Author: Not Alison

My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

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photo of the cover of the GKids blu-ray release of My Neighbor Totoro, showing a girl holding an umbrella waiting at a bus stop in the rain beside a large fluffy blue-grey whiskered creature staring straight ahead; he has a leaf on his head
In Miyazaki’s original version of the story, there was only one girl, not a pair of sisters.

Totoro in a few words and phrases: joyful, playful, beaming with wonder, rich in emotion.

Miyazaki trademarks offered here: nature coexisting with humans and vice versa, touches of a not-hostile supernatural, flying in strong wind, active girls looking out for their family or community, facial expressions that communicate so much.

Both girls, but especially Mei, show absolute delight and eagerness when they encounter creatures and situations that would be scary if allowed to be. The girls boldly leap at things that are strange and new.

You can be good, kind, and respectful but still behave like a kid.

Satsuki is working so hard to fill the place her mother would: preparing bento boxes, tending the kitchen fire, fixing her little sister’s hair, reminding her father of things.

At the start you see the truck packed with belongings, and Miyazaki doesn’t forget to include, without drawing any special attention to them, a pair of umbrellas sticking out the top.

I wonder if Totoro’s breath smells like leaves and fresh grass. It must not smell bad, and is likely even pleasant, because Mei and Satsuki aren’t the least bit fazed when he exhales a gale on either of them.

I will always and forever love the catbus.

When your dog seems to be barking at nothing at all, it might not be a ghost—it might be a catbus.

Thundercats: A Chronology

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detail of a photo of the inner cover of the Thundercats complete series DVD set, focused on the circular Thundercats symbol

Neither broadcast order nor production order really makes sense of all that happens in the first season of the original Thundercats series. (You can find my series overview here.)

The likely explanation is that the episodes were written by multiple storytellers whose efforts were not fully coordinated, with oversight probably provided by people who felt the series was episodic children’s television and if one story conflicted a bit with another or failed to follow a cohesive timeline, that was acceptable.

This problem is most evident when you look at the five episodes of Lion-O’s Anointment Trials, which not only first aired on different weeks (one every Friday) but were actually made at separate times, with other episodes produced in between, even though it is quite plain that the trials all take place on consecutive days, with no other stories intervening. This resulted in continuity headaches. For instance, a place/entity called the Vortex is introduced in the first Anointment Trial episode, clearly the first time the Thundercats have encountered it; the Vortex is seen again in “Divide and Conquer,” which was both produced and aired after Day 1 but before Day 5 of the Anointment Trials. The final Anointment Trial day also included a wide shot of a vast number of characters encountered by the Thundercats, which indicates that the Trials take place after those characters have been introduced, even though some of their episodes were made and aired after the first Anointment episode. So you can’t move all the Trials to where the first day stands or to where the last day stands. Some of the episodes in between need to come before the Trials and some of them need to come after the Trials.

Watching the episodes through this last time, I crafted my own chronology, repositioning a great many first-season episodes for one reason or another. I started with the broadcast order and consulted, sometimes, the production order, but I relied most of all on the content of the stories themselves, assuming that broadcast and production orders were unreliable.

Not all of these changes are strictly necessary, and I probably went overboard trying to prolong Vultureman’s petulant rejection of the other Mutants. But some of the repositioning can help untangle confused continuity and make better sense of characters’ behavior. If I ever add more episode commentaries I’ll explain my reasoning for the individual shifts.

A proviso: I have not gone back and rewatched everything using this updated sequence. There might be places where the new arrangement creates issues of continuity I didn’t think about.

Season 1

Exodus
Unholy Alliance
Berbils
The Slaves of Castle Plun-Darr
Trouble With Time
Pumm-Ra
The Terror of Hammerhand
Tower of Traps
Garden of Delights
Mandora the Evil-Chaser
The Ghost Warrior
The Doom Gaze
Lord of the Snows
All That Glitters
Spaceship Beneath the Sands
The Time Capsule
Fireballs of Plun-Darr
Return to Thundera
Spitting Image
Safari Joe
Mongor
Dr. Dometone
Astral Prison
Crystal Queen
Snarf Takes Up the Challenge
Return of the Driller
Turmagar the Tuska
Sixth Sense
Rock Giant
Thundercutter
Mechanical Plague
Demolisher
Wolfrat
Mandora and the Pirates
Feliner pts. 1-2
Dimension Doom
Queen of Eight Legs
Eye of the Beholder
Excalibur
Secret of the Ice King
Sword in a Hole
Good and Ugly
Trapped
Anointment Trials 1-5
Divide and Conquer
Micrits
Out of Sight
Shifter
Superpower Potion
Transfer
Jackalman’s Rebellion
Tight Squeeze
Monkian’s Bargain
Evil Harp of Charr-Nin
Mountain
Mumm-Ra Berbil
Trouble With Thunderkittens
Mumm-Rana
Dream Master
Fond Memories

