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.

The Faculty (1998)

Consider this a back-to-school special.

The potential pitfall of all those self-aware, meta-referencing pieces of genre entertainment—a particular specialty of the nineties—is a sense of having your cake and eating it: they point out all the tropes and cliches while actively using them, without necessarily demonstrating any original or truly subversive ideas of their own. The Faculty aims for that style of storytelling, but has at least one new-ish angle up its sleeve: it’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers set in a high school, leading to all sorts of new metaphorical possibilities for a well-worn concept. Of course, because of the style of writing, it’s a version of that concept where characters directly talk about Jack Finney’s original Body Snatchers story as well as Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, signposting all of those metaphorical possibilities before you even get a chance to really take them in. That part of the movie was, not surprisingly, the contribution of Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who was assigned by the supervillains at Miramax to revamp a script by David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel, with the directorial role given to Robert Rodriguez, coming off of From Dusk Till Dawn and his support work on Mimic. As aggressively 1998 as any movie could be, this does make some honest attempts to straddle the snarky hipness of the meta dialogue with a nominally serious Sci-Fi horror take on teenage alienation.

The Vulture (1966)

From what I’ve seen, the western-produced monster movies from the second half of the sixties very rarely show any real evolution from what was being produced a decade earlier—a movie like The Vulture could have been in theatres at any point from mid-fifties to the early sixties and would have been exactly the same, and yet it was produced well into a decade of major societal change. You wouldn’t know it from watching it, as it simply doesn’t reflect then-modern culture at all, staying in its B-movie bubble and acting as if its rather puzzling tale of science gone wrong has any bearing on anything. Based on what I’ve seen, it took years for drive-in filler like this to really start getting with the times, both thematically and visually.

Which is not to say that there is nothing novel about The Vulture—although its novelty is more in its particular choice of nonsense than in the movie itself. It was the final project of Lawrence Huntington, a British workman director with over thirty movies to his name stretching back to the thirties, and the fact that he both wrote and directed it (getting financial backing from American and Canadian studios and also an English football club?) leads one to believe that this was something of a passion project. It’s difficult to discern from the film itself what that passion was, but maybe it was in the aforementioned choice of nonsense, which represents not so much a development of the nuclear and scientific themes of the fifties creature features as it as a weird, borderline incoherent offshoot of it.

Leviathan (1989)

Released at the tail end of the eighties, Leviathan followed a string of major projects for Stan Winston—he had worked with Rob Bottin on The Thing, and after opening Stan Winston Studio, crafted the effects for The Terminator, Aliens, and Predator (as well as Invaders From Mars and Pumpkinhead), establishing that team to be the top studio for creature effects in Hollywood. Winston himself was well past his Gargoyles mask-masking days, acting as Producer of Creature Effects alongside his crew, including Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. (the latter once again tasked with wearing the monster suit), who would move on to Tremors immediately after this. With those in mind, one can’t help but look at Leviathan as a victory lap, the kind of movie that these people could make in their sleep. It doesn’t change the game like Stan Winston Studios prior projects, but it allows them another chance to show why they got those earlier movies in the first place.

Gorgo (1961)

While the giant monster movie genre originated in America, it was the productions by Japanese studios like Toho that really gave the genre its own topoi. When studios outside of Toho tackled the subject from the late fifties and into the sixties, it was always in the shadow of Godzilla and its successors, and it’s interesting to see how they responded. Surprisingly few of them really attempted to utilize the tokusatsu kaiju style, instead attempting to keep the stop motion tradition of King Kong alive—Gorgo is one of the few examples of a non-Japanese studio tackling suitmation.

