King Kong in popular culture
[3] The combination of advanced special effects and primitivist content in the film made it popular among American and European intellectuals, especially the surrealists.
Ray Bradbury remarked that when King Kong was released, "a mob of boys went quietly mad across the world, then fled into the light to become adventurers, explorers, zoo-keepers, filmmakers.
[1] The controversial World War II Dutch resistance fighter Christiaan Lindemans – eventually arrested on suspicion of having betrayed secrets to the Nazis – was nicknamed "King Kong" due to his being exceptionally tall.
In the film, two teenagers, Molly and Johnny, tell their parents that they are going to a classic movie showing of King Kong, when they are actually going to an abandoned lookout.
In 1965 Monocle, a political satire magazine, cohosted a publisher's party at the Empire State Building with Bantam Books, who were reissuing Delos W. Lovelace's novelization of King Kong.
Andy Warhol, who was not on the guest list, used the occasion to generate publicity and create a performance by complaining to the press that King Kong should be screened with his own film Empire (1964).
[1] In Mad Monster Party?, the giant gorilla "It" (with the vocal effects provided by Allen Swift) is a larger knock-off of King Kong and is most likely named "It" due to copyright reasons.
In a 1972 New Yorker cartoon, a man at a cocktail party atop the newly constructed World Trade Center comments that he is impressed that it was "finished so quickly and without incident", while King Kong climbs up the building below him.
[7] Thomas Pynchon, in his post-modern 1973 novel, Gravity's Rainbow, treats the King Kong/Ann Darrow relationship as an obvious metaphor for Americans' historical racist paranoia of black men dating white women.
In homage to King Kong, K-1 falls for the Doctor's friend Sarah Jane Smith, and views her as the one human being it is willing to spare from destruction.
In the essay Stein talks about the contexts in which he has seen King Kong during his life, including in the 1930s in New York picture palaces like Radio City Music Hall, and the RKO Roxy and in Paris with Jean Boullet in the 1950s.
The spoof follows the plot of the 1933 film closely, but it ends with Marge marrying King Homer after he collapses in exhaustion, failing to climb beyond the second story of the Springfield State Building.
King Kong's family, consisting of smaller apes, appear at the wedding, and Homer has a habit of eating people, such as Shirley Temple as well as Marge's father at the end.
[11] In the My Life as a Teenage Robot episode "Hostile Makeover", Jenny is turned into a Neanderthal and gorilla-like monster; when the cameras flashed their lights to take pictures of her, she roared.
In the second Futurama film The Beast With a Billion Backs, Richard Nixon's head remarks about an alien invasion that King Kong is "too old to save us this time".
The concluding second-part had Kong cornering the Bunny on the roof of a New York City building, complete with biplanes flying in the sky.
The woman, extremely annoyed, slams the window on Kong's toes, making him lose his balance and grip, sending him falling.
[12] English author Graham Greene's last novel The Captain and the Enemy, published in 1988, contains a few allusions to King Kong and specifically, the theme of unrequited love of the monster for his captive, Ann; even other elements of the final scene of the film, such as military planes and Kong's eventual demise, are alluded to in the novel, which too ends with a death by an aeroplane crash.
However, they lost and had to pay Nintendo $1.8 million in damages when it was discovered that King Kong was in fact in the public domain at that time and that MCA/Universal knew this when they filed the lawsuit.
They had even argued in the past that the name "King Kong" was in the public domain in Universal City Studios, Inc. v. RKO General, Inc.[13][14] The music video for Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers' "Runnin' Down a Dream" references the Empire State Building fight scene against the biplanes, where a giant Tom Petty swats at giant mosquitoes in the same manner as King Kong.
The music video to Cherrelle's 1984 single "I Didn't Mean to Turn You On" features the singer being pursued by a Kong-like gorilla who tracks her to her apartment.
In the video game Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, an argument over which building King Kong climbs in the climax blossoms into the beginning of the relationship between the main character Raiden and his girlfriend Rose.
In the 2008 film Be Kind Rewind, Jerry (Jack Black) gets magnetized, thus erasing all the tapes in the titular video store where his friend Mike works.
In the Family Guy episode "Hannah Banana", Miley Cyrus which turns out to be an android catch the Evil Monkey and I climbed it to the top of a building that resembles the Empire State.
In the anime-manga series Toriko, the protagonist is a gourmet hunter whose job is to travel around the world to hunt the most delicious animals and creatures.
In "The Big Bash", Timmy Turner and Remy Buxaplenty had to obtain a giant banana from King Kong as part of a scavenger hunt held by Cupid.
King Kong later joined the other characters from time in chasing after Cupid and then unleashed on Cosmo and Juandissimo by Wanda over a bet they had about winning her.
He gets rescued, but Rainbow Monkey Kong follows and is ultimately defeated when Numbuh 4 uses a giant wrestling robot to give it a goodbye hug.
In the 2017 film The Lego Batman Movie, King Kong (voiced by Seth Green) appears as an inmate of the Phantom Zone.
This prompts the protagonist Wade Watts/"Parzival" to search for a solution in James Halliday's life to a dialogue which urges him to go backwards traveling through the code of the game, in a tunnel which starts at the base of the Statue of Liberty and ends behind King Kong at Central Park where the finish line is.
