/tv/ - Movies and Television

The original is the only one I've seen, but it's great. It's very odd and doesn't feel like anything else from its era or any other.

>island of primitive savages worships a blonde girl so much they kidnap her
>White people go to island of savages to film them cuz theyre so exotic
>Masculine monster protects beautiful girl, who eventually kinda falls in love with his powerful, yet noble masculinity

What possesses you to think that this would be allowed in (((current year)))? Theres a reason skull island was made and not another faithful remake of kong

I love the 76 version, great ost and atmosphere and practical effects. Kongs grey demonic design and that ending where he breaks through the island gate are legit fucking terrifying.

Yea it kinda comes off like a giant BBC porno but still definitely a good movie even if it doesnt stay filly faithful

The 2005 version is more faithful and really leans into the romance and the the crazy ecology of skull island. Kong is also less scary and more of a nice guy, much less of a bbc porn vibe. Its good but idk it just feels less interesting to me than the 76 version

The 1933 is undoubtedly a classic but the special effects are just too dated for me to get into. Still has a good ost tho

Who was the best kongfu?

Could kong have saved the WTC during 9/11?

>From an idea conceived by Edgar Wallace and Merian C Cooper
Awfully nice to credit them on an idea

>>361304
A big black super powerful primate from a primitive island in love with a beautiful blonde? Who goes back to white civilized society and is killed? Theres definitely some bbc vibes lol

>>361299
Jessica Lance was an angel and the most beautiful but that scene with her in the waterfall was basically BLACKED so im going with 2005 fay

>>361307
Not even american lol. You're coping hard if you don't see what i said. I didnt even say it made king kong bad, as a story its one of my favorite ever. But it's pretty clearly an obvious possible interpretation even if by accident. I think the 30s was right around the end of the scramble for africa and the 20s had lots of black civil unrest so it makes sense considering the timeline

>>361309
tell me what jews were involved in making the king kong movies and i will believe you

>>361289
>I saw the 1976 and 2005 remake but never the original. Was it better than the remakes?
Yes, although I'm biased because I'm obsessed with the movie. I don't think the atmosphere has ever been equaled as far as these kinds of movies go, the structure and editing are tightly focused (maybe even too much, since there were some parts that sound really cool that never made it into the actual movie). It was actually seeing the 2005 remake in theaters that led me to rewatching the original and becoming so fascinated with it, but to me it just feels like it a much more version of the original that doesn't really appeal to me anymore when the original exists. One thing I do like is that it included a version of the spider pit scene that never made it into the original (and most likely no longer exists), although I didn't like the leech creatures and thought the whole thing felt too over the top. I would put the 1933 King Kong in the same category as The Wizard of Oz, where I feel like I'm nitpicking if I criticize aspects of it.

I've only seen the 1976 version once, but I could at least appreciate that it tried to do things differently. The lack of monsters besides Kong and the giant snake was really disappointing though. I remember seeing people heavily criticizing it in the past, but I didn't think it was a bad movie at all when I watched it.
>>361293
>It's very odd and doesn't feel like anything else from its era or any other.
It has a really otherworldly feeling to the presentation. A large part of it comes down to all the artists who helped design the look of it. It's not even just the dreamlike stop-motion effects either. The production team as a whole put in a ton of work on all the visual details, like layering up the sets to create the illusion of depth. That Gustave-Dore-inspired jungle scenery pulls me right in. They really made the right choice to go for that more artistic appearance instead of aiming for naturalism. The stylized look sets it apart from other movies with similar stories. You can compare it to the 1925 version of The Lost World, which had some of the same crew members and was a direct predecessor to King Kong (which began as a spiritual sequel to The Lost World called Creation before Merian C. Cooper pulled the plug on it and decided to aim for something more interesting). I've always liked The Lost World, but it just doesn't have the same flair to it.

