Even worse was the Toho version of Kong. In King Kong vs. Godzilla, he had to be comparable to Godzilla in size, about 147 feet tall. In King Kong Escapes, and the animated cartoon Toho collaborated on, he was “ten times as big as a man” i.e., 65 feet.
What a depressing thread for a place that prides itself on being so clever.
I find it gut wrenching to watch as a creature, King Kong, is taken out of his native habitat for the entertainment of selfish folks for profit. And then to make matters worse the poor creature is killed. I wish that a remake is made where King Kong can get home alive.
Yes this story does seem to parallel the cruelty and indifference which led to Black folks being ripped out of Africa and sold as property in this U.S.A.
King Kong may be a racist story and that is bad. I think the whole idea is cruel and selfish. And yes racism is cruel and selfish.
More than a hundred posts, and no one has mentioned that King Kong was one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite movies? He owned a print and watched it over and over again in his late night salons. He was fascinated by it.
You can bet any “Black man/White woman” subtext was not lost on him!
Oh, well done!
It’s a tragedy. As good as anything Shakespeare ever did. But the sequels did have him becoming the bad guy against the reformed Gojiro (Godzilla). I never liked that. Kong had a heart and died for his love. Godzilla is just a big-ass cold blooded lizard (with nuclear capabilities).
If you watch a lot of movies from the 1930s, & 40s, “Apes getting loose” is a genre. Merian C. Cooper just upped the ante with a giant ape done with stop motion and in-camera mattes, instead of a guy in a suit. But the apes on the loose went from the absurd (there’s a Ritz Bros. film about a Gorilla gone wild, called The Gorilla) to film versions of Murders in the Rue Morgue, to familly-friendly films like Mighty Joe Young, to sci-fi films like Captive Wild Woman. The genre extended into the early 1950s, with a surprisingly good movie with Anne Bancroft and Lee J. Cobb called Gorilla at Large.
If you look at King Kong in the context of all the other ape movies, most of which were very clearly not metaphors for Black people, it’s easier to see that King Kong is just a special twist on the ape genre.
I have seen KK all the way through several times, and have watched the special anniversary edition with commentary track.
There is racism in the film, but Kong is not a symbol for a Black man falling in love with a white women.
For one thing, Kong’s love is very sweet and pure, and if anyone tried to make a film about an actual Black man showing those feelings for a white woman, and her eventually relenting, even at his deathbed, the way Ann does for Kong, it wouldn’t have been permitted.
For another, Kong’s love seems to be asexual, and Black men were usually thought of by white people who didn’t know better as oversexed, which is why so many white people thought that Black men were a danger to white women.
If the film is a metaphor for anything, it’s about disruption of the natural order-- bringing wild animals into cities, and this was actually a problem in the 1930s. Has anyone seen another film from the 1930s called Bringing up Baby, where a woman’s brother sends her a pet leopard? There was a craze for exotic pets in the 1930s, and while most people settled for ocelots, foxes, and spider monkeys, some people were actually trying to keep tigers, chimpanzees, and alligators as pets, and it always led to disaster. Not quite Kong-scale wreckage, but some pretty serious damage.
Personally, I don’t think KK was even about this problem, though. It was just another ape movies, albeit, a really good one, with an excellent twist and high production values. The twist in a lot of the ape movies was “It was a guy in a suit trying to get away with a crime.” Kong was real. And really, really scary at the time. The movie is still amazing 80 years later.
The 70s films is one of those bad-good, Plan 9 type films. The 2005 version is just unnecessary. It’s not bad enough to be funny, and not good enough to sit through on its own merits, and adds nothing to the discussion. It has the best special effects. Big whoop.
My take on the Peter Jackson version is that it was a deliberate deconstruction. It’s unspoken (but broadly hinted) premise is that the original King Kong was Hollywood’s sanitized version of events, and that what we’re seeing in the remake is what “really” happened.
You forgot this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq9IKsH9BXg 
“Sultry beauty … in the clutches of a half-crazed MONSTER!” :eek:
He wasn’t a real ape, though. He was a space monster who happened to look like a cheesy fake gorilla from the neck down, and a cheesy fake deep-sea diver from the neck up.
I have actually seen that movie in a theater in the glorious 3D the director intended. The radio/soap bubble machine is much scarier when those bubbles float right out at you.
Might be a fair analysis if it were based on true events.
I love it how people will come up with a theory about some artist’s work, and even when the artist denies it, insist that their loony fantasies are what they*** really*** meant.
Fine. You interpret it that way. Just don’t be surprised when people laugh at you.
Picky, picky, picky! 
I do envy you your cinema experience, though. Robot Monster in 3-D … sigh! :o
And you’d be laughing at a basic literary theory you should have learned in high school.
The author’s intentions are in no way decisive. What the author meant to say does not define the text. The work itself is independent of the author and says what it says. If anyone creates meaning in a work, it is the reader.
If you can make a good argument, supporting it with the text, then that interpretation is valid. Laughing at that is no better than laughing at a scientist or mathematician.
Exhibit A: Room 237. An awesome and kinda scary look at how nerdish loons see hidden meaning in The Shining.
Apparently, Hitler’s favorite film of all time was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
When the original movie came out, how many people had seen an actual gorilla? Not many. I see something that says the first the Bronx zoo was the first to have a gorilla in captivity, at some time in the early 20th century. Other cites say that Europeans didn’t encounter mountain gorillas until sometime in the 1920s, but had seen lowland gorillas earlier.
So, in the early 1930s we have stories about giant apes in Africa, a growing new industry in Hollywood, we have the newly built tallest building on earth and we have a depression. A perfect storm for a grand adventure movie like King Kong to be made.
Black Lives Matter, indeed.
I don’t know. I have a hard time ascribing to the theory that the reader gives meaning to the book. A reader may form new meanings based on the book but those new meanings are as likely to be a product of the reader’s mind as they are of the book. And if they originate in the reader’s mind, they don’t somehow project themselves into the book. The only person who puts meanings into the book is the author.
That said, I will acknowledge that authors aren’t always open about the meaning they put into their books. Sometimes they knowingly lie about the meanings. Other times they may be honestly unaware of the meanings they’ve unconsciously put into a book. And a discerning reader may discover these hidden meanings. But discovering these meanings is not the same as creating them.