Background
Before King Kong hit the silver screen, a long tradition of jungle films existed, and, whether drama or documentary, such films generally adhered to a narrative pattern that followed an explorer or scientist into the jungle to test a theory only to discover some monstrous aberration in the undergrowth. In such films, scientific knowledge could be turned topsy-turvy at any time and it was this that provided the genre with its vitality, appeal, and endurance.
At the turn of the 19th to 20th century, the Lumière Brothers sent film documentarians to places westerners had never seen, and Georges Méliès utilized trick photography in film fantasies that prefigured that in King Kong. Jungle films were launched in the United States in 1913 with Beasts in the Jungle, a film that mixed live actors with lions, a tiger, and other animals. The film's popularity spawned similar pictures, including a few about "ape men" and gorillas. In 1918, Elmo Lincoln starred in Tarzan of the Apes, and, in 1925, The Lost World made movie history with special effects by Willis O'Brien and a crew that later would work on King Kong.
The little-known but recently partially rediscovered Mascot Pictures 1927 movie serial Isle of Sunken Gold may have provided fundamental inspirations for story and character elements of King Kong – it featured shipwrecked sailors on a remote island, and a seafaring hero (Bruce Gordon) clad in white who fights to protect the scantily clad heroine (Anita Stewart) from primitive natives and their deity, a cave-dwelling fanged ape named "Kong."
Read more about this topic: King Kong (1933 film)
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