Later Episodes

In the later part of the series, broadcast and production order seem to align, and the episode writing was apparently more tightly controlled to keep writers on track. There were only three episodes I saw a need to rearrange:

  1. move “Ravage Island” back and place it between “Psyche Out” and “Mask of Gorgon”; 
  2. reverse “Hachiman’s Honor” and “Runaways” so that “Runaways” comes first;
  3. reverse “Thunderscope” and “Jade Dragon” so that “Jade Dragon” comes first.

Thundercats (1985-1989)

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inner cover of the Thundercats complete series DVD set

I watched the original Thundercats series as it first aired, and it was a major part of my childhood—or at least the first season (65 episodes) and the “Thundercats Ho” movie/episodes (introducing Pumyra, Lynx-O, and Bengali) were, because while I watched and rewatched and rewatched those, the episodes that came after kind of fell by the wayside for me, unseen except in fragments. I think what happened is that the first season was in reruns for a long time, and before the new episodes began airing, the show had moved to a time slot earlier than I got home from school and I didn’t bother setting the VCR to record them—and might not have realized there were new episodes until I’d already missed a lot.

I didn’t see the second half of the series until it was released (slowly) on DVD. I recently watched everything again with a complete-series box set of DVDs, making absurdly elaborate commentary notes on nearly every episode.

Here I’m offering my general overview, an examination of the pilot (“Exodus” and “Unholy Alliance”), and in a separate post my own personal recommended episode order for viewing the series. Maybe someday I will also post those episode commentaries, but for now I’ll avoid the temptation.

(I’ve never seen any of the 2011 version of Thundercats, but I just possibly might have bought one or two of the toys when they appeared.)

Idiosyncrasies

Officially, according to the show, people from Thundera are Thunderians. I say and write Thunderan because there’s really no reason at all for that extra i.

I call Willa’s domain the Treetop Queendom, not Kingdom. There are emphatically no men there, that’s rather a defining feature, and Willa is never called a king.

I accept the spelling S-S-Slithe as official based on the packaging of the LJN toys, and yet the toy line also said Ben Gali (two words) and I treat it as a single word, Bengali.

In my comments I don’t italicize the names Feliner or Ratstar out of laziness, even though these are ships and the names really should be in italics.

An Overview

The opening sequence is simply gorgeous animation. This is some of the best animation you could see on U.S. television in the 1980s. It still looks amazing today, jaded as we might be.

Watching the series at other times it bothered me that various Thunderans would not immediately recognize the Sword of Omens and understand Lion-O’s authority because of it; but in fact it is built into the very first episode that the Eye of Thundera is largely a secret, perhaps thought of as a myth, and even the nobles don’t know about it. Jaga has carried the Sword openly in the past, we learn, but apparently without people understanding what it was. The Sword is not a symbol of the ruler of the Thundercats; it is not being passed down to Lion-O from his father. It may be quite rare, or even unique, for the lord of the Thundercats to have it, something called for only by the extreme circumstances they find themselves in.

In many episodes it helps to assume that the Sword not only warns Lion-O when a Thundercat is in trouble but also mystically persuades him of which direction to go, whether he recognizes the location in the vision or not.

The setting is called Third Earth. I have always understood this as meaning a future epoch of the earth’s history—this is the third major stage of the earth’s life. Whether we ourselves are First Earth or Second Earth is unclear. Perhaps the age ending with the extinction of the dinosaurs marked the end of First Earth and we are in Second Earth. If so, the change from Second to Third is not as total or traumatic as the move from First to Second. There has been some continuity from our age to the future time of the Thundercats, such as human beings in Willa’s Treetop Queendom or the Berserkers, along with Mumm-Ra’s pyramid and some other ruins and relics.

It’s possible, though, that “Third” might have nothing to do with time periods or stages; maybe it’s just attached to the name because Earth is the third planet from the sun.

We know the Berbils came from another planet. We assume the Wollos, Bulkans, Trollogs, and other species are native to Third Earth, though it’s not necessarily the case.

