King Kong in Popular Culture - King Kong From The 1950s To The 1970s

King Kong From The 1950s To The 1970s

The film was re-released in 1952, becoming one of the media events of that year. Time magazine named it “Movie of the Year”. The film’s studio RKO tried an experimental reissue of King Kong in the Midwest United States in 1952. In an unprecedented move they committed most of King Kong’s promotional budget to television spots. The re-release was an enormous success, with the film attracting triple the usual business in its markets. This showed that television was a powerful tool for promotion. King Kong generated more box office receipts than the original 1933 release had. Theatre owners named it Picture of the Year. It was at this time that King Kong acquired its reputation as a popular culture phenomenon. The two most significant spinoffs of King Kong in this period were Mighty Joe Young (1949) and Godzilla (1954). Godzilla was inspired by King Kong’s popularity in Japan. Godzilla revived and reconfigured parts of the King Kong story more powerfully than any other spinoff has. RKO theatrically re-released King Kong for the last time in 1956.

King Kong was sold to television after the conclusion of the 1956 release. One channel in New York showed the film seventeen times in a single week, with each showing topping the ratings. From then on, the film was a television mainstay that captured many new fans.

There is a reference to the real-world revival and massive success of King Kong in the 1950s in the 1959 movie A Summer Place. In the movie, 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. Molly calls King Kong “one of those wonderful old horror numbers.” Johnny frets that if he doesn't watch the movie, he might not be able to answer his parent's questions, but Molly tells him, "It's kind of sad dreams If anybody asks, just tell 'em about the end. That's the part everybody remembers.". In 1974's Herbie Rides Again Alonzo Hawk has been having nightmares about Herbie. During his nightmare sequence there is a King Kong-themed dream. Alonzo dreams he's Kong with Herbie-like planes flying around him and squirting oil until he falls off the Empire State Building. In a Superman story, an ape grew to giant size and gained kryptonite vison due to meteors of kryptonite and uranium, and was called Titano the Super-Ape. This ape had a liking to Lois Lane, and in one story climbed up the Daily Planet building.

King Kong reached the height of its public visibility in the twentieth century in the 1960s and 1970s, as part of a nostalgic trend to 1930s Hollywood. King Kong was becoming a cult film with nostalgia value. During this period the character and story of King Kong was most frequently used as a parody in popular culture. The frequency of its use as a parody at this time shows how significant it had become in popular culture. In the 1968 film Yellow Submarine, the characters look in a room where a monster ape smashes through a window to get at a screaming woman on a bed. "Do you think we're interrupting something?" George nonchalantly comments of it, to which John replies, "I think so."

In the mid-1960s RKO began to license a series of King Kong-related products in response to a heavy demand from the public. These products included comic books, games, models, and posters. In 1969 most of the censored shots were found. In 1971 a version of King Kong with these long-missing portions returned to their proper places was released to art houses.

References to King Kong in popular culture have been widespread since the 1960s. The references have different tones, with some being parodies while others are parodies or oppositional critiques. Some of these references are fleeting (for example, Frank Zappa named one of his more complex compositions with the Mothers of Invention after Kong), but nevertheless are evidence of King Kong’s importance in popular culture. King Kong has been cited in films such as Morgan! (1966), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), and Amazon Women on the Moon (1987). In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the song "Science Fiction/Double Feature" pays homage to King Kong with the lyric: "Then something went wrong for Fay Wray and King Kong ... they got caught in a celluloid jam." At the end of the film, Rocky carries Dr. Frankenfurter on the RKO logo, replicating what King Kong carrying Fay Wray in the climax of King Kong.

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. A panel of Monocle satirists was due to give an ironic commentary on King Kong, followed by a screening of the film. One of the titles on the satirists’ program was “King Kong to Viet Cong: Thirty Years of Gorilla Warfare”. 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). Warhol was permitted to show three minutes of Empire after King Kong. Empire was then criticized in the press for being too dull and being upstaged by King Kong.

By the 1970s the character of King Kong was constantly referenced in cartoons and jokes. 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. It was at this time that the film began to be studied by academics and film theoreticians, who found hidden subtexts and symbolic meanings in the film. However, Merian C. Cooper maintained that the film was nothing more than a simple adventure story.

After the highly promoted but vastly inferior 1976 remake of King Kong, Elliot Stein wrote a nostalgic fan homage essay to King Kong called “My Life with Kong” in Rolling Stone magazine. Stein was one of the most famous of the “Kongophiles” along with Forrest J. Ackerman and Jean Boullet. 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. There was an art deco retrospective of King Kong at the Radio City Music Hall in the 1974 and a King Kong homage was staged for the Telluride Film Festival in the 1970s. King Kong was also mentioned by name by Kermit the Frog in lyrics from the song "I Hope that Something Better Comes Along" from The Muppet Movie: "She made a monkey out of old King Kong/I hope that something better comes along."

Additionally, King Kong is one of the epithets Redd Foxx's character, Fred G. Sanford, from Sanford and Son used referring to his sister-in-law Esther.

The corpse of King Kong, said to be a left over prop, appears in the 1978 film Bye Bye Monkey, where a small chimpanzee is found inside of it.