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.

Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965)

This October will mark five years since I started writing monster media reviews on a regular basis—and almost two hundred movies (and dozens of other things) later, I know that there’s still plenty left out there. For this year’s Halloween season, most of my subjects will be themed around sneakily breaking my own personal rules when it comes to subject matter—since this project began, I steadfastly avoided covering movies based on the “traditional” monsters of horror, things like vampires, werewolves, and the undead. For me, those represent their own little corners of culture, with their own histories and tropes and meanings that have already been examined in great detail, offering less for me to dig into than the vast “miscellaneous” monster category.

However, if one were to find movies that are ostensibly about those most famous of monsters, but with some kind of twist…

In that spirit, we’re starting this Halloween month off with a film that name checks one of most well-known monsters in history…that’s right, the Space Monster (or Spacemonster, depending on how seriously you take the stark-looking opening titles of the movie.) But anyone coming to this looking for a traditional Space Monster story are going to be in for a shock, because this is really an in-name-only Space Monster movie—it is actually an odd duck mash-up of retro Sci-Fi movie concepts and early sixties cultural trends, a drive-in chimera if there ever was one. If you squint real hard you might be able to make out the Space Monster spirit hidden somewhere in this bricolage, but that is only one minor ingredient among many.

The Return of Swamp Thing (1989)

As previously reported, there was much ado about Swamp Thing between the 1982 release of Wes Craven’s film adaptation and its belated 1989 sequel—on the back of that original movie, DC relaunched the comic series, and a year or two into that run, it was given to Alan Moore, John Totleben, Stephen Bissette, Rick Veitch, et. al., who reinvented the character through their journeys into “Sophisticated Suspense.” The opening credits for The Return of Swamp Thing features a montage of comics covers from the entire series run, showcasing striking images by Totleben, Bissette, Richard Corben, and character co-creator Bernie Wrightson, among others—playing over that montage is, of course, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Born on the Bayou”, indicating that the tone of this movie is probably nothing like those comics. Nor is it anything like Wes Craven’s movie, which was sincere to a fault, while, for better or for worse, this doesn’t have a sincere bone in its swamp debris body.

Nightbreed (1990)

By the late eighties, Clive Barker had enough clout in the movie world that he could pursue bigger and grander projects, including writing and directing an adaptation of his dark fantasy novel Cabal, which constructed a mythology tailor-made to appeal to the horror and monster-loving outsiders of the world. “Humans are the real monsters” is a common enough theme (that’s why I have an entire tag for it), but Cabal and its film counterpart Nightbreed might be the most blatant examples, presenting a story that explores the allure of the monstrous and the macabre, especially to the disenfranchised, and pitting it against the violent prejudice of the close-minded mass of mainstream society. In interviews, Barker explains this story in terms of obvious fantasies that monsters let us live out—of possessing immortality and other amazing abilities—but it also clearly draws a connection between monsters and underground subcultures, often similarly persecuted, which I’m sure was a very meaningful thing for an openly gay writer like Barker to explore, especially at the very end of the AIDS-haunted eighties. So the subversion in having the monsters be the “good guys” in the scenario carries a lot of weight.

Before I get into the bulk of the post, I should clarify which version of Nightbreed I watched—because this was famously one of those movies that the studio mishandled completely, leading to some crucial changes to the final product that in turn led to multiple cuts of the movie existing. The original 1990 theatrical version was 102 minutes; altered and removed footage was rediscovered in the late 2000s and early 2010s, which were re-inserted into what is called the Cabal Cut and has been re-released with lengths from 145 minutes to 159 minutes. The version I went with was the 2014 Director’s Cut put out by Shout! Factory, which is just over two hours long and utilizes footage from the Cabal Cut. None of us want to be here all day, so I won’t go over the differences between the versions.

Gamera 2000

A while back, I wrote about the history of Godzilla-based video games, and how perplexing it is that such an important pop cultural figure—with a particular influence on video games—has almost no truly notable games to his name. The disproportionate “Influence on games vs. Actual presence in games” history you see in Godzilla might actually be more pronounced in Godzilla’s former kaiju movie counterpart Gamera: there are innumerable Japanese-made games featuring turtles—whether it be a Pokemon, Bowser, or a random Mega Man enemy—where the turtle tucks into its shell and spins around, and every one of those instances is a direct reference to Gamera; and yet, there are only a tiny handful of games featuring the giant, fire-breathing friend to all children. While there might be fewer Godzilla games than you’d expect, there are certainly a lot more of them than there are games based on Gamera.