It may help to assume that when we see English printed on the screen, this is just a concession of the animation for us the viewers, and the real text is actually some kind of galactic common script, spread far and wide including Thundera, Second Earth, the galactic police force, and any of old earth’s former colonies. The spoken language, too, must be some kind of common speech that even Warrior Maidens and Berbils use (although the Berbils may’ve been on earth long enough to take up the local language).

A few episodes feature nameless hench-Mutants, “extras” doing gruntwork in Castle Plun-Darr or guarding (and inevitably chasing) prisoners. However, it’s fairly clear overall that the intended situation is for S-S-Slithe, Jackalman, and Monkian—at some point joined, inexplicably, by Vultureman and a couple of times bullied by a visiting Ratar-O—to be the only Mutants left active on Third Earth. (My own attempts to explain this discrepancy away are in my comments below on “Unholy Alliance” and “Spaceship Beneath the Sands.”) The beautiful opening at the beginning of every episode shows numerous Mutant foot soldiers, but this represents a scene from the very first episode, before the Mutants’ ship got buried in the sand. Viewers could be misled by this into thinking hench-Mutants were still around, and I strongly suspect that some of the show’s writers were also fooled.

One of the statues in Mumm-Ra’s crypt represents something like a vulture. But whoever drew the main shot of this statue, the image that gets repeated over and over throughout the series, got the foreshortening wrong. Instead of a bird with a beak, it looks like this is some fantasy creature with no mouth and no chin, just a wrinkled neck between eyes and collarbones, and it irks me every time I see it.

In the early episodes Lion-O is sometimes overbearing and pompous and too proud and caught up in the image he thinks “the Lord of the Thundercats” ought to convey—all of which is exactly, precisely how a child in an adult body who’s suddenly been tossed into royal leadership with little preparation and everyone depending on him, plus receiving a set of completely new, unexpected super-Thunderan powers, would behave.

Mumm-Ra is honestly quite scary. Whether mummified or powered up, he is not a tame or amusing character, and the people making the show did not soften him up to make him nonthreatening. (Or if this is the softer version, the original must have been horrifying.)

Exodus

The first two episodes aired originally in a one-hour block; in reruns, this block was split into “Exodus” and “Unholy Alliance.” Together these episodes deliver a lot of the setup of the series (although you need to add on “Berbils” [ep. 3] and “Slaves of Castle Plun-Darr” [ep. 4] to get most of the main pieces in place).

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There’s a great deal the first episode doesn’t tell us.

Why does Thundera explode? Was it a geological catastrophe? An accident of Thunderan technology? A deliberate attack by enemies? (Way, way, way down the line the series will address this.)

We don’t know exactly what is going on between the groups, but it’s clear the Thunderans are familiar with the Mutants as a threat, and a frequent one (Panthro: “Always those blasted Mutants!”), although here the Mutants might be no more than opportunistic space pirates. Later in the series we see there must have been some sort of ongoing conflict, because otherwise the Thunderans would not be stealing plans for Plun-Darrian war machines. But how severe is this conflict? (Later events will suggest that the moons of Plun-Darr are within orbital range of Thundera, at least entering that area after the planet’s end. So the Mutants may come from a place fairly close by.)

We also don’t get much explicit information about the group surrounding Lion-O. We get the idea that “Thundercats” are a specialized, elite group among the Thunderan population, and these few on the flagship are called nobles. But we aren’t told more than that.

It’s possible Cheetara, Panthro, and Tygra are the heads of their clans, the highest of the nobility aside from the lord himself. But one would expect the heads of the clans to be older and married and have children—although it’s possible they do have families, placed on other ships to maximize the chance that someone will escape to rebuild. And it may also be that the older, more mature heads have already been killed in a conflict with the Mutants, and these relatively young adults have taken over the leadership of the clans earlier than they normally would, much the way Lion-O does when the planet explodes (with his father apparently on it, as we see later in the series).

But I happen to think that as the episode opens there are living clan heads on other ships, in other places, and this group of Thundercats was selected because they are in their prime and Lion-O will need fit, active, physically strong protectors in the hostile galaxy. It may well be that one, two, or all three are in line to be clan heads in the future, and it was decided to get this group of nobles bonded with Lion-O now in preparation for that future, even if the elders should survive.

That leaves Wilykit and Wilykat, brother and sister, twins. Why choose two children instead of a strapping adult at the peak of her or his physical abilities?

For one thing, they represent a different kind of ability than speed and strength; it is not for nothing that in the future Anointment Trials theirs will be a test of cunning. That too will be needed in the dangerous refugee future. But I rather think this emphasis on cunning and wit and stealth and tricks is found throughout their clan; lacking the speed of cheetah-types or the strength of panther- and tiger-types, their branch of Thunderan people will traditionally rely on less bodily means for defense and offense. (I’m supposing that each clan is made up of Thunderans of a particular cat-type, which is purely speculation.)