Something about the Great Depression backdrop gives it a weird kind of verisimilitude too. A lost world setting feels way less implausible then than it would later on. King Kong came out less than ten years after Percy Fawcett disappeared in the Mato Grosso (incidentally, he was friends with Arthur Conan Doyle and directly inspired the title of The Lost World; he also had some far-fetched stories about things like running into ape men in South America, shooting a scrawny, 62-foot anaconda, and was said after his death to have seen giant footprints of a dinosaur-like creature or even to have seen a sauropod himself), so the premise doesn't feel as unbelievable as it would if it were set in the modern day. It also helps that Merian C. Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack, and Ruth Rose were basically putting their real-life experiences into the movie in a highly exaggerated form. Cooper and Schoedsack were WWI veterans who ended up traveling to far-flung places in the '20s to make movies. Schoedsack met Ruth Rose on a research expedition and married her, and she ended up joining Cooper and her husband on some of their travels. When King Kong was being worked on, they had Ruth Rose rewrite the script and cut out a lot of the crap. She ended up basing the three main characters on them.
>>361297
>I love the 76 version, great ost
The original is my favorite movie, but I have to give the John Barry music from the '76 version credit. The Max Steiner score was revolutionary, works well in the context of the movie, and has some great standalone moments, but I dislike the Mickey Mousing. I guess it works in the context of the movie, but it doesn't outside of it. The more Wagnerian leitmotif-based approach isn't to my liking either in that regard. The '76 soundtrack works better on its own. Maybe I'm just jaded from hearing the 1933 score so much though.
>Yea it kinda comes off like a giant BBC porno
I think that's got something to do with the remakes changed the story angle by turning it into an unrequited love story about a vicious relic of prehistory dying being killed off by civilization (which I think was inspired by W. Douglas Burden's story of bringing Komodo dragons into captivity, where they died off) to a big, misunderstood teddy bear being murdered by a cruel world. Cooper himself made a comment about making Kong as brutal as possible and still having audiences crying over him at the end.
>>361299
Fay Wray is best girl.
>>361303
Edgar Wallace didn't even come up with it either. They just wanted him to flesh out the story because he was a famous author at the time, and he ended up keeling over before he could do much. Even his replacement, James Creelman, ended up having a lot of his ideas rejected.
>>361309
>But it's pretty clearly an obvious possible interpretation even if by accident.
The racial angle is decades old too. It's even implicit in the movie to a degree in the sense that Kong never fell in love with any of the black girls who were sacrificed to him. It took a blonde woman to make him go bananas. In Germany the movie was even called "King Kong und die weisse Frau."

I have the out-of-print Making of King Kong book from the '70s, and I think it mentioned black slavery as one of the interpretations of the story people have come up with. Maybe I can look through it and see if I can find it. There were others claiming that Kong represented the proletariat and its struggle against capitalism. Cooper himself disavowed all those interpretations and said he was just trying to make an adventure movie.

The thing with King Kong is that it's a rare modern work in that thematically it seems to hit on the same levels as a fairytale or an ancient legend. There's something about it that lends itself to eggheads reading their own speculations onto it, and yet it's just a story some people came up with back in the early '30s.

>>361313
Jesus Christ, man. Great post.

>>361313
Good post besides muh Tiny Wakandan Pecker meme being given any attention.

>>361313
I think the remake is great for the sole reason that it keeps the brutality and ominous feeling of Skull Island which was directly inspired by the the 1912 novel, The Lost World, which got a a really good movie adaptation worth a watch in 1925.
Very few works are inspired by it nowadays, shamefully, but the movies that existed in the 90s inspired by it were great along with the comics from the 70s to the 2000s.

It also inspired the original the Conan The Barbarian novels and comics.

The Lost World also gave us good shit like this

>>361354
>>361353
>>361341
His stuff is pretty good.

>>361354
>>361341
>>361353
Big scary monster vs helpless white girl this shit is just bbc porn lol

>>361358
Hate how hot it is tho :/

Here are some Gustave Dore pieces I think could have inspired the look of King Kong, plus an excerpt of the Wikipedia article on the 1929 version of The Four Feathers kvetching about Cooper. I need to watch that.
>>361313
>but to me it just feels like it a much more version of the original
I meant much more cartoonish.
>I have the out-of-print Making of King Kong book from the '70s
I have to correct myself on this point. If I remember right, there was a reprint that came out in the past few years. From what I heard, it's missing some of the pictures since the original photographic elements were apparently lost. I don't know why they just didn't include scans taken from the original version. That would have been better than nothing.

I probably forgot that point because I made this post before bed last night and wasn't thinking clearly.
>>361318
Muh bibisi isn't in the movie, but I meant that people who like reading too much into things have interpreted the movie as being about negroes for a long time. There are racial aspects to the story, but saying it's about Pee Oh Cees and that Kong is a proud black African-American negro of color ignores the fact that there are actual blacks in the movie. They're depicted as primitives living in huts among stone ruins, having "forgotten the higher civilization" that built them. They practice implied human sacrifice, kidnap Ann Darrow, and are referred to as "crazy black man" by Charlie the Chinaman. Anyone saying Kong is supposed to be black is pretty funny in the first place, because they're openly admitting that blacks remind them of prehistoric ape monsters.

