From Last Week's Issue Of THE HUB
In the 187 minutes it takes for the current remake of KING KONG to unspool, you could watch both KING KONG VS. GODZILLA and KING KONG ESCAPES. Since Peter Jackson’s opus contains neither a fire-breathing Japanese dinosaur nor a giant robot monkey, it seems obvious where your Kong time would be best spent.

KING KONG VS. GODZILLA is perhaps most notable for marking the big ape’s second appearance on the big screen and first in nearly thirty years. In retrospect, it seems amazing that America’s foremost movie monster never returned in a sequel (admittedly, the final scene of the 1933 KING KONG would have made it difficult, but in Hollywood, a dollar sign always seems to trump dramatics). Instead, RKO lent Kong out to Toho and special effects craftsman Eiji Tsuburaya, who eschewed Willis O’Brien’s painstaking stop-motion techniques for stuntmen in rubber suits stomping miniature cities and countrysides.

Some dopes in a nuclear submarine accidentally crash it into an iceberg, releasing Godzilla from his frozen prison. The Big G beats feet for Tokyo, where he resumes his normal practice of stomping the city into matchsticks. Meanwhile, a pharmaceutical company looking for a way to improve its television show’s ratings sends two dudes to Pharaoh Island, where it is rumored the natives offer non-addictive hallucinogenic berries to the mythical beast they worship. The natives capture the drug company flunkies, who win them over by offering a radio that plays crummy J-Pop and giving cigarettes to the children. Sure enough, Kong is there, too. After defeating a giant octopus in battle, he chugs some berry juice and passes out long enough for the expedition team to strap him to a raft and pull him back to Japan. Unsurprisingly, this turns out to be a bad idea, resulting in Kong’s explosive escape, his destruction of much of Tokyo and an epic battle royal with Godzilla at Mt. Fuji.

Besides the lovely Mie Hama, who wallows in a large mockup of a monkey’s paw in the role of Kong’s love interest, the human actors don’t make much of an impact under Ishiro Honda’s direction, not that we really need them to when giant monsters are kicking the crap out of each other. KING KONG VS. GODZILLA was made before Toho’s kaiju movies got really silly (we’re getting to that), so there is a bit of political subtext concerning the possible use of nuclear weapons against the monsters — an interesting point in a Japanese production made less than twenty years after Hiroshima.

In 1967, Toho brought Kong back in KING KONG ESCAPES, which was inspired by a Saturday morning cartoon and plays much like a spy movie. Square-jawed sub commander Carl Nelson (Rhodes Reason), an American nurse (Linda Miller) and a Japanese cohort (Akira Takarada) take a cool flying sub to Mondo Island, where they discover Kong. Meanwhile, evil villain Dr. Who (Eisei Amamoto) is in cahoots with the sexy Madame X (Mie Hama again), an agent from an unnamed Communist power, who wants the radioactive Element X. She builds a 60-foot King Kong robot to mine Element X (“the strongest thing there is in the world today”), which will ensure Madame’s country’s nuclear domination. The damn thing doesn’t work, though, so Dr. Who kidnaps the real Kong and hypnotizes him into doing Who’s bidding. Before you know it, Kong and the newly refurbished robot Kong are fighting atop the Tokyo Tower.

For KING KONG ESCAPES, Toho and director Honda joined forces with Rankin/Bass, producers of animated TV specials like FROSTY THE SNOWMAN, which resulted in ubiquitous American voice artist Paul Frees dubbing nearly every male actor in the film. That’s okay, it just adds to the fun, which includes Kong fighting a dinosaur and a giant sea snake and Nelson’s bunch being kidnapped to Who’s Arctic lair, where the megalomaniac commands an army of jumpsuit-wearing henchmen.

Universal presents both movies on DVD in striking widescreen prints, the first time since their original U.S. theatrical releases that they have been seen in their proper 2.35:1 aspect ratios. Akira Ifukube contributes majestic scores that add much-needed gravitas to the rubber-monster cage matches. If the busy Mie Hama looks familiar, it’s because she played one of Sean Connery’s Japanese lovers, Kissy Suzuki, in the James Bond adventure YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE the same year she filmed KING KONG ESCAPES.

Peter Jackson’s KING KONG remake appears to be the must-see event picture of the season, but if you’re looking for simpler entertainment at half the running time, you can’t go wrong with two of Kong‘s biggest opponents. If Jackson had only thought to include a giant robot in his movie. Then he might have had something.