A Brief History of King Kong - By: S.Roberts

King Kong was the result of writer/director Meridian Cooper's interest in gorilla behavior which he developed whilst on location for Paramount's 1929 picture, The Four Feathers.

Cooper was fascinated with the great apes, particularly gorillas. Cooper's inspiration was to make the beast a gorilla and he was fortunate to find Willis O'Brien, who single-handedly invented the stop-frame animation that made the 1933 film so revolutionary. Kong's screen test was made using an 18-in model covered in rabbit hair.

Cooper wrote his film based around King Kong a giant gorilla, and a monster of an ape that lived on a remote island. The beast falls for a beautiful girl, Ann Darrow, and desperate to have her, he finds himself lured into captivity.

In Jackson's remake of "King Kong", Jackson revised the main character, casting him as a melancholy hero. The revised edition of "Tracking King Kong" updates a groundbreaking study of King Kong as the iconic character enters the twenty-first century. However, the persistence of King Kong in western (and to a certain extent eastern) culture is to do with its "intertextual" character. The film's mobilisation of a range of different discourses and generic conventions seems to have facilitated numerous re-workings of the Kong story, notably those which perceive that story in terms of a racial politics and those which seek to assign cult status to it.

Jackson expands on this basic premise by drawing on the jaw-dropping talents of his special effects team to satisfy his thirst for the grand spectacle. The movie posits Naomi Watts as Ann Darrow, the starry-eyed blonde beauty whom Kong falls for; Jack Black as Carl Denham, a low-rent Orson Welles look-alike who drags the crew to the island to make his movie; and Adrian Brody as Jack Driscoll, a hack playwright who battles Kong both physically and for Darrow's heart.

Watts makes Ann's relationship with Kong both believable and heart-breaking. Watts' Ann is given to Kong for reasons unknown, and no one ever makes explicit her sacrificial status as a "bride of Kong".

Jackson makes a clever symmetrical repeat of the mountain top rescue of Ann by Jack Driscoll. On both occasions, Kong is thwarted and withheld from his companion by winged demons and the machinations of mankind, his fate turning full circle.

During the end of the film in the frenzied attach on King Kong in both Coopers and Jacksons versions; you are left with the question - on which side is the monster. During the film Kong shows human like emotions towards Ann which endears us to him. Ann's also shows emotion towards King Kong as she tries to protect him from the planes, this also humanizes Kong to some degree.

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