In an age where much ado is made about computer animated creatures like The Hulk and Gollum, one forgets that sixty years ago, a fantastic giant monster movie was made with painstaking frame by frame animation of an 18 inch model!  Despite its age, King Kong still stands out as one of the most fantastic and thrilling monster movies ever made, setting the stage for giant monster movies for decades to come.

When Kong was first released in 1933, it had the most successful opening weekend of the time.  Bear in mind, this was in an age when you didn’t have 2000 theaters ready to show it at once.  In fact, when Kong premiered at TWO of New York’s biggest movie houses, it was considered extravagant.   The film grossed $90,000.  The amount seems a pittance, but when you consider the average ticket price was a mere 15 cents at the time, that would translate to a $5.4 Million opening in with today’s $9 average cost.  And again, this was the gross from TWO THEATERS!

FUN FACT: One interesting logic flaw in King Kong was the giant wall built to hold him away from the native village on Skull Island.  Why on earth did they even bother making that big door, anyway?

Kong also holds the distinction of being the first film successful enough to be re-released.  Prior to that, “older” films never saw the light of day again in first run theater.  Its also one of the first films to get censored to appease conservative studio bosses, fearful that Kong was a bit too shocking and gruesome with his behavior.  Here’s a look at the scenes that were cut from rereleased versions of Kong that were not restored until nearly 40 years later, and even then many versions shown on TV failed to bring them back.

When Kong first escapes from his holding pen on Skull Island, he decides to chew up a few natives like luscious bits of popcorn.

Another cut scene featured a native getting stomped by Kong’s giant foot, and smashed into a pulp!

click thumbnails to see the full sized image

Kong certainly had a way with the ladies, but the censors felt that this scene where he actually strips pieces of clothing off Fay Wray was a bit too racy.  In one hilarious bit, he actually tickles her breasts, then SNIFFS HIS FINGER!

Surprisingly, this scene where Fay swims away from Kong was not cut, even though freeze frames clearly show her breasts hanging out in plain site.  Of course, DVDs were about 7 decades in the future, so perverts like me had a hard time catching it.

Once Kong decides to visit New York, he continues his man chewing rampage, grabbing this poor soul and chewing him to bits, despite his Botany 500 wardrobe.

Of course, Kong wasn’t the only beast that wanted to munch the hapless humans.  This dinosaur chewed up an unfortunate adventurer and tossed him around like a ragdoll (it was a ragdoll!) long before the director of Jurassic Park was even born.

Probably the most disturbing scene that was cut also took place in New York, in which Kong picks the wrong lady out of a window, then chucks her several stories to her doom when he realizes its not Fay Wray.

A rare still photo from the never found removed “giant spider” scene from King Kong, which was cut after the 1st test screening was performed.

Though these scenes have since been restored, there’s one sequence that was removed after the 1st screening, and has been lost forever.  When Kong shakes people off a giant log and they fall into the valley below, the original print featured giant crabs and spiders waiting below who proceeded to make a meal of them.  The director saw that the audience found this to be so shocking, they forgot all about the menace of Kong himself, so he proceeded to cut it out the next day.

Peter Jackson did an excellent job “restoring” the scene using a stop motion style that honors the original. You can find it on the lovely deluxe restored edition of King Kong from a few years back…

I’ve merged a separate article I’ve written about that with this one below…

Among the numerous lush pre-production sketches exists this one which shows a giant crab attacking and an offscreen tentacled beast going to town on the hapless souls trapped in the ravine of doom.  Clearly there were plans to create the scene, but there was no actual hard evidence that it was filmed…

…until this photo surfaced in Forrest Ackerman’s magazine, “Famous Monsters of Filmland”, which showed a spider, and some sort of lizard/gator hybrid in the background.

The two photos were the only “real world” trace of the footage which still hadn’t been found even decades after the original cut was made.

Popular legend says that Cooper cut the footage because it was “too shocking” when shown to a test audience, but as the screen capture of one of Cooper’s notes from one of the special features in the new Kong DVD shows, “…so don’t know about the spider sequences.  After all I invented them, and personally cut them out of the rough studio print of “King Kong”  They stopped the story”. It was cut merely to tighten up the pacing and keep the focus of the terror on Kong.

But still, even though it was the director’s choice to remove the scene, fans of King Kong have long been clamoring for it to surface.  With the likelihood of the Spider-Pit Scene showing up more than 70 years after it was removed almost non-existent, Peter Jackson (director of the 2005 Kong remake), decided to pay tribute to the scene and film a new one as a special feature for the Warner Brothers DVD release.  A documentary about the effort on the disc shows Jackson brought together his brightest FX guys from his WETA studios, along with creature creator legend Rick Baker and screenwriter Frank Darabont to brainstorm exactly how it would be put together.

One thing they discovered while pondering how to recreate the missing  scene, is that there’s actually another cut scene as well.  Many folks wonder why the men simply don’t run back to the other side once Kong starts shaking the log bridge, but this photos shows that there’s a dinosaur on the other side who’s equally hellbent on causing them trouble.

Peter Jackson, being the super King Kong fan with Lord of the Rings money to burn, actually owns the model from the 1933 film, pictured above.  The brilliant stop-motion animation artifact is in such a horrible shape, that it could never be used again without falling apart.  The animators wanted to get a good look at the metal skeleton structure underneath so they could make an exact replica of the model, but agreed that tearing off the rubber skin and exterior of such an important piece of film history would be criminal.

So they had the inspired idea to bring the model to a hospital and have it x-rayed.  The results allowed them to not only duplicate the complex mechanics without destroying the model, but revealed an amazing set of bellows that were used to simulate the creature’s breathing.  They never even considered such a thing existed inside of it.  The WETA team went to work and built a perfect modern replica of the dino.  Further research revealed that the original dino model was actually used for a bit in the goofy sequel Son of Kong, so they were able to see how the original animator Marcel Delgado intended his movements to look like.

The animators went on to painstakingly recreate the crabs and other creatures that waited in the valley below.  If you look on the wall over his right shoulder, you can see what the metal skeleton of the original King Kong puppet looked like.

Not only were stop motion puppets made of the monsters, but in the true sprit of 1930s special effects, they were created for the people/dinner as well.

Once the sets were duplicated and filming was ready to begin, in true fan film form, the victims were cast with animators who actually created the creatures.  The pictures that follow are screen captures from the recreated scene which can only be seen as an extra on the collector’s edition DVD of King Kong.

It’s a charming bit of fun with effects that is delightfully faithful to the technology of the time.  Jackson states, “I don’t intend it to be a piece of serious film archaeology”, but stresses their work is just a fun simulation of what might have been.

If you’re a fan of great cinema, the King Kong DVD set is well worth ever penny.  In addition to fun extra features of this sort, you get a brilliant restoration of the entire film, with all the hair, scratches, and dust removed.  The restoration  is not “George Lucasified” with reshot scenes and upgrades, but looks just like it did when it was first shown back in 1933.

Thanks to Peter Jackson for showing the well deserved love for this film and making this for us all to enjoy.

-Robert Berry
rberry@retrocrush.com