King Kong in popular culture
King Kong is one of the best-known figures in cinema history. He and the series of films featuring him are frequently referenced in popular culture around the world.[1] King Kong has achieved the stature of a pop-culture icon and modern myth.[2][3] King Kong has inspired advertisements, cartoons, comic books, films, magazine covers, plays, poetry, political cartoons, short stories, television programmes, and other media.[1] The forms of references to King Kong range from straight copies to parodies and humorous references.
1930s and 1940s[edit]
The 1933 release of King Kong was an immediate hit at the box office, and had a huge impact on the popular culture of the 1930s. It was the first film to play in two of New York City's largest theatres at the same time, and the first in the 1930s trend for horror films.[3] The combination of advanced special effects and primitivist content in the film made it popular among American and European intellectuals, especially the surrealists. Ray Bradbury remarked that when King Kong was released, "a mob of boys went quietly mad across the world, then fled into the light to become adventurers, explorers, zoo-keepers, filmmakers."[1] There was a version of King Kong in the 1933 animated Mickey Mouse cartoon "The Pet Store" (also known as "Mickey and the Gorilla Tamer"). In the cartoon, the ape falls in love with Minnie Mouse and climbs to the top of a stack of boxes while holding her. Mickey and a group of birds, imitating the biplanes at the climax of King Kong, defeat the ape.[4] In the 1933 animated Mickey Mouse short film, "Mickey's Mechanical Man", Mickey's invention, a robot, is engaged in a boxing match against an ape known as "The Kongo Killer".
The 1933 animated film King Klunk served as a parody of King Kong, being released six months after King Kong arrived in cinemas.[5][6]
In 1938,[1] King Kong received its first re-release, although some shots, such as King Kong removing parts of Ann Darrow's dress, and his chewing and stomping various extras, often in graphic close-up (via use of full-scale mechanical head and foot props), were removed because they were now considered unacceptable under the Production Code.[3][7] King Kong was again re-released in 1942 and 1946.[7] Despite its success, King Kong was not yet as important a part of popular culture as it would become in the future.[1]
The controversial World War II Dutch resistance fighter Christiaan Lindemans – eventually arrested on suspicion of having betrayed secrets to the Nazis – was nicknamed "King Kong" due to his being exceptionally tall.[8] Among the Dutch, the name "King Kong" is still more often associated with him rather than with the fictional ape.
1950s to the 1970s[edit]
The film was re-released in 1952, becoming one of the media events of that year. Time magazine named it "Movie of the Year". The film's studio RKO tried an experimental reissue of King Kong in the Midwest United States in 1952. In an unprecedented move they committed most of King Kong's promotional budget to television spots. The re-release was an enormous success, with the film attracting triple the usual business in its markets. This showed that television was a powerful tool for promotion. King Kong generated more box office receipts than the original 1933 release had.[1] Theatre owners named it Picture of the Year.[7] It was at this time that King Kong acquired its reputation as a popular culture phenomenon. In 1953, it became the first of more than 500 movies to be parodied by Mad. The sixth issue included a spoof by Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Elder titled "Ping Pong!"
The film became inspiration for other similar monster films like Mighty Joe Young (1949) and Godzilla (1954). Godzilla was inspired by King Kong's popularity in Japan and the film revived and reconfigured parts of the King Kong story more powerfully than any other film has.[1] RKO theatrically re-released King Kong for the last time in 1956.
King Kong was sold to television after the conclusion of the 1956 release. One channel in New York showed the film seventeen times in a single week, with each showing topping the ratings. From then on, the film was a television mainstay that captured many new fans.[7]
There is a reference to the real-world revival and massive success of King Kong in the 1950s in the 1959 film A Summer Place. In the film, two teenagers, Molly and Johnny, tell their parents that they are going to a classic movie showing of King Kong, when they are actually going to an abandoned lookout. Molly calls King Kong "one of those wonderful old horror numbers". Johnny frets that if he doesn't watch the movie, he might not be able to answer his parents' questions, but Molly tells him, "It's kind of sad dreams if anybody asks, just tell 'em about the end. That's the part everybody remembers".[1] In 1974's Herbie Rides Again Alonzo Hawk has been having nightmares about Herbie. During his nightmare sequence there is a King Kong-themed dream. Alonzo dreams he's Kong with Herbie-like planes flying around him and squirting oil until he falls off the Empire State Building. In a Superman comic book story, an ape grew to giant size and gained kryptonite vision due to meteors of kryptonite and uranium, and was called Titano the Super-Ape. This ape had a liking to Lois Lane, and in one story climbed up the Daily Planet building.
King Kong reached the height of its public visibility in the twentieth century in the 1960s and 1970s, as part of a nostalgic trend to 1930s Hollywood. King Kong was becoming a cult film with nostalgia value. During this period the character and story of King Kong was most frequently used as a parody in popular culture. The frequency of its use as a parody at this time shows how significant it had become in popular culture.[1] In the 1968 film Yellow Submarine, the characters look in a room where a monster ape smashes through a window to get at a screaming woman on a bed. "Do you think we're interrupting something?" George nonchalantly comments of it, to which John replies, "I think so".
