Pop Culture References
King Kong, as well as the series of films featuring him, have been featured many times in popular culture outside of the films themselves, in forms ranging from straight copies to parodies and joke references, and in media from comics to video games.
An animated King Kong appears in The Beatles' 1968 movie Yellow Submarine, and The Simpsons spoofed King Kong during a segment of their "Treehouse of Horror III" Halloween episode, in which Homer was Kong. It ends with him marrying Marge and eating her father. King Kong appears among the good guys in an episode of South Park in the episode "Imaginationland". The British Comedy TV Show The Goodies made an episode called Kitten Kong, in which a giant cat called Twinkle roams the streets of London, knocking over The British Telecom Tower.
A science fiction short story, Andrew Fox's "The Man Who Would be Kong", is about an old man with memories of having starred — as Kong himself — in the 1933 film.
The controversial World War II Dutch resistance fighter Christiaan Lindemans — eventually arrested on suspicion of having betrayed secrets to the Nazis — was nicknamed "King Kong" due to his being exceptionally tall. Among some older Dutch people, the name "King Kong" is still often associated with him rather than with the fictional ape.
Hollywood Undead band member Daniel Alvarez, AKA 'Funny Man', is nicknamed King Kong, and is widely known by that name by many of the bands fans.
Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention recorded an instrumental about "King Kong" in 1967 and featured it on the album Uncle Meat. Zappa went on to make many other versions of the song on albums such as Make A Jazz Noise Here, You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 3, Ahead Of Their Time, and Beat the Boots. He claims that the song is "a story of a very large gorilla. He was doing o.k. until some Americans came by and thought that they would take him home with them. They took him to the United States and they made some money by using the gorilla...then they killed him."
In 1972, a 550 centimetres (18.0 ft) fiberglass statue of King Kong was erected in Birmingham, England.
The Kinks recorded a single named "King Kong"
Filk Music artists Ookla the Mok's "Song of Kong", which explores the reasons why King Kong and Godzilla shouldn't be roommates, appears on their 2001 record Smell No Evil.
In the fifth episode of the second season of the British television series Misfits, a man named Bruno scales a building in a gorilla costume, possibly referencing the famous scene where King Kong climbs the Empire State Building. It is later revealed that he is actually a gorilla, further strengthening the connection.
In Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, a trophy named Gorilla Thriller is achieved when you ride a gorilla using a female character and you use that gorilla to climb up the tallest building in Gotham City, which is a direct reference to the final scene of the movie.
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