Let us, for argument’s sake, assume the events in the 1933 classic film King Kong were based on real, historical events, which, obviously, would have taken place some years before the '33 docudrama.
What effect would this have on History?
Would American aircraft design be impeded by politicians who thought the biplane was “good enough”? Or accelerated, to make up for perceived deficiencies? Would specialty Attack Aircraft (ever unpopular with the military brass in the US) gain support?
Would general military preparedness be stepped-up?
What about police powers? Expanded?
What effect would this have on zoos? Circuses? Exotic animal imports?
In that hypothetical, I think it would depend - is Kong the last of his kind? If so, no changes, but lots and lots of journalism about “The Next Kong” and probable increases in well-funded expeditions to the “lost areas” in various continents.
If there are many such Kong-kaiju, then I see it going one of two ways. First, huge efforts to capture and keep said animals for bragging / political weight, think China’s panda diplomacy writ big (heh). Or two, they’d be seen as a thread and said habitat would be shelled out of existence from offshore with main battleships.
It would be a reset button on everything we know about biology, and probably physics.
The square-cube law limits how big animals can get, at least not without running into serious other constraints (low metabolism, huge leg cross-section, etc.). A normally-proportioned gorilla that’s simply 10x as large in every dimension throws a wrench into this. It would need special organs to get rid of heat, some way of massively reducing weight and increasing bone strength, hyper-efficient lungs, and other things. And then it has to be reconciled with the rest of evolution–how did this gorilla get all of these features while not evolving in any other way? It would almost have to be artificial. But then, what made it? Aliens?
I can definitely see the US military upgrading from .30 cal machine guns to .50 cal machine guns much quicker as standard on aircraft seeing how long it took to down King Kong with the .30s. Possibly even 20mm cannons standard on American fighters by 1941.
“Get to your plane and hit it with your 20 mm cannon!”
“Are we sure that’ll kill it?”
“A 20 mm cannon will kill anything!”
I dunno… Fundamentally, King Kong is just a big animal. He’s bigger than an elephant, but I don’t think he’s enough bigger to be qualitatively different, in terms of how we need to respond to him. A big animal that unexpectedly gets loose in the middle of New York City can cause a lot of damage, but it’s also something that, with proper planning, we can deal with. And in this case, proper planning can be as simple as “Don’t import dangerous wildlife without proper precautions”.
Now, the scientific implications, as @Dr.Strangelove says, would be very significant. But I don’t think that would result in much change in policy (unless the solution to those scientific puzzles does turn out to be “aliens did it”).
I dunno, if the square-cube law is out the window, maybe we can build much bigger airplanes, because the mass doesn’t scale as the cube of the length anymore.
If King Kong had been real, I seriously doubt that they’d have gotten him off of Skull Island and all the way back to some modern city, let alone New York. The movie conveniently sidesteps the question of how they brought him back by jump-cutting from Denham on the beach to a theater marquee in Time Square showing his “name up in lights”). A reprinting of the novelization by Delos W. Lovelace twenty years ago has a drawing with a very cramped-looking Kong tied onto the superstructure of the Venture. The Gold Key comic book version from 1968 shows Kong being towed through the water like a raft. The 1976 modernized version has Kong being transported in one of the holds of the oil tanker Petrox had. (I can’t buy that they came to Kong’s Island on a prospecting visit in a supertanker. And, if they did, it’s likely that the fumes in the hold would have suffocated Kong – oil companies tended to vent engine exhaust into the holds to minimize the likelihood of explosion. And, even if they didn’t, the holds tended to be filled with petroleum volatiles. And I can’t believe that they put a bunch of fans into the hold to try to clear it out. But at least a supertanker hold would have been a way to get the body back to New York.)
Also, had Kong been real they would’ve probably kept him to his original size of 18 feet – pretty big in terms of square-cube law stuff, but believable. When they switched to scenes in New York they made him 24 feet tall, because he was being dwarfed by the buildings. f he had been the 50 feet tall publicity claimed, I think he would’ve had serious health issues.
OK, but ignoring all that, what if they got him to New York and he escaped and all? Carl Denham would’ve been on the hook for a LOT more than those pesky subpoenas they threw at him. Laws would’ve been passed to prevent bringing anything similar into the city (so forget about outfitting an expedition to Skull Island to bring back a T. Rex. And presumably London would’ve learned enough – assuming they hadn’t from the Lost World debacle of 1925 – not to let them put Gorgo on display in the 1960s)
The mid to late 30s saw massive improvements in aircraft performance, with the various countries competing with either other to design better, faster and more capable planes.
Just looking at US Navy fighters, the Grumman F3F entered service in 1936 as the last biplane to be introduced to any American military air arm.
The Brewster F2A Buffalo was introduced in 1939 as the U.S. Navy’s first monoplane fighter aircraft, but were already obsolete two years later when war broke out in the Pacific.
The Grumman F4F Wildcat was introduced in 1940 but was replaced by the Grumman F6F Hellcat which was introduced in 1943, midwar, but the design had been started by Grumman in 1938.
There isn’t any reason to suppose that a single combat again a large creature would have delayed any of these programs.
The question of armament was again driven by competition with other countries and unless huge armies of KKs invaded the US, not likely to have changed things.
The original movie had scenes of Kong chewing villagers. (restored scenes that had been censored) IIRC he spits them out.
Kong would be a bigger threat to humanity if he is a omnivore. Unfortunately that might be necessary to provide enough nutrition for a primate that large.
He did seem somewhat intelligent in the movie. He adapted to dangerous situations better than a elephant or rhino.
Hopefully Kong could live on Skull island and it would be off limits to visitors.
Kong couldn’t survive attacks by .50 cal aircraft machine guns or explosives. Any direct conflict with modern people wouldn’t end well.
Are the events of “Son of Kong” also in play? Because at the end of that movie Skull Island sinks into the sea entirely and all its inhabitants drown.
In any event I don’t see how a population of dinosaurs and other giant creatures could sustain themselves on an island small enough to have not been discovered before then.
Did they show King Kong being transported in the Peter Jackson version? I recall some ship scenes but that may have been before arriving at Skull Island.
Wikipedia says that in that version Kong was 25ft tall.
Brian
I think there were plans to have Fay Wray deliver the final line
A plot point was that the Great Depression was already well underway and Ann Darrow was one of many homeless and hungry people on the streets of New York City. King Kong was officially greenlighted in December of 1931 and the film debuted on March 2 1933 after a year of production. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for the events of the film to have taken place in reality.
The Empire State Building was finished in 1931. That constrains the timing.
It was famously referred to as the Empty State Building, because the Depression limited the rentals to 25% of capacity. Knowing Kong preferred it over the Chrysler Building may have sent rentals booming. Or maybe scared everybody out. Hard to say.