King Kong (1976)

Those things that we love from our childhood are sometimes among the stranger things to love. Case in point: I loved my old 1976 KING KONG puzzle. It was a cool scene of the big ape destroying a giant elevated train. The movie would have been cooler had it the scene in which the puzzle was based upon actually occurred in the film as it is portrayed in the puzzle. Oh well, I guess you can not have everything. I got that puzzle Christmas time in 1978. While the movie had been out of theaters for a year, it had just debuted as a two part television special featuring LOTS of extra footage (45 minutes) so as to stretch the airings out to two nights. Groovy idea and a lost method of television hucksterism.

Now, there are those illiterate people who seem to repeatedly state that the film was a box office bomb. What it was, was a movie brutally panned by the critics, but not a bomb. The film's budget was around the $25 million range, a huge price tag in those days. The film did $55 million at the US box office and went on to do $125 million worldwide. That is just theatrical showings. There was also the mega millions from tie in merchandise such as the puzzle eloquently mentioned in the opening of this review.

Then there are those "Television event" airings as well. Lots of money here folks!
Truth be told, while I was a fan of the film, most of the people who did see the film found it pretty bad. Charles Grodin did not make a great villain. Jeff Bridges happy hippie role is silly. And, oh my, Jessica Lange replace Fay Wray with the worst possible dialogue in movie history. A rubber suited King Kong to replace the phenomenal stop motion animation of the 1933 classic? Geez.

But I still love the film. Sure, it was incredibly inferior to the screen classic it remakes. Yes, the dialogue was dumb and the film overlong. When you are a kid, however, none of that matters because the big ape and his rampage are kind of cool. Kids do not waste their time trivializing the dopey adults and their dialogue. (Watching the first part of the mini series was annoying as Kong only shows up at the end of part one to show off a TO BE CONTINUED notice. Oh well. I do miss those all TO BE CONTINUED alerts that classic TV used to have.

The 1976 version of KING KONG was one of the few event films of the day. STAR WARS and JAWS were considered smaller productions than KING KONG which was touted as one of the most expensive films ever made. Probably the only film that could compare with KING KONG in terms of reputation for cost and expense would be the 1978 SUPERMAN: THE MOTION PICTURE which cost $50 million, although they did also shoot a huge chunk of SUPERMAN II (1980) at the same time. KING KONG was considered a mist see motion picture because there was nothing else like it in theaters. In a way, this is accurate because there was nothing in theaters that was equally as silly much less silliness on the grandest scale. (They spent over a million dollars on a life size King Kong robot that only appears in a few seconds of screen time because it looked so unbelievably terrible.)

It was fairly sad to see the 1976 KING KONG ignored as bad as it was when the Peter Jackson remake was released. Sure, a widescreen DVD of the 1976 showed up on store shelves, but where was the hour of footage from the TV airings? Why no special edition of KONG? In France, the DVD release of the 1976 KING KONG was a two disk special edition that was the complete uncut theatrical version reedited with the extended footage from the network TV airing. Hopefully, the extended special edition of the 1976 remake will eventually show up.

The 1976 remake of KING KONG is far from great cinema, but it is an enjoyable and fun film that is undeserved of its bad reputation. Well worth watching again and again!