Speaking of Charlie, you might as well bring up how Charlie is an oriental man reduced to being a comic-relief character who gets bossed around by whitey and pontificate about how the movie must be trying to send a message about Asian bois getting dominated by BWC.

There are definitely racial themes there, but they're being exaggerated and taken out of context.
>>361335
I do like how Peter Jackson was clearly a fan of the original movie and how his version Skull Island felt like it was crawling with life. I don't know if I'll ever feel like revisiting it (maybe I'll watch the extended cut at some point), but I'm thankful his remake led me to the RKO Production 601 film that got me so interested in King Kong. From there, I developed a genuine interest in learning about movies. I would watch movies like King Kong and Mighty Joe Young as a kid, but my interest was a lot more passive then.

As for The Lost World, that was one of the first silent movies I ever got into. I'm definitely fond of it. It might sound like I'm dumping on it, but I'm not at all.

The novel is worth a read too, although the movie improved on the ending. The part about the conflict between the Indians and the apemen was pretty cool and never made it into the 1925 movie. They just settled with having one lone apeman hanging out with his South American chimpanzee sidekick and getting up to perilous monkey business at the expense of the Challenger expedition. I'd also recommend the lost world stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs (the Caspak and Pellucidar books and Tarzan the Terrible) for anyone who's read The Lost World and wants more.

I still haven't seen the '60s Irwin Allen adaptation, which seems like it could be goofy fun.
>>361341
>2011
They've been working on Hollow Earth Spinosluts for much longer than I ever imagined.

>>361366
Here are some pictures from the making of the film for comparison.

The fact that the excised scenes like the spider pit footage and arsinotherium/styracosaurus chase have been lost to time will always haunt me. There have been people who have claimed to have seen the spider pit scene (Ray Bradbury among them), but it just seems like there's been a Mandela effect thing afoot.

Kong was a noble warrior and not a nigger who did more to protect Anne than a lot of the retarded white people, seeing his starry eyed corpse at the end of the film just disgusts me. This film always makes me depressed.

>>361358
>>361359
Gorillas aren't niggers
Gorillas are smarter, more intelligent and more sensitive.

>>361378
No they are not niggers.

>>361378
Swear im 0n my m0mm@ ill be@t d@t cracka azz if y0 azz said dat fukked up shyt in da real w0rld. Cracka may0 puzzy nukka i fuck y0 wife y0 azz 0nly say dat on da internet cuz yuh kn0 a nukka aint g0n stand it

I don't know if this level of autism would appeal to anyone here, but I've uploaded a 42-page Filmfax article about the spider pit scene:
https://anonfiles.ch/s/CJFAa0UK08E
It includes artwork and test photos and goes into extensive detail about the sequence and the speculation surrounding it.

>>361454
It appeals to me
Thanks anon, it's a fantastic concept and I'm glad Jackson got it made.
That shit is nightmare fuel

>>361454
>>361457
Thanks anon, Kong is a real freakin' Gorilla for btfo'ing those spiders.

I personally love the Japanese 60s Kong movies where he is a hero and isn't pointlessly slaughtered by retarded subhuman amerimutts.

>>361460
The japanese can appreciate strong,alpha, foreign beasts

>>361464
Brutal BBC taking our asian women too

>>361474
Niggers wish they were Gorillas

>>361474
Gorillas have a penis size between 1-3 inches. Since BBC is a myth, definitely as big as niggers.

>>361477
Y'all wh1teb0is scared of uz nukkaz cuz y'all got dat genetic memory of when uz African homo sapiens DOMINATED y'all neanderthal mayo faggots 100 thousand years ago

>>361457
>It appeals to me Thanks anon, it's a fantastic concept and I'm glad Jackson got it made.
Are you referring to the one from the 2005 remake or the stop-motion one he did separately just for fun?

I've read that Jackson even spent his own money trying to follow up on leads of people who swore they'd watched the scene years ago in one place or another. He deserves a lot of credit for that. It's easy for someone to criticize Peter Jackson over things he supposedly did or didn't do with his work, but at least he seems to be a filmmaker who has a sense of passion and personal investment in his profession and not just some publicity-seeking hack. I saw someone claim years ago that he decided to remake King Kong because he felt like someone else would be less invested in the end product than him.
>That shit is nightmare fuel
It's a creepy enough idea on its own, but it's also at an intersection where a creepy idea is also a mysterious piece of lost media with possible false memories mixed that add even more mystery and speculation.