Part of that is just a result of the two franchises’ histories: Godzilla returned after a decade-long hiatus just as console games were really taking off in Japan, giving him ample opportunity to be adapted into video games from the Famicom days to now. Gamera’s final film for a good long while was 1980’s extra-length clipshow Gamera: Super Monster, and with that movie making a shambles of the monster’s reputation (and original studio Daiei long dead), Gamera was no longer a going concern, and was seemingly relegated to exclusively being a nostalgic reference for certain generations of Japanese (and western) fans. Not surprisingly, then, the first Gamera video games (all Japanese-only, also not surprising) did not appear until the mid-nineties, tied in directly with the high profile revival of the series through Shusuke Kaneko’s Gamera: Guardian of the Universe—for a brief period, Gamera went from having zero games to a couple of them, and much like the Gamera movies themselves, these games basically followed the same trajectory as the Godzilla games, in microcosm.

That means there that no two Gamera games played even remotely alike, and most of them even seemed to buck conventional wisdom when it comes to making licensed video games. Where a traditional genre cash-in would make sense, they instead went about the things in a sideways manner, creating games that are more perplexing than fun. That brief time where Gamera games were coming out with no real direction, however, did at least produce one interesting result: 1997’s Gamera 2000, the one Gamera game that received some notoriety outside of Japan, with import copies receiving a few surprisingly positive reviews from western game magazines of the time. In this case, an unexpected take on a giant monster game actually resonated.

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.

The Iron Giant (1999)

Despite the neglect of the studio heads initially hindering its box office performance, animator Brad Bird’s directorial debut The Iron Giant became a cult hit whose acclaim and influence only grew over time. Very very loosely based on the book The Iron Man by British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (which, it should be noted, ends with the titular character matching wits with a continent-sized space dragon in order to create world peace), it is a classic story of a kid befriending an otherworldly being and finding both outside acceptance and self-acceptance, themes that will likely always resonate. It’s also a unique piece of American animation, made as the boom of traditionally animated movies was on the downswing, but nonetheless doing many things very differently than the animation norm of the nineties. Most importantly for us on this site, though, it’s also a homage to, and critical analysis, of the Science Fiction and monster movies of the 1950s, using decades of hindsight to craft a portrayal that captures all the complexities of that time. Despite feeling very modern—well, modern for 1999 I guess—it still very accurately reflects many of the ideological components of those older movies, something I’ve only really come to appreciate after becoming more immersed in the source material.

The Herculoids

As I learned from Mark McCray’s book The Best Saturdays of Our Lives, 1966-1968 was the short-lived reign of superhero action cartoons on Saturday morning TV, building off the success of Filmation’s The New Adventures of Superman—over a dozen series in this genre from all the major cartoon producers premiered in the fall of 1967. This trend was short-lived because those shows became the target of parental groups and publications that criticized the violence (McCray contextualizes this by noting the atmosphere of the US in the midst of the Vietnam War, making some people much more sensitive to what their kids were being exposed to), and by the end of the decade they were replaced by musical comedies, while the “action” shows that came down the pike in the seventies were severely defanged. Anyone born in the last few decades would probably watch any of those sixties action shows and be flabbergasted that anyone would consider them too much of anything—that’s just a sign of how things change.

