Miltonic Monkey

Today connoisseurship of spray-can excellence is apt to be condescending. The black-and-white is grainy, the animation jerky, Kong himself of uncertain size (fifty feet according to the publicists; actually 18 feet in the jungle, raised to 24 in New York after the stone canyons dwarfed him in the first tests). It all creaks.

Misinformation about how it was all done quickly filled 1933 magazine columns, some of it planted by the studio, which wanted to protect its investment by leading competitors into expensive blind alleys. Modern Mechanix explained that Kong was a man in an ape-suit; later at least two actors claimed the role, and only seven years ago one of them was telling the Chicago Sun-Times what his pay had been per week. Guff. No man donned a monkey-suit for any part of King Kong. Contrariwise, somebody from RKO fed Time a statistics-studded fantasy about a fifty-foot robot ape, its 85 motors operated by six men. Also guff, though in the Thirties any yarn with a robot seemed plausible, and Time bit.

HK

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Hugh Kenner

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Today connoisseurship of spray-can excellence is apt to be condescending. The black-and-white is grainy, the animation jerky, Kong himself of uncertain size (fifty feet according to the publicists; actually 18 feet in the jungle, raised to 24 in New York after the stone canyons dwarfed him in the first tests). It all creaks.

Misinformation about how it was all done quickly filled 1933 magazine columns, some of it planted by the studio, which wanted to protect its investment by leading competitors into expensive blind alleys. Modern Mechanix explained that Kong was a man in an ape-suit; later at least two actors claimed the role, and only seven years ago one of them was telling the Chicago Sun-Times what his pay had been per week. Guff. No man donned a monkey-suit for any part of King Kong. Contrariwise, somebody from RKO fed Time a statistics-studded fantasy about a fifty-foot robot ape, its 85 motors operated by six men. Also guff, though in the Thirties any yarn with a robot seemed plausible, and Time bit.