The original 1933 King Kong has always been one of my favourite movies.
I love everything about it, from concept to execution, and IMHO it still holds up nearly 90 years later. It was – and remains – a technical marvel of stop-motion animation. Animator Willis O’Brien managed to bring real pathos to an 18” animatronic model covered in rabbit fur, which has been unmatched since. (The Peter Jackson remake certainly has its charms, but I’ll take the original any day. And the less said about the 1976 ‘man in monkey suit’ version, the better).
As a movie, the original King Kong gets all the exposition out of the way in the opening set up, and then after Kong appears the action never stops right up to the famous finale atop the Empire State Building. For those interested in how the effects were achieved, I thoroughly recommend the book The Making of King Kong, if you are lucky enough to find a copy.
Original posters for the 1933 original release are, understandably incredibly rare and expensive. (One – previously owned by Kirk Hammett of Metallica fame – recently sold for $28,000 at auction). So I never seriously expected I would own one – and I still don’t! But this North African poster for a 1950s re-release comes close. I found it on a French poster collection website a couple of years ago and snapped it up. It is in very good condition, all things considered. I love the image, both of Kong and of Fay Wray and the other stars.
I got it professionally framed, and then made the stupid mistake of displaying it on a stone wall in my ‘man cave’. Come winter I checked regularly that there were no mould spots, and then one day, out of nowhere, I noticed a few green spores between the poster and the glass. When I took it off the wall and looked at the cardboard backing I was horrified to see it was covered in green mould. There was nothing for it but to take the poster out of the frame, shake off the mould and let everything dry out thoroughly. Luckily, I caught it just in time before the mould had had a chance to eat through the paper. I learnt my lesson then – its very important for poster conservation (and obvious in retrospect) to keep them in a dry environment and in particular to be very careful if displaying inside of exterior facing walls, especially in old houses which may be more prone to damp.
More recently, I was lucky enough to find a second reasonably priced piece of Kong memorabilia from the 50s. Above is a Mexican lobby card, one of a series that all featured the same main colour image with a different photo from the film. This image of Kong battling a pterodactyl is I think one of the best in the set. This is the only Mexican card I own, and it makes a great companion piece to the African poster.