Big Bad Monkeys

As children, my brother and myself would dare each other to go upstairs in the dark. Going upstairs in the dark was scary. We would say to each other ‘there’s a wolf and a monkey upstairs’. These were the two scariest things we could think of. The wolf is easily explained. As the bad guys from fairytales, wolves were familiar from stories like Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs. I owned a ‘Little Golden Book’ of childrens’ stories illustrated by the legendary Garth Williams, whose depiction of the Big Bad Wolf still gives me goosebumps. As to the monkey, I think I know the answer…

It was, I think 1964 or 65. At this time, ITV tended to show movies on Sunday afternoons, many of them receiving their British TV premieres. None was particularly recent: most hailed from the late 40s or early 50s. In one of these movies, an outsized gorilla was perched atop a rocky bluff, taking swings at a bunch of cowboys who were trying to lasso him. Someone told me the monkey was called King Kong. As it turned out, they were wrong – but to my parents’ and grandparents’ generation, any big animated ape was by default King Kong. Either way, it didn’t really matter. I was now equipped with the knowledge that King Kong was a giant monkey, and that monkeys were, by extension, scary. From there it took but a short leap of the imagination to have them lurking upstairs in the dark...

The monkey I’d seen on that Sunday afternoon in the mid 60s was really a good guy. Mighty Joe Young (1949) was essentially a reminagining of Kong, by his creators Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoedsack. The story was slicker, more modern and more logical than the original, and whilst it retained the same basic premise of an oversized ape on the rampage (in this case, he wrecks a Hollywood night club), it was less of a horror movie and more of a heartwarming family film. Mighty Joe Young turned up again a couple of years later, on a Saturday evening, a broadcast of which I have clearer recollections. At the climax, the big monkey climbed up a tree to rescue a child trapped at the top of a burning orphanage, earning himself a reprieve after the nightclub escapade. As David Attenborough would later take pains to point out, gorillas aren’t really scary. They just look that way. And they’re handy to have around if you’re trapped in a burning building.

Creator Merian C. Cooper reputedly came up with the idea of King Kong after dreaming about a giant gorilla terrorising New York, a piece of blatant symbolism that any Freudian would relish. It was such a potent image and a memorable name that the movie became an instant hit. Mighty Joe Young, by contrast, was a box office flop, and plans for a sequel in which he was to have starred alongside Tarzan were quickly dropped.

The original King Kong didn’t get many outings on TV in my childhood. It wasn’t shown on British television at all until Boxing Day 1965. It turned up again as the big movie on a Sunday evening in 1971, but by an unfortunate coincidence, we were away on holiday that weekend, in a different ITV region. That same summer, however, saw the first piece of Kong memorabilia enter our household, in the shape of a plastic model kit. Created by the Aurora Plastics Corporation – based, appropriately enough in New York – the Kong kit was one of a series of models of iconic horror film monsters, featuring components which glowed in the dark. The kits weren’t very easy to come by, but it happened that, on our summer holiday that year, we stayed in a flat on Brixham high street, a few doors up from a model shop whose window was chock-full of them. As well as the hollywood monsters, there were several based on TV shows like Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

The Kong kit was bought for my brother, while I chose a cool new monster that I’d never heard of before: Godzilla. None of the adults with us on that holiday had heard of Godzilla, which seems interesting in retrospect. Today, he’s as well known as Kong, if not more so, but back in 1971, in Britain at any rate, he had yet to acquire iconic status. Clearly, the stage was set for a face-off between my Godzilla kit and my brother’s Kong – if we’d only known at the time that there had been such a movie. Ironically, it would be Godzilla rather than Kong whom I first encountered on celluloid. The occasion was also my one and only experience of a Saturday morning picture show. It was forty years ago this week, in fact, that I prevailed upon our dad to take my brother and myself to see Son of Godzilla at the Odeon New Street, where it was presented in a decidedly juvenile programme of cartoons and sundry nonsense which all felt a bit childish to me (then aged thirteen). By this time, I was fully clued up as to the origins of Godzilla, courtesy of Denis Gifford’s essential coffee table book A Pictorial History of Horror Movies. Gifford’s book also included a fair few images of King Kong, and its lesser-known sequel Son of Kong, but had nothing to say about Mighty Joe Young.

Kong himself turned up in the form of a statue, inexplicably erected in the Birmingham Bull Ring in 1972, an apparition which we were taken to see and which sticks in the mind to this day, but the original 1933 movie remained elusive. The TV broadcast rights were held by ITV up to 1976, but screenings were rare. ITV gave us King Kong Vs Godzilla as the Sunday Star Movie on 19 January 1975, a piece of scheduling which seems laughable in retrospect, but I would have to wait another sixteen months to see the original.

Despite not having seen the movie, Kong continued to exercise a hold on my imagination. At my birthday in 1976, I was bought a book, The Making of King Kong, which went into the movie’s production in detail, including working drawings and rare photographs. The same year saw the character’s return to the cinema in Dino De Laurentis’ remake, but I gave this one the cold shoulder. Fortunately, the original was waiting just around the corner.

It was, in fact, forty-eight years ago today, Friday 14 May 1976, that I finally got to see Kong in all his 1933, black and white, censor-edited glory, courtesy of ATV’s regular Friday night horror slot, Appointment With Fear. But the big monkey proved to be like the proverbial double decker bus: after waiting so long to see the film, it was broadcast again, a mere seven months later on BBC1, who chose to place it in an early evening slot of 6.50 pm. Needless to say I sat through it all a second time (this time without commercial breaks), but it made less of a splash in my diary, where the May broadcast had been accompanied by a cartoon Kong and ludicrous graphics.

Despite being Kong’s poor relation, Mighty Joe Young kept pace with his more illustrious predecessor via screenings on BBC television, who owned the broadcast rights from 1981 onwards. Between 10 December 1981 and 31 August 1994, Joe was rolled out on no fewer than six occasions, two of them on BBC1. Kong, meantime, scored seven BBC hits between his debut on the network in 1976 and August 1995. A restored version, reinstating the 1933 censors’ cuts, was presented for the first time on 8 December 1992. Rarer by far was Son of Kong, which managed a mere three broadcasts in the same time frame.

One final oddity as a coda to this piece: while watching the blu-ray release of Mighty Joe Young, I was surprised to see the climatic orphanage scene presented in tinted red. This, apparently, is how the film was seen by audiences on release in 1949. Those big monkeys may have been with us for almost a century, but they can still spring the occasional surprise. Now, dare I venture upstairs…?