It's like a monster-movie equivalent of the alleged 1890 Tombstone thunderbird photograph:
http://www.strangemag.com/strangemag/strange21/thunderbird21/thunderbirdintro21.html
The scene was probably filmed, so it's existence is much more likely than the thunderbird photo's. I think the people (or most of them, in the pit scene's case) who claimed to have seen either are probably remembering wrong, unless there's some kind of weird parallel universe thing going on.

As far as Kong-related mysteries go, there are also the lost Japanese movies from the '30s. Those seem less interesting the more information comes out about them though. Wasei Kingu Kongu was a comedy about a guy playing Kong in a stage play, whereas The King Kong That Appeared in Edo just seems to have been capitalizing on the name more than anything. Outside of the marketing material, it looks like the creature in the movie was a pretty regular-sized ape monster. I imagine that if the spider pit scene was discovered intact somewhere, a lot of the appeal might disappear once the mystery was gone. Horrors that appear in the full light of day never seem to measure up to horrors confined to the shadowy darkness of imagination. It's like that H.P. Lovecraft quote about fear of the unknown.
>>361459
If anything, Kong and the pit creatures were on the same side at that moment. They took care of the sailors who were trying to separate him from his 3D waifu. I imagine he wouldn't have cared about the log falling on them though.
>>361460
>I personally love the Japanese 60s Kong movies where he is a hero
I've got nothing against the old Toho movies, but Kong as a vicious anti-hero is more interesting to me than the more heroic versions of Kong. He's more like an unpredictable force of nature.
>and isn't pointlessly slaughtered by retarded subhuman amerimutts.
Kong's treatment by his captors is exploitative and hubristic, but there's more nuance to the story than that. Kong deserves to stay and rule over his natural habitat, but once he gets on the loose in New York he becomes a legitimate threat to the public. There's no ham-handed moralizing on the part of the movie against Carl Denham and company or resentful bitching about the "Amerimutts." I never perceived Denham as an outright villain or anything. He's got a hammy kind of charisma to him that allows him to convince others to assist with his reckless schemes, but in King Kong itself it doesn't feel so black and white to me. There's a larger-than-life likability to the character that reminds me a bit of the way George S. Patton is portrayed in Patton. Interestingly, Son of Kong begins with Carl Denham's actions starting to catch up to him. He decides to leave the country due to impending legal trouble over the Kong fiasco. The movie makes it clear he feels some guilt over the mayhem of the previous movie. I think those are some interesting touches in a sequel that's pretty disappointing overall and add a bit more depth to the character.

Can y'all go ONE (1) thread without talking about nigger dicks? lmao

>>361522
No uz wh1teb0is are just naturally submissive to dark skinned black thug men ^_^

>>361515
>Are you referring to the one from the 2005 remake or the stop-motion one he did separately just for fun?
Both, though I think Cooper would have been way more subtle with the Spider pit.
They even state it stopped the movie and was eerily creepy.
>It's easy for someone to criticize Peter Jackson over things he supposedly did or didn't do with his work, but at least he seems to be a filmmaker who has a sense of passion and personal investment in his profession and not just some publicity-seeking hack.
I like Jackson and he contributed a whole lot to cinema,though he's a has been now.
Shit, that's all of Hollywood pretty much now.
Watch Bad Taste and Evil Dead if you haven't, they're fantastic and cost fuckall to make.
>Mystery
While it certainly adds to the ominous feeling, and I'm sure Jackson played with that, even without that fact, the concept alone is fucking terrifying.
Stuck in a shadow filled canyon with tons crevices where gigantic insects prey on you, is fucking terriying.

No way out and eaten alive by the bottom strata of the island.
Shame the 2005 movie didn't fully commit and plenty of characters leave the Pit alive.

>>361524
>Both, though I think Cooper would have been way more subtle with the Spider pit.
The main thing I don't like about the recreation is that it still feels too modern. Given that there's a good chance that they were the same puppets, I think the spider and tentacle bug designs I think should have been made with the spider and worm with tentacles from The Black Scorpion in mind. I think they should have made the pit bottom more muddy too like it was apparently supposed to have been.

It was still a good effort. Old-school animation has to be very hard work, especially for people who aren't accustomed to doing it.

