King Kong - Related Films

Related Films

• The premise of a giant gorilla brought to the United States for entertainment purposes, and subsequently wreaking havoc, was recycled in Mighty Joe Young (1949), through the same studio and with much of the same principal talent as the 1933 original. It was remade in 1998.
• King Kong bears some similarities with an earlier effort by special effects head Willis O'Brien, The Lost World (1925), in which dinosaurs are found living on an isolated plateau. Scenes from a failed O'Brien project, Creation, were re-used for the 1933 Kong. Creation was also about a group of people stumbling into an environment where prehistoric creatures have survived extinction.
• An obscure Japanese clone, Japanese King Kong (和製キングコング, Wasei Kingu Kongu?), directed by Torajiro Saito featuring an all-Japanese cast and produced by the Shochiku company, was also released in 1933. Detailed information outside of Japan about this film cannot be found.
• King Kong Appears in Edo (江戸に現れたキングコング, Edo ni Arawareta Kingu Kongu?). A Japanese-made monster/period piece that was produced by a company called Zensho Kinema in which King Kong attacks medieval Edo (modern Tokyo), and arguably Japan's first kaiju (giant monster) film, predating Godzilla by sixteen years.
• The Mighty Kong, an unofficial (this is why it was called Mighty Kong rather than King Kong) straight to video 1998 animated musical/remake of the 1933 film. It featured the voices of Jodi Benson and Dudley Moore. This film also featured a song score by the Sherman Brothers.
• Banglar King Kong - An unofficial Bangladeshi musical based on the King Kong story and directed by Iftekar Jahan. The film uses large amounts of stock footage from King Kong and premiered in June 2010 in the Purnima Cinema Hall in Dhaka.
• Other similar giant ape films include the 1961 British film Konga, where a chimpanzee is turned into a giant ape after being fed growth serum by a deranged scientist, and attacks London, the 1969 American film The Mighty Gorga which features a circus owners's quest to capture a giant ape in an African jungle, the 1976 Korean 3D film A*P*E. where a giant ape runs amok in Seoul South Korea, the 1976 Queen Kong, another British film that parodies King Kong with a gender reversal between the giant ape and the object of the ape's affection, and the 1977 Hong Kong made The Mighty Peking Man that featured a huge ape-like bigfoot that attacked Hong Kong,

There were other movies to have borne the "King Kong" name that have nothing to do with the character, such as the Hindi films King Kong (1962) and Tarzan and King Kong (1965) which featured the professional wrestler King Kong and has nothing to do with the famous movie monster, the 1968 Italian film Kong Island (which was advertised in the U.S as King of Kong Island, even though the gorillas in the movie are normal size), as well as the 1978 Mexican film Las Munecas Del King Kong (The Dolls of King Kong) which featured exotic jungle girls.

• The corpse of the 1976 King Kong makes an unauthorized appearance in the film Bye Bye Monkey.
• King Kong appears in the 1967 film Mad Monster Party. For copyright reasons he was renamed "It".
• King Kong appears in the 1996 Imax film Special Effects: Anything Can Happen. In this film, the classic climax of the 1933 film is recreated with modern (at the time) digital special effects.
• King of the Lost World, a direct-to-video movie produced by The Asylum, taking elements from both King Kong and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. The film was released on December 13, 2005, just one day before the theatrical release of Peter Jackson's version of King Kong.