzilla cartoon and a King Kong cartoon, two series with no real relationship to each other that nonetheless called for comparison due to the title monsters’ interlocking history. Decades later, television was briefly rocked by the arrival of another Godzilla cartoon and another King Kong cartoon (and not the other other King Kong cartoon that I already wrote about), but this time their proximity was far closer and their parallel existence seemed far more intentional. Wikipedia and the fan sites that steal from Wikipedia claim that Kong: The Animated Series, a product of the Bohbot/BKN cartoon factory alongside French animation studios Ellipsanime and M6, was created to “rival” the FOX-airing Godzilla: The Series, starting its two-season, forty-episode run just as the other series was ending, airing briefly on FOX and in syndication from 2000 to 2001. As one would expect from anything said about a piece of pop culture ephemera on the Internet, there is no source for that claim, and most of the surviving press releases and industry pieces from the time I browsed made no mention of Godzilla—but I can at least understand where the assumption came from. In the year 2000, with nothing going on in the series movie-wise, what other reason would someone have to make a King Kong cartoon but to pit it against the ape’s scaly counterpart?

Of course, the caveat there is that, despite all appearances, Kong: The Animated Series is probably not an official King Kong cartoon (I also think it stole its logo from the movie Congo, which definitely won’t be featured on this site soon very soon.) Rather than a revival, even if an odd one, this is actually a clever theft that likely fooled every child in its audience with its quasi-authenticity. But, as it turns out, that is only one of the many strange things I discovered by digging up this copyright-eliding incarnation of the world’s premier giant primate.

Mighty Joe Young (1949)

The profound cinema influence of King Kong rests not only in the fantasy it effectively brought to life, but in the tragedy at the core of its story, both conveyed in the mythic terms of early cinema. Yet one of the most interesting things about the creative minds behind Kong—producer Merian C. Cooper, director Ernest B. Schoedsack and his screenwriter wife Ruth Rose, and stop motion animator Willis O’Brien—is that they essentially remade their greatest creation twice, and in both cases tried to put a much more optimistic spin on the story. This started shockingly early with Son of Kong, released nine months (nine months!) after the original, and is a movie that I think has very interesting as a follow-up (I’ll probably write about it someday); it then came rolling back over a decade-and-half later with Mighty Joe Young, which saw the old gang working together one last time to unknowingly usher in the next decade of monster movies. This intentional softening of Kong‘s giant ape melodrama may in some ways seem like a commercial decision, to make it more kid-friendly (more kid-friendly than King Kong, a movie that fascinated children for decades), but the interpretation I’ve always preferred is that it’s the result of a deep guilt: they had created a resonant tale of humanity exploiting and destroying natural wonder and beauty, as represented by a beast both terrifying and sympathetic, and it’s terribly sad to think that such a thing could only ever be a tragic monster laying dead on the Manhattan concrete. Mighty Joe Young manages to capture many of those same themes, but in its deviations from the Kong template, it demonstrates that there is another way for it all to end.

Konga (1961)

In order to better understand the essence of the classic Giant Ape Movie, I’ve sought the many riffs on King Kong that have improbably filled movie theatres over multiple decades, and I think I may have finally seen all the most notable examples—which is really not saying much. Konga is one of the only ones that was released well before the banana gold rush of big apes that occurred around the release of the 1976 Kong remake, and so has a unique late fifties/early sixties B-movie vibe when compared to the others—I can imagine it was at least partially made because of the successful theatrical re-releases of the original Kong throughout the fifties, which really raised that movie’s cultural stock. But despite being from an entirely different era of movies, it still ultimately falls in line with the brazen schlock that came to define the giant gorilla genre, setting a standard for the films that followed, and not a particularly high one.

King Kung Fu (1976/1987)

It’s December and you can already hear the sound of carols filling the air, which means it’s time for another round of Christmas Apes—and the seventies are at it again with yet another low budget King Kong parody, and one with a history as strange as the previous ones. King Kung Fu was a project by local Wichita, Kansas filmmakers Bob Walterschied (producer) and Lance D. Hayes (writer/director) that they hoped would potentially bring the movie business to their state, but after filming from 1974 to 1976 (when they hoped to take advantage of the King Kong remake’s premier), they ran out of money before they could finish editing the movie. It was eventually completed and had a very small theatrical run in 1987, and who did they hire as editor in the end? Why, it was Herbert L. Strock, director of previous subject Gog. Funny how that works out.

You saw the title, so you can probably tell that this is a movie that combines Kong with the martial arts movies that were also popular at the time, but in reality this is meant to be a vehicle for extremely goofy comedy, another pre-Airplane spoof that tries hard to live up to its live action cartoon potential. I’ve always thought that a guy in a gorilla suit doing stuff is inherently funny—some may call it cheap entertainment, but I like to think of it as economical entertainment—so watching a full-length film consisting mostly of that is a real test of my beliefs. What it really feels like is a ninety-minute long Hilarious House of Frightenstein sketch, embracing its low production values, mostly amateur local actors, and dopey sense of humour in a way that is maybe hard to gush about, but is also hard to hate. Despite not being released until the eighties, too, the hair, clothes, and pretty much everything else indicate that we are once again dealing with the Most Seventies thing ever, which is the third year in a row that I’ve said that.