In the mid-1960s RKO began to license a series of King Kong-related products in response to a heavy demand from the public. These products included comic books, games, models, and posters. In 1969 most of the censored shots were found. In 1971 a version of King Kong with these long-missing portions returned to their proper places was released to art houses.
References to King Kong in popular culture have been widespread since the 1960s. The references have different tones, with some being parodies while others are parodies or oppositional critiques. Some of these references are fleeting (for example, Frank Zappa named one of his more complex compositions with the Mothers of Invention after Kong), but nevertheless are evidence of King Kong's importance in popular culture. King Kong has been cited in films such as Morgan! (1966), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), and Amazon Women on the Moon (1987).[1] In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the song "Science Fiction/Double Feature" pays homage to King Kong with the lyric: "Then something went wrong for Fay Wray and King Kong ... they got caught in a celluloid jam". At the end of the film, Rocky carries Dr. Frankenfurter on the RKO logo, replicating what King Kong carrying Fay Wray in the climax of King Kong.
In 1965 Monocle, a political satire magazine, cohosted a publisher's party at the Empire State Building with Bantam Books, who were reissuing Delos W. Lovelace's novelization of King Kong. A panel of Monocle satirists was due to give an ironic commentary on King Kong, followed by a screening of the film. One of the titles on the satirists' program was "King Kong to Viet Cong: Thirty Years of Gorilla Warfare". Andy Warhol, who was not on the guest list, used the occasion to generate publicity and create a performance by complaining to the press that King Kong should be screened with his own film Empire (1964). Warhol was permitted to show three minutes of Empire after King Kong. Empire was then criticized in the press for being too dull and being upstaged by King Kong.[1]
In Mad Monster Party?, the giant gorilla "It" (with the vocal effects provided by Allen Swift) is a larger knock-off of King Kong and is most likely named "It" due to copyright reasons. Baron Boris von Frankenstein did not send an invite to "It", since "It" can be a bore and had crushed the Isle of Evil's wild boars the last time "It" was invited, as he explains to his assistant Francesca. Boris has his zombies patrol the island just in case "It" shows up uninvited. When "It" does show up, it goes on a rampage and snatches up the other monsters and Francesca (where "It" develops a crush on her) and climbs the Isle of Evil's tallest mountain. Boris convinces "It" to take him instead of Francesca, which "It" complies to. After Francesca is off the island with Boris' nephew Felix Flanken, Boris sacrifices his life where he drops the vial containing the secret of destruction which destroys himself, "It", the Isle of Evil, and everyone else that was on it at the time.
By the 1970s the character of King Kong was constantly referenced in cartoons and jokes. In a 1972 New Yorker cartoon, a man at a cocktail party atop the newly constructed World Trade Center comments that he is impressed that it was "finished so quickly and without incident", while King Kong climbs up the building below him. It was at this time that the film began to be studied by academics and film theoreticians, who found hidden subtexts and symbolic meanings in the film. However, Merian C. Cooper maintained that the film was nothing more than a simple adventure story.[7]
Thomas Pynchon, in his post-modern 1973 novel, Gravity's Rainbow, treats the King Kong/Ann Darrow relationship as an obvious metaphor for Americans' historical racist paranoia of black men dating white women. He quotes the fictional film reviewer, Mitchel Prettyplace, from his "definitive 18-volume study of King Kong", which includes "even interviews with King Kong Kultists, who to be eligible for the group must have seen the movie at least 100 times and be prepared to pass an 8-hour entrance exam".
The character is mentioned in folk rock singer Jim Croce's 1973 song Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, where the eponymous Leroy Brown is described as being "badder than old King Kong" during the chorus.[9]
King Kong influenced the 1974 Doctor Who story "Robot", where the Doctor and his friends in UNIT must stop Experimental Prototype Robot K-1 aiding the evil Scientific Reform Society in conquering the world. In homage to King Kong, K-1 falls for the Doctor's friend Sarah Jane Smith, and views her as the one human being it is willing to spare from destruction. When the Doctor is forced to destroy K-1 with a metal-eating virus, Sarah is visibly saddened.
In Mad Mad Mad Monsters (a "prequel of sorts" to Mad Monster Party?), there was a knock-off of King Kong called Modzoola.
After the highly promoted 1976 remake of King Kong, Elliot Stein wrote a nostalgic fan homage essay to King Kong called "My Life with Kong" in Rolling Stone magazine. Stein was one of the most famous of the "Kongophiles" along with Forrest J. Ackerman and Jean Boullet. In the essay Stein talks about the contexts in which he has seen King Kong during his life, including in the 1930s in New York picture palaces like Radio City Music Hall, and the RKO Roxy and in Paris with Jean Boullet in the 1950s. There was an art deco retrospective of King Kong at the Radio City Music Hall in the 1974 and a King Kong homage was staged for the Telluride Film Festival in the 1970s.[1] King Kong was also mentioned by name by Kermit the Frog in lyrics from the song "I Hope that Something Better Comes Along" from The Muppet Movie: "She made a monkey out of old King Kong/I hope that something better comes along".
Additionally, King Kong is one of the epithets of Redd Foxx's character, Fred G. Sanford, from Sanford and Son when referring to his sister-in-law Esther.
The corpse of King Kong, said to be a leftover prop, appears in the 1978 film Bye Bye Monkey, where a small chimpanzee is found inside of it.