During that brief two-year superhero cartoon buzz, one of the big pushers of the genre was Hanna-Barbera, who seemingly had a hit with their series Space Ghost & Dino Boy in 1966, and so in 1967 managed to produce a half-dozen new shows in a similar vein (it makes more sense when you consider that they were making cartoons for all three of the big networks at the time, but it’s still a lot.) Almost none of them lasted for more than twenty episodes, although it’s hard to tell if it was because of that anti-violence backlash or just Hanna-Barbera’s typical cut-and-run style of production. As surprising as it may sound for a company not known for originality, H-B did try to find ways to differentiate all these shows from each other, leading to a decent variety of settings and concepts— from that we got our present subject, The Herculoids, whose distinguishing element was that the titular heroes were a team of monsters (with a human family guiding them) protecting their extraterrestrial home from various generic sci-fi threats. This series aired eighteen episodes (thirty-six ten-minute segments) and then halted, but it had enough of an impact that it was briefly revived in the early eighties, alongside Space Ghost, as part of the package series Space Stars. The characters of Herculoids have made cameos or been referenced in later Hanna-Barbera-related series, especially Adult Swim stuff like Harvey Birdman, Attorney At Law (coincidentally, the original Birdman series premiered at the same time as Herculoids), so I had some knowledge of the series through cultural osmosis, and its concept would obviously intrigue me—its combination of a “primitive” setting with science fiction, and its clear appeal to kids who were in the midst of a kaiju renaissance in the mid-sixties, is both completely of its time and also still fairly unique.

Swamp Thing (1982)

1982 turned out to be one of the most influential years in genre filmmaking, hosting movies that reverberated whether they were an initial box office success or not. In a time when ET, Blade Runner, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, and Poltergeist all premiered within weeks of each other, there was also John Carpenter’s The Thing, a critical and financial failure at the time that nonetheless ushered in a new wave of revisionist monster movies, taking the ideas from the classic creature features of the fifties and revitalizing them with dark humour and special effects that realized or exceeded people’s imaginations. Later that same year you also saw Q -The Winged Serpent, another movie in that vein, but the real kick-off for this trend was Wes Craven’s adaptation of Swamp Thing—and while just as indebted to the classic tropes of the old monster movies as The Thing (and was also a financial disappointment at release, leaving Craven in career doldrums until he started working on something called A Nightmare on Elm Street), it represents a very different sort of revisionist take. While The Thing took the paranoia and unknowable monstrosity of its fifties predecessor (and the short story it’s based on) to its utmost extreme, Swamp Thing is a movie about a tragic accident of science, as many of the classic monsters were, who then becomes a hero, playing into the sympathies of a whole generation who questioned why the Creature From the Black Lagoon and Frankenstein had to die before the movie ended.

Digimon Adventure (1999) & Digimon Adventure: Our War Game! (2000)

Bandai was pretty quick to expand on their line of Digimon virtual pet toys after they debuted in 1997 (as I wrote in my post about Digimon as a franchise from a while back), commissioning both an anime television series and a theatrical short at the same time, and eventually deciding to have the latter act as a prequel to the former—the short premiered as part of one of Toei Animation’s film festivals the day before the series began. That a company like Bandai would want to get in on the multimedia action ASAP is not a surprise (they’re also heavily involved in both Ultraman and Kamen Rider as well), and I can imagine that the meteoric rise of Pokémon at around the same time encouraged them to hype up their own battling monster concept as much as possible. But there’s a lot more going on in the early days of Digimon’s animation history, which makes it more interesting than just another toy franchise getting some spin-offs.

First and foremost, there’s the involvement of animator Mamoru Hosoda. Hosoda had really wanted to work for Studio Ghibli, and while his application was rejected, he was encouraged by Hiyao Miyazaki himself to continue pursuing his art. He then found work at Miyazaki’s old stomping grounds at Toei, and eventually was given the role of directing the Digimon Adventure short, impressing Toei enough that a year later he also directed the next Digimon film, Our War Game!, which in turn impressed the heads of Ghibli enough that they finally decided to hire him (meanwhile, those two short films were haphazardly cobbled together with two later Digimon films, and a soundtrack of contemporary pop songs, to create the English-language Digimon: The Movie, released theatrically in October 2000. This blog post is about the original Japanese versions, as the English compilation would probably be better suited for an Ink & Pain post.) Hosoda was intended to direct Howl’s Moving Castle, but creative clashes with the studio convinced him to leave, which led to Miyazaki taking over the project (an experience that seems to have left Hosoda with some long standing bitterness that has shown up in his subsequent films and in interviews.) In the two decades since, Hosoda has directed a string of acclaimed and award-winning animated films including The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Wolf Children, and Mirai, all praised for their distinctive animation and emotional content (his 2009 film Summer Wars, in terms of theme and story, is essentially a re-imagining of Our War Game!) And to think, it all started with Digimon.