Jim Danforth was going to do a recreation of his own, but he ended up canceling it. I think it was learning that Peter Jackson was going to do his own version that led to him throwing in the towel. With how smooth the animation is in this surviving clip, you can tell it was done by a guy who had a ton of animation experience. I almost feel like that would work against it though. It doesn't seem like it would fit in with King Kong footage (although the style of the tracking shots match in terms of the cinematography; King Kong loved moving camera shots). It looks more like Ray Harryhausen animation than Willis O'Brien animation to me. It feels like it was made by someone who had decades of prior model animation works to draw from, build on, and polish up, whereas Willis O'Brien's work feels more pioneering but also more primitive. It's like he was still getting the kinks out as he went along. The way Kong's fur moves in King Kong is an example of that. That was a problem they didn't anticipate then, and they made sure to prevent anything like that from Son of Kong onward (despite that movie unfortunately being pretty phoned in due to budgetary limitations, being rushed out the door, and maybe also Willis O'Brien's tragic personal life at the time). I think Pete Peterson's work in the underground scene in The Black Scorpion is probably the closest thing out there to how a recreation should look. It's pretty creepy. I still think it's too bad Danforth gave up, but I guess he probably had other priorities.
>though he's a has been now.
I'm inclined to agree, at least in the sense of creating the kinds of movies he was making in the 2000s. I watched one of the Hobbit movies and thought it sucked. I liked They Shall Not Grow Old a lot though, so maybe he should stick with documentaries from now on.
>Shit, that's all of Hollywood pretty much now.
Very true.
>Watch Bad Taste and Evil Dead if you haven't, they're fantastic and cost fuckall to make.
I haven't even seen any of his early work yet. Heavenly Creatures is the earliest thing I've seen of his.
>Shame the 2005 movie didn't fully commit and plenty of characters leave the Pit alive.
Yeah, I think it's too cartoonish the way Bruce A. Baxter comes in swinging in on the vine to save the day. I like the idea of a redemption arc for the character, but it's like the scene with Legolas taking down the oliphaunt in The Return of the King. There's too much going on visually for my taste too. It might sound like a weird thing to say given that the whole idea of King Kong is to be an adventure movie on steroids, but I would have preferred some restraint. I imagine they could have had the Delos W. Lovelace novelization in mind, where the pit is swarming with creatures. The novelization is where the Lumpy character comes from, so they had to have been drawing from it in some sense.

>>361528
This video includes the scenes from The Black Scorpion with the worm creature and the spider. It's too bad the movie otherwise feels so routine, because I love the effects.

>>361528
>Old-school animation has to be very hard work
That's the issue, it was a barely practiced method at the time, and much like practical effects today, it's mostly amateurish as there's both no funding or practice with no concrete company or veterans working on such artistry.
It's why it feels modern, it's also extremely fast, too fast compared to the rest of the movie.
>I liked They Shall Not Grow Old a lot though, so maybe he should stick with documentaries from now on.
I don't think that's the issue, I think the issue is that the modern movie industry is so centralized and the development pipelines so fucked that not only do you not have any creative freedom but you're also working with mostly underpaid incompetent workers, which is why a smaller passion project like They Shall Not Grow Old is an actual good product as it was paid from his own pocket with the people he wanted.
We're living in a transitional period right now, I think once boomers die out and millennials inherit their stuff we'll see true change.
>I haven't even seen any of his early work yet. Heavenly Creatures is the earliest thing I've seen of his.
Well, if you like 80s/90s splatter films, be sure to give them a watch.
>I like the idea of a redemption arc for the character, but it's like the scene with Legolas taking down the oliphaunt in The Return of the King.
That's a good comparison
>There's too much going on visually for my taste
I don't know, I think it works beautifully, the insects all creeping around trying to take them by surprise, a small trickle and then a flood, the ominous music, the various shot of the sailors hopelessly fighting for their live and dying.
And it's really slow paced, contrasting with the straight action scene against Kong from before.

I don't think it's at all what Cooper intended, but it's still creepy on it's own.

>>361529
Fuck that's cool

>>361544
>I don't know, I think it works beautifully, the insects all creeping around trying to take them by surprise, a small trickle and then a flood, the ominous music, the various shot of the sailors hopelessly fighting for their live and dying.
I do get what you mean. The horrors keep building and building, and up until the rescue at the end it looks like they'd be better off being put out of their misery.
>And it's really slow paced, contrasting with the straight action scene against Kong from before.
That makes me wonder about just how much the cut scene from the original movie affected the pacing. I could see it being cut no matter what the actual length was because it distracted audiences from the main story. Cooper was a huge proponent of having a strong central character for the movie to revolve around, and apparently anything that didn't move that part of the movie forward was fair game to him. He criticized The Lost World as just being a bunch of big beasts running around. Although that's a harsh way of putting it, I see his point and prefer the kind of tighter pacing he aimed for. Creation would have been a similar movie to The Lost World if he hadn't stepped in and essentially cannibalized it for anything he found useful for King Kong.

