Thursday, September 16, 2010

you know the name of King Kong

I can't believe I have never written about King Kong yet.  let's fix that.

the first version of King Kong I saw was the cartoon. it was at my friend Charles' house, he had one of those little hand cranked movie viewers which had maybe 30 or 60 seconds of some given film.

he had a cartridge of King Kong in "The Thousand Year Knockout" which is not on either of the DVDs that were released in 2005 to capitalize on the needless remake.  it's an episode where a stone gargoyle comes to life and Kong has to stop it.

pretty cool, and who would make a movie or tv show about gargoyles returning to life, that would never work! this show also boasted one of the best theme songs ever.

also notable is the series' main villain- Dr. Who.  he shows up in a number of the episodes, including one where he makes a giant mechanical ape version of Kong.  boy, I bet that would have made a great feature film!

yes, yes it did!

in more recent years it's become fashionable to for some overly silly fans to try to differentiate this Dr. Who from the other one by spelling his name as "Hu" or "Whu" or something else, but really, what's the point?  the one from King Kong Escapes is based on this one.

Billie Mae Richards provided voices for some of the characters, and she recently passed away on September 10th of this year.  she was a talented actress, known to most of our ears as Rudolph. RIP Billie.

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