King Kong is a 1933 American pre-Code adventure horror monster film[5] directed and produced by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, with special effects by Willis H. O’Brien and music by Max Steiner.
Produced and distributed by RKO Radio Pictures, King Kong is the first film in the self-titled franchise, combining live-action sequences with stop-motion animation using rear-screen projection. The idea for the film came when Cooper decided to create a motion picture about a giant gorilla struggling against modern civilization.
The film stars Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, and Bruce Cabot. The story follows a giant primate dubbed Kong who feels affection for a beautiful young woman offered to him as a sacrifice.
King Kong premiered in New York City on March 2, 1933, to many rave reviews, with praise for its stop-motion animation and musical score. During its initial run, the film earned a profit of $650,000, which increased to $2,847,000 by the time of its re-release in 1952. Various scenes were deleted by censors, but they were restored in 1970.
Later, in 1991, the film was deemed “culturally, historically and aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.[6][7] In 2010, the film was ranked by Rotten Tomatoes as the greatest horror film of all time[8] and the fifty-sixth greatest film of all time.[9] Various new editions of the film have also been released. A sequel, entitled Son of Kong, was made the same year as the original film, and several more films have been made, including two remakes in 1976 and 2005.
The film’s novelization, published prior to its release, entered the public domain though a failure to include a copyright notice, making the characters and story public domain; the film’s copyright is set to expire in 2029 in the US.[10]
The Criterion Collection introduced audio commentary on the LaserDisc format, which was able to accommodate multiple audio tracks. The first commentary track, for the 1984 LaserDisc release of the 1933 film King Kong, was recorded by Ronald Haver, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and was inspired by the stories Haver told while supervising the film-to-video transfer process.[1] Criterion expected that the commentary would only be of interest to serious film students.[2] It received a favorable reaction, and his commentary on King Kong is considered to ultimately have started the trend.[3][4][5] Haver went on to provide commentaries for Criterion for the rest of his life.[2]
Excerpt of Haver’s commentary for King Kong:
Hello, ladies and gentlemen, I’m Ronald Haver, and I’m here to do something which we feel is rather unique. I’m going to take you on a lecture tour of King Kong as you watch the film. The laserdisc technology offers us this opportunity and we feel it’s rather unique — the ability to switch back and forth between the soundtrack and this lecture track.[6]
An additional scene portraying giant insects, spiders, a reptile-like predator and a tentacled creature devouring the crew members shaken off the log by Kong onto the floor of the canyon below was deemed too gruesome by RKO even by pre-Code standards. Cooper thought it “stopped the story”, and thus the scene was censored by the studio before the original release.[74] Members of the preview audience also left the film early because they were concerned about the scene.[142] The footage is considered lost, except for only a few stills and pre-production drawings.