On the other hand, one of the reasons I've always found The Lost World appealing is all the scenes with prehistoric creatures just going about their business. Both the 2001 Image Entertainment DVD and the 2017 Flicker Alley Blu-ray also include some deleted scenes, which are nice to have. I think early model animation is precious, historically speaking. I think there also might be footage we still don't even have. Think there was a scene involving cannibals, if I remember right, which is why you see the Indian standing by the side of the jungle river before you see the expedition members coming along. I don't remember if that was something that was cut out prior to or after the original release. For all I know, it might not have even been shot.
>Fuck that's cool
I agree with Archduchess Jerome Weiselberry that Them! works better as a whole. However, I think the special effects in The Black Scorpion are far more effective and make it really stand out compared to similar movies. There's just something nightmarish about the stop-motion bugs, and the lighting work adds to the atmosphere. It's a shame that Pete Peterson never got to complete either of the projects he made test footage for. He was clearly a talented animator, and he seems to have had some creative ideas too. Maybe if things had gone better for him he'd have been looked at as something like a more bizarre contemporary of Ray Harryhausen's. He never really got to set out on his own, and now if people remember him at all it's just as Willis O'Brien's assistant. They even died the same year.

>>361639
Keep making these posts theyre appreciated lol. I thought i was autistic about king kong but you put me to shame. I grew up rewatching the 76 and 2005 remakes all the time. And ive had quite a few dreams and nightmares involving kong

Kong aspie im curious are you into other Kaiju films? Assuming kong counts as one

>>361544
>Well, if you like 80s/90s splatter films, be sure to give them a watch.
Forgot to respond to this. I might check them out, but I'm kind of hesitant because I don't like horror comedies.
>>361644
>I thought i was autistic about king kong but you put me to shame
I became obsessed as a teenager. It was the movie that got me into actively checking out different movies, and it's managed to hold its rank as my favorite over the years. It all started after watching the Peter Jackson remake when it was in theaters. I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen. One day when I was bored, I decided to pop the bonus disc of the 2005 special edition of the original movie and stumbled across the lengthy RKO Production 601 documentary. YouTube blocked the upload I found, so I figured I'd post an ok.ru link:
https://ok.ru/video/1535039638185

There was just something about it that grabbed me. Part of it was the story behind the movie and the processes behind it, but it also gave me a real appreciation for the aesthetics of the movie. King Kong had just been a movie I'd taken for granted. I liked it as a kid and all, but I think I preferred Mighty Joe Young over it. I thought it was cool the way they managed to include so many prehistoric creatures, but for some reason I enjoyed Mighty Joe Young more. By the time Peter Jackson's remake came along, it had been years since I'd seen the original movie. I've always been drawn to history, and old things in general have always felt exotic and oftentimes downright eerie to me. Getting another look at King Kong and seeing how primitive yet painstakingly created the whole endeavor was fascinated me. We're talking about something that came out only a few years after the transition to talkies had ended. It felt like looking into another world. I became so obsessed that it used to just be common for me to come home from school and pop the movie in (usually skipping the beginning) or rewatch parts of the documentary. Eventually I read Ray Morton's King Kong book, the Living Dangerously biography of Merian C. Cooper by Mark Cotta Vaz, and The Making of King Kong, among other books less directly related to King Kong. I got the DVD box set with Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young. I even got the colorized version of the movie on VHS from eBay, which definitely isn't an ideal way to watch the movie but makes for an interesting novelty. The listing also came with a 10th-anniversary-edition tape of the 1976 movie, which I still have.