You could call Gorgo a British homage to Godzilla, with “homage” being quite generous—on the other hand, Godzilla itself was a “homage” to The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, so you know, turnabout is fair play. Who is the director of this? Why, it’s Eugène Lourié, director of (the non-Ray Harryhausen parts) of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, “homaging” the “homage” to his own movie! It was also the third time he directed a light variation of “giant marine reptile attacks a city”, with the other two being The Beast and1959’s The Giant Behemoth, the latter featuring stop motion by King Kong‘s Willis O’Brien ( Lourié also directed previous site subject The Colossus of New York between those two.) Two years after Behemoth and yet another lizard from millions of years ago is battering London—but despite the clear attempt to ape from Godzilla (and despite it featuring no apes), one of the ways it differentiates itself is by eschewing the nuclear radiation fears that animated both Toho’s and Lourié’s own movies and going back to ape the plot, and sympathetic monster(s), of King Kong (which does feature apes.) Coming out in the same year as Toho’s Mothra, which also has a Kong-esque plot, there seemed to have been a convergent sense of nostalgia in the giant monster genre at the time.

GUNHED (1989)

There seemed to be a certain level of ambition behind GUNHED—it was created through a collaboration between some of Japan’s biggest franchise hitmakers, including Toho, Bandai, Gundam creators Sunrise, Kadokawa, and special effects house Imagica, who formed the “Gunhed Production Committee” (there was also a manga produced by noted author Kia Asamiya, but I don’t know if that preceded the movie or not.) It’s also a movie that makes no bones about existing in the shadow of James Cameron, shamelessly pilfering imagery and ideas from both Terminator and Aliens in order to construct an action epic full of apocalyptic tech graveyards and danger-filled corridors. What you get is, essentially, a story set in a variation of Terminator‘s future war zone, pitting man against ruthless machines, except with classic Toho kaiju effects from the early days of the Heisei era—effects Koichi Kawakita, who had been at the company since the early sixties, directed the effects for all but one of the Heisei Godzilla movies and the first two Mothra movies, and even worked on Zone Fighter—and the addition of a friendly battle mech, a very late eighties Japanese take on a very eighties American concept.

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.

The Monsters of Metroid

In their early days, it was a proud tradition for video games to aspire to be “the game version of X”, where X was some other piece of popular culture—one could argue that it still is a tradition, it’s just that they’re better at hiding it (or are legally obligated to.) Back in the eighties, it was a copyright-skirting free-for-all, and developers were looking to take something else and put their video game spin on it—that’s the mindset that gave us Konami series like Castlevania, Contra, and Metal Gear, which were very blatant mash-ups of multiple movies, and it’s the same mindset at play in Nintendo’s long-running Metroid series, which began as a pastiche of Alien. This is not speculation on my part—as longtime series developer Yoshio Sakamoto (who started out as a designer and has since moved on to director and producer roles on most of the later games in the series) said in an interview: “I think the film Alien had a huge influence on the production of the first Metroid game. All of the team members were affected by HR Giger’s design work, and I think they were aware that such designs would be a good match for the Metroid world we had already put in place.” There are many games that look to Alien for inspiration (and maybe even more that look to its sequel—but Metroid actually released in Japan a little over a month after Aliens, and likely didn’t have to chance to be inspired by it), but it still feels like the entire Metroid series is the one that can claim the title of being “the game version of Alien.”. It’s not because the games have consistently been exactly like the movies—although there are certainly some parallels one could make—but because, more than any other video games, they are the ones that absorbed aspects of the 1979 movie’s core tension, the sense of strangeness and otherworldly menace, and iterated on them, maybe even more than that movie’s sequels.

The Mutations/The Freakmaker (1974)

As I was saying before, British horror became increasingly salacious as the years wore on, as evidenced by The Mutations (known in some places as The Freakmaker)—by1974, a typical mad scientist yarn was given additional sensationalist subject matter and multiple gratuitous scenes of topless women. On top of that, it attempts to mash up a storyline swipe from a thriller classic with a barely compatible monster movie plot, just like It!/Curse of the Golem (and, hey, Jill Haworth is in this one, too!)—in this case, that would be Tod Browning’s 1932 cult favourite Freaks, with its cast of real sideshow performers providing authenticity to a bit of drama set at a travelling carnival. Some of the lifts are really quite blatant, too—but a little lack of originality was apparently worth it to make something that could capitalize on the spectacle, and seems to revel in the truly downbeat and icky feeling of seventies exploitation films, even while saddled with a Sci-Fi element pulled right out of the fifties.

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.