I have seen it many times. I own a copy. One of my favorite films.
Carl Denham is first class bastard.
Man: The airplanes got him in the end.
Carl: No, twas beauty that killed the beast
Me: Actually Carl, I think this is all your fault.
That’s something PJ got right in his version of King Kong: Jack Black was Carl Denham.
This was almost certainly my exposure as well ( I’m not quite 46 ). For some reason Son of Kong, Mighty Joe Young and the “glory” that was Godzilla vs. King Kong all seemed more ubiquitous in my possibly shaky memory ( but see below ), but I’ve definitely seen the original several times. All before third grade ( when we moved out of NYC ) and never since.
Odd that. I’ve never really thought about it, but I’ve never seen the original as an adult. I believe the SF Bay Area’s great Creature Features w/ Bob Wilkins showed several of those ape films, but I don’t recall seeing the original on that program. My only current memory is from NYC.
Own it, love it, and watch it several times a year. Even after factoring in the age, I still consider it one of the best movies of all time.
It’s a pretty hard nosed flick. The deaths are brutal, and they don’t attempt to make Kong very sympathetic. Hell, he pulls a terrified blonde out of her room and then throws her to her death at one point. And yet you end up feeling sorry for him anyways.
Don’t care much for the remakes, though I wanted to. They take a force of nature and turn him into a schmaltzy, love-besotted anti-hero.
(I still don’t get why the village wall has giant doors, however. Those must’ve been a bitch to hang.)
I don’t remember the details, but in King Kong vs. Godzilla the big guy comes into the village to save them from the giant octopus. Maybe they opened the door for him in circumstances like that. But it seems like he could have just climbed over the wall anyway so I don’t even see the wall as doing that much good.
According to The Making of King Kong by Orville Goldner and George El. Turner (1975) (Goldner was one of the effects crew on the original Kong, so he knew whereof he spoke):
(p. 58)
p. 131
Marcel Delado was the chied model maker, who’d worked with O’brien for years, and certainly wouldn’t have kept quiet about any misgivings.
Goldner and Turner’s book was republished in what was advertised as an “expanded”: edition as Spawn of Skull Island several years ago, but that edition severely reduced the sizes of many of the originally full-paged illustrations, and reproduced them badly. I think they may have left some material out, too. The added material doesn’t make up for it.
Is their any record of what ever became of the original rabbit fur Kong model?
There were multiple armatures built and used for the film. One was re-used for Son of Kong. Over the years most vanished. One of them was on display at a place called Movie World in California when I was a kid. I never got out there, but there were pictures in Famous Monsters of Filmland. It had long ago lost the fur and the foam rubber musxcles, and was just a bare skeleton*.
It’s now in the possession of film historian Bob Burns:
*Animation models have a surprisingly short lifetime, and begin to fall apart almost after the film is finished, it seems. When I saw pictures of Harryhausen’s models through the years, they were frequently spalling and peeling.
Christies auctioned off what was claimed to be an armature a couple of years ago. I don’t think it’s the Burns one. It might be one of the other Kong armatures said to have been made
This Christie’s site says that it’s the armature used for the Empire State Building scenes:
More discussion than you probabnly want on armatures from Kong:
Bob Wilkins never showed anything anywhere near that good. A lot of movies that showed up later on MST3K, I saw previously on Creature Features (“Horror of Party Beach” was definitely one)
Thought this Youtube link would be relevant.
Seen it, loved it, own it. 
“Hattie McDaniel’s sister in a coconut bra.”
Now there’s where you bring your A game to bar trivia night.
I saw the full-length (or fuller-length than shortened… whatever…) version as a kid, and I remember being absolutely terrified by all the jungle scenes, particularly with everybody falling to their deaths and getting stomped on by Kong. And, in Faye’s case, stripped. Once they got back to the US, the movie kinda screeched to a halt.
But, still, a great movie.