I finally got the Blu-ray within the past few years (I held off for so long because there are a couple shots where surface gauges had been accidentally left in shots but had been removed from the Blu-ray, possibly accidentally; I'm a purist about keeping stuff like that) and was expecting to be let down due to having seen it so many times when I was younger. Instead, it made me realize that I still liked it just as much as I used to. My autism was actually relatively dormant until I saw this thread. I feel like I've exhausted a lot of the information out there. I've spent years eating up discussions on the King Kong subforum of the Classic Horror Film Board. Those boomers are much more knowledgeable than I am, but forums of that type only get so much activity and I feel like I'm getting seriously diminishing returns at this point by reading it. I've still never read The Girl in the Hairy Paw due to it seeming like an unfocused grab bag, but I just downloaded a copy and might skim through it to see if there's anything of interest.
>And ive had quite a few dreams and nightmares involving kong
I've had at least one dream that I can remember. I remember one where I saw his lair, except it looked like a narrow passageway in a cave and was lined with torches for some reason. The orange flames from the torches had a really saturated look, like a Technicolor glow. I don't know why it was in color when to me the black-and-white look is essential.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if I had more in the past. The gloomy, uncanny atmosphere of Skull Island has had a rent-free domicile in my head for a long time now.
>>361645
I have a soft spot for them, but I'm not really passionate about them the way I am about the original King Kong. My favorite is probably the Japanese cut of the original Godzilla (I've never seen the King of the Monsters cut since it always seemed superfluous to me). I appreciate the dark tone it had, as well as the music. Conversely, I also like the more silly '60s and '70s movies where Godzilla is a lovable goofball. Rodan is a movie I remember liking more than I thought I would. As for Gamera, I've only seen one of those and don't recall much of it.

It might not be a kaiju flick, but I've always been interested in seeing the Toho Prophecies of Nostradamus movie. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like it has much of a chance of getting a quality release. I might just have to suck it up at some point and give a potato-quality rip a chance.

>>361639
Off topic but this girl is an absolute angelic cutie holy shit i wanna be nice to her and hold her hand . As a shitskin id literally do fucking anything for a generic looking nerdy white girl like this. One of my ultimate fantasies

>>361666
she's a menko

>>361648
>I'm kind of hesitant because I don't like horror comedies.
I wouldn't call Bad Taste horro, more like Action/Comedy.
Braindead leans less on horror as well and more on drama and violence.

Watched the Gamera 90s trilogy? Absolutely go for that, some of the best kaiju movies ever made.

There was an old Tripod page revolving around The Lost World I remembered reading a long time ago, and it turns out that it's still up:
https://silentmoviemonsters.tripod.com/TheLostWorld/LW1925.html
Neat. There's a page on the cannibal scene, which was the main place I remembered reading about it.
>>361648
I also forgot to mention having the Delos W. Lovelace novelization. I don't know if I'd say it's worth reading for people who aren't obsessed with King Kong. The main thing that interests me is that it includes parts that never made it into the movie.
>>361666
I think she's a breath of fresh due to clearly actually having an interest in the types of things she covers. She's not some e-whore cynically banking on the interests of male nerds for money and clout. Her style is very low key and reminiscent of the old days of YouTube, back before the days of flashy production values and obnoxious soyface thumbnails.
>>361678
>I wouldn't call Bad Taste horro, more like Action/Comedy.
Yeah, I looked it up after I made that post. I did see it classified as a horror comedy, but it didn't seem that much like one.
>Braindead leans less on horror as well and more on drama and violence.
Then I might have to give them a watch eventually.
>Watched the Gamera 90s trilogy? Absolutely go for that, some of the best kaiju movies ever made.
I'll probably end up watching the ones that were featured on MST3K first. I've only seen Gamera vs. Gyaos, and I had to look it up to check which one I saw. All I can really recollect is that there was a blood fountain used to bait the monster.

Can anyone name any enjoyable old-school prehistoric lost world movies besides King Kong and the 1925 version of The Lost World? I guess they don't even have to be movies necessarily. They could be TV shows or short films or something along those lines. I'm not looking for masterpieces. I'm just wondering if there's anything fun out there that I don't know about.

Video related is one I've always had a soft spot for.

>>362499
I saw this twice but went away both times not remembering any of the plot. I like the books and everything, so it's too bad. It was a successful enough movie that they ended up doing At the Earth's Core and The People That Time Forgot afterwards, but I haven't given either of those a try.

It might be pretty forgettable, but I'm also a bit fond of this schlocky color King Kong knockoff from 1948. Most of the creatures are just guys in monster suits, most notably Crash Corrigan playing a giant sloth in a modified ape costume.

>>362703
>color
Nice

>>362724
As far as I know, it's the first color dinosaur movie. It predates Journey to Beginning of Time by 7 years. While Journey to the Beginning of Time has the distinction of having stop-motion dinosaurs in color (as opposed to Unknown Island's guys in dinosaur suits and such), War Eagles would have beaten both to the punch. Unfortunately, that project's fate was sealed when Merian C. Cooper went overseas to fight the Japs. Work on the film began in 1938. It would have featured a aerial invasion of New York (implicitly Nazi, although I'm not sure they were ever intended to be outright named as such), with the city being defended by Vikings from a lost world in the Arctic riding giant eagles. Very little was even shot.