Queen Kong (1976)

With a chill in the air and the sidewalks slick with ice patches ready to instigate comedic pratfalls and concussions, we all know what time of the year it is: time for the return of Christmas Apes, a month-long celebration of seismic simians in the media. Just like last year, I’ll be beginning with another trip to the magical year of 1976, where everyone was putting men in gorilla suits in order to cash in on the imminent release of the hotly anticipated Dino De Laurentiis remake of King Kong. Yes, everyone was indeed wanting to ape that ape—the big difference between the other two Kong klones from that time, which I wrote about last Christmas Apes season, and Queen Kong is that only the latter got hit with an infringement suit, with both RKO (the original distributors of Kong Kong) and the De Laurentiis Company managing to block its theatrical release in all but a few countries. Director and co-writer Frank Agrama is mainly known as the CEO of Harmony Gold, which was a major distributor of anime in the eighties (specifically Robotech), of which there seems to be many heated opinions—he was also a business associate of infamous Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and ended up being convicted of tax fraud.

As you can probably tell, there’s a lot of seediness all around this production, which at least feels appropriate: this a relatively lowbrow spoof, going for a manic absurdity that would be perfected in Airplane!, but doesn’t land all that often here (maybe they were a little ahead of their time—they even have a singing nun on a plane joke, just like Airplane!) The primary source of comedy seems to be all the gender reversals at play (which was also part of their legal argument in the copyright case), which isn’t so much commenting on gender roles in the original King Kong as it is a way to revel in broad ridiculousness and a condescending view of second-wave feminism. It even has a theme song (played by The Peppers, who appear in the movie wearing ape masks under the name The Orangotangs), which is full of bass and includes lines such as “She’s the queenie for my weenie” and “When I’m feelin’ mighty spunky/I want to do it with my hunky monkey.” In short, and I’m pretty sure I’ve said this about every one of these seventies giant ape movies, but this feels like the most seventies thing in existence.

A*P*E (1976)

There is a very specific reason why I am writing a post about the 1976 movie film A*P*E (I refuse to type it any other way), and that’s because I have been regularly using an image from it on the Internet for years. I probably had no idea where the picture/GIF of the gorilla suit man flipping us off originated from, but I knew in an instant that it was a perfect visual, one that would provide endless amusement and would have an infinite number of applications in my everyday existence online. Do I need to respond to someone I don’t like? The gorilla is there! Do I need something to properly represent my mood? The gorilla is there! Do I just want to make myself laugh? The gorilla is there! I have always kept that image somewhere in my files, and since I learned of where it came from, I considered checking that out, just to see how a bird-flipping-gorilla fit into an actual movie. Now that I have seen it, I’m still not entirely sure it is a movie.

I’ve written about some lower budget or lower quality productions in the series (looking at you, Frogs), but I haven’t quite gotten into the truly bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. That ever-dropping barrel bottom, though, is an important part of monster movie history, especially in the fifties and sixties, when barely coherent excuses for film (which were sometimes imported films, but not always) found their way into cinemas, often as part of double bills. Sitting through something like The Creeping Terror or The Beast of Yucca Flats was a rite of passage for many burgeoning monster fans, as they promised terrifying delight, but mostly provided endless tedium because unexciting things are cheaper to film—basic competence was no longer a guarantee. These movies provided good examples of what separates different kinds of schlock: while some movies may not have coherent plots, consistent special effects, or top tier acting, they at least have ideas, style, or atmosphere—others seem like they could have been home movies (and some of them pretty much were), and contain so little of what they advertised that they are basically a scam. A movie like Inframan is super silly, but it feels like the people making it knew what they were doing in the end. A movie like A*P*E on the other hand…

The Mighty Peking Man (1977)

There’s one very important area of monsterdom that I haven’t covered yet in this series: apes! After all, are we not all creature feature fanatics because of a certain giant gorilla from long ago? That’s why December is going to be another themed month, which I am dubbing “Christmas Apes”, all about our fellow simian citizens. And, almost as if I do plan these things ahead of time, our first monkey movie is, in fact, the follow-up to last week’s Super Inframan. What a segue!

The release of Dino De Laurentiis’ 1976 remake of King Kong caused a massive gold rush in giant ape movies, with production companies the world over putting people in gorilla suits and filming them climbing miniature buildings. It probably made even more sense for Shaw Brothers to get in on the action only a year or two after they made Super Inframan, where they showed some skill in making rubber suit monsters work in their style—so, studio co-founder Runme Shaw produced The Mighty Peking Man, the Hong Kong giant’s take on a giant taking Hong Kong. Much like Inframan, Peking Man follows the template set by another studio’s production and adds some inventive genre mashing and classic seventies exploitation silliness, but this one feels like it’s trying to be somewhat more of a “real” movie, so it never reaches the heights of hyperactive goofiness. Which isn’t to say that Mighty Peking Man is not goofy—because, boy, it sure is—but the pleasures in it are more in its peculiar interpretations of both the Kong narrative and the old-fashioned (even back then) jungle adventure genre, as well as some choices that are so seventies they might as well be wearing bell bottoms and carrying around a pet rock.