Topic: King Kong     The move is over, and we’re back with new episodes.  And we pick ourselves back up with one of our more recent topic, on our way to their epic faceoff, we’re studying King Kong, The Eighth Wonder of the World.  Unlike his nemesis, Godzilla, King Kong has a far smaller collection of movies by comparison, but his impact on American pop culture and history and certainly been around in America just as long as his Japanese Counter Part.  And as we await their epic battle, we learn a bit about the massive ape, and study his movies to see what we can gleam off the future encounter.     Creation Created by Merian C. Cooper for his title movie, King Kong (1933), young Cooper was fascinated with primates.  Upon growing older, he eventually started working in the motion picture industry and after production finished on The Four Feathers(1929), he started thinking his next picture would be something to do with Primates.   A year later, he found himself at RKO, a major movie studio, and Cooper began development on what would be King Kong, deciding that his primate would be giant sized.  He had actually decided the ending of the film first, liking the idea of his giant primate fighting war planes atop of the New York Insurance Building.  Famously, Cooper liked the idea of pitting a giant primate against a dinosaur, but decided to focus on one main character instead.   The name for King Kong took some development however.  Cooper originally like names that started with a K, but found himself having a difficult time coming something that sounded mysterious and catchy.  In original scripts, the title monster was only referred to as ‘The Beast’, but the studio did not like the generic name.  Eventually, after notes from the studio, Cooper landed on the name ‘Kong’, but in worried it would sound like a docudrama instead, like other one word films at the time.  He added ‘King’ to differentiate it, thus became King Kong.     Fictional History King Kong is a massive Monster Primate, who originates from ‘Skull Island’, a mysterious island that King Kong lives with other prehistoric mammals and creatures.  The island is thus named due to the skull shaped mountain that lies at the center of the island.  The island is also home to the ancestors of a once highly civilized nation that previously built a wall to keep in the monsters on the island.  Though the name was never used in the original 1933 film, the name was featured in the novelization that came out two months prior to the movie, and has since stuck.   Though described as prehistoric Ape, King Kong has a number of human like qualities, notably, his ability to walk upright in an anthropomorphic manner.  He is described as being upwards of 40-50 feet tall, he was later rescaled to be 18-25 feet tall in the original 1933 film.  In most initial western versions, King Kong is roughly 25 feet tall, however in later Japanese versions, he was scaled in size to be similar to Godzilla.  Most recently, in the 2017 film, he was 104 feet tall, and finally 337 feet tall to fight against Godzilla in 2021.   In most early versions of the character, King Kong is a villain, however, in more recent films, he’s given a sympathetic story, and is even the hero in some of these movies.      History While a major film icon in the west, the character’s intellectual property owners have been split between various parties through history, making the character a difficult character to track.  Initially, the rights were thought to belong with Cooper, but in 1962, when the character was licensed to Toho to make King Kong vs Godzilla (1962), Cooper sued RKO.  Even though there was quite a number of evidence in Cooper’s favor, some key documents were lost between his time in the military and his return home, which the courts found that RKO owned the character.   Eventually, concern over the rights would come up again in 1975 when Universal Studios were trying to make a King Kong Film.  Eventua