I think it had the potential to be a pretty cool movie. It sounds the most intriguing to me out of his unfilmed projects.

By the way, I took these production drawings and the black-and-white test photo from a scanned copy of Cinefex #7, which you can download here along with a few other issues.
https://archive.org/details/CineFex_1982/CineFex%201982/
It's been said that even an implicitly anti-Nazi movie would have seen as contentious before the attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war on the U.S., but from my limited reading on the topic it doesn't seem to have been a leading factor in the whole thing being abandoned.

Cooper had plans to make a Cinerema King Kong midquel in 1952. I don't know how they could have pulled it off so long after the original. And fighting regular animals sounds like a massive step down from taking on giant prehistoric creatures. That sounds more suited to a Mighty Joe Young sequel.

>>364323
As always the concept art looks incredible.

>>364592
I think the dinosaur in the third pic looks unusually wonky, but they're still pretty neat pictures.

The color photography would have made the movie stand out for its time. I saw someone drawing a comparison between the look of the Technicolor test footage images and the art of Zdenek Burian, although I'm not sure how much of an inspiration he was. King Kong intentionally modeled the look of Skull Island off Gustave Dore's art, so it wouldn't surprise me if the War Eagles crew was just choosing a different artist to serve as a basis for their work that time around.

I have to say, I think I'd prefer the more stylized jungles of King Kong. The black-and-white test shots look like they were shot around Skull Mountain though.

It looks like I'm possibly off about the timing of Burian's paintings and Merian C. Cooper leaving for the military.

According to the Cinefex article, Cooper apparently joined the Army Air Corps way back in 1939 after the invasion of Poland (which is something I imagine might have felt personal for him due to his role with the Kosciuszko Squadron; he did end up fighting the Nips later on though), which make it sound like the project was abandoned earlier than I believed.

On the other hand, this link claims that he joined up after Pearl Harbor like I thought:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160910081157/http://www.americanpolishcooperationsociety.com/2016/01/merian-c-cooper-forgotten-hero-of-two-nations/

If War Eagles truly was abandoned in 1939, then I think it's less likely that Zdenek Burian's paintings were helping guide the look of War Eagles. He began focusing on paleoart in the '30s, but in that respect his career was really just getting started at that point. I'm not sure how well known he was during that time.

I'm not sure what the timeline was for any of this. I tend to think that Cooper left later rather than earlier.

I figured I might as well post some Burian paintings while I'm at it.

>>364599
>>364600
Everything looks alien, as it should.
Modern egotistical retards can't think of any kind of life but their own.

Even trying to conceive the thought processes of an Anthens citizen is hard, much less the whole look of an era of history with only mere ashes to tell the tale.

>>364603
Maybe it's just the fact that contemporary art and reconstructions of prehistoric creatures don't appeal to me, but old paleoart feels like it has more of a sense of wonder and romanticism to me. I'm sure the new portrayals are generally more accurate, but I also think they feel much more clinical.

>>364804
>More accurate
That's the thing, they aren't, it's downright impossible to conceive how these creatures looked accurately based off skeletons (sometimes 90% of them missing).

>>364831
Well, there has been a recent movement to try to orient paleoart more toward showing a range of plausible recreations of what they could have looked like. Something like that seems like a step closer to the truth than portrayals based on rigid tradition. I don't really follow any of this stuff though. To be honest, I don't care that much what dinosaurs really looked like. In my mind, they'll always be prehistoric dragon monsters who walked with their tails dragging along on the ground behind them. They were real in my mind.

By the way, I felt like I should mention that Zdenek Burian's fellow Czech Karel Zeman based the look of Journey to the Beginning of Time on his art.

>>364836
>They were real in my mind.
That's the point anon, they were real, but outside of a basic draft and on the most common numerous species, pinpointing how they looked like is hard and the fags pushing for "this is more accurate to how they look like" are lying to themselves and everyone else.

This popped into my head, but I got confused and misremembered it as a Cinemassacre video. I always assumed the scene where Jack Driscoll is hiding in the cave was just part of a sound stage. If there are production notes saying that some filming was done in Bronson Canyon, then I guess that part being shot there does seem plausible. They could have just spiced the scenery up with vegetation to match the jungle sets.