Kit and Kat are quite competent and capable, as they prove repeatedly, but they’re not entirely responsible and their judgment is sometimes weak, as they prove repeatedly. Maybe in this case there really is no one else from their clan to send. There may be a head of the clan, however, either too aged to take part in guarding Lion-O or too busy scrambling to meet clan responsibilities shouldered too soon because the previous head was killed. But it shouldn’t be overlooked that they are the same age (so far) as young Lion-O, and a desire to give him someone his own age to relate to might have been a factor.

Both Wilykit and Wilykat are sent, instead of simply one clan member, for several reasons:

  1. They work best as a team.
  2. They are young, and the leaders were concerned one might not be enough, although the pair might do the job of one adult.
  3. They’re facing devastation and extreme loss, and more than any of the adults they are going to need someone close and familiar and offering connection to their old life in order to deal with the emotional toll of what’s ahead. (It also seems that Panthro, Cheetara, and Tygra are already friends and comrades before this mission, which is less likely to be true of the two young Thundercats.)

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When the Mutant attack begins, the framing is such that we the audience may not realize the ship being hit is a different one than the main characters are on. I expect this was deliberate.

There is no explanation given for why the Mutants don’t attack the ship again while the Thundercats are in stasis. The reason for S-S-Slithe’s retreat from the Sword chamber is shaky enough that it’s hard to believe they flew away without any effort to track where the Thunderan ship went. It’s true they must have been out of immediate range, or else the Thundercats would not have dared go into stasis. But it’s hard to believe that the Mutants totally lost the ship and it took them that long to find it—unless the Thunderan flagship had some kind or electronic cloaking/stealth/scrambling technology (and they hadn’t employed it in the first place because the lesser convoy ships lacked that technology, so what was the point; or the technology can’t be activated close to a planet; or, since the planet was exploding the Mutants knew the flagship would be leaving and were waiting to spot them visually without sensors).

One explanation is that something hugely important and significant was going on that claimed the Mutants’ attention—something that could not wait. They had a sense of where the Thunderan ship was heading, estimated that the Thundercats would have to go into suspension, and decided they could come back for the Sword later after this huge situation had been dealt with. It didn’t take the Mutants years to find the Thunderan flagship, it took them that long to deal with their own near-hand crisis, then put themselves in stasis and fly out to follow the ship.

The initial episode implies that Lion-O grew to physical adulthood because the suspension capsules allow some aging—which naturally leads to the question of why Wilykit and Wilykat didn’t grow the same way. The traditional answer is that although Lion-O explains it as the natural functioning of suspension capsules, he’s jumping to conclusions and in fact his capsule was malfunctioning slightly due to damage inflicted during the Mutants’ attack on the ship. His capsule allowed a little more aging than it should have, but the other Thundercats’ capsules were apparently in regular working order.

The Unholy Alliance and Spaceship Beneath the Sands

When Mumm-Ra sinks the Mutants’ ship in the sands, we know there were other Mutants on board. Because it’s a spaceship, it’s airtight and has its own oxygen supply, so the burial itself would not have killed anyone. The ship may have had working suspension capsules, but otherwise the crew members would have spent a good bit of time alive down there squabbling over food reserves until either they ran out of water; they killed each other off in fights; or whatever ruined the ship let the sand pour in.

The Mutants’ spaceship was whole when Mumm-Ra sank it. Had it been on the surface, erosion could easily have eaten away the hull, but it was buried and should have been protected. Yet when it reappears in “Spaceship Beneath the Sands” it isn’t whole. Are we to assume the sands shift enough to wear giant holes in the buried ship, or is there some sort of creature down there that eats metal?

Possibly some Mutants actually survived the entire time of the ship’s burial but were too weak to come out when the ship resurfaced. S-S-Slithe and the others—eager to fly out and fight with their newly reclaimed vehicles—just left them there for later and dragged them to Castle Plun-Darr between episodes.

OR

When the ship was buried the Mutant crew decided to go into suspension instead of starving slowly, and when S-S-Slithe, Monkian, and Jackalman entered the wreckage they did see the sleeping Mutants but ignored them for the present. The trio went for a test ride of the vehicles before coming back, waking everyone up, and ordering the newly awakened henchmen to haul all the salvageable equipment to Castle Plun-Darr.

OR

The Mutant troops were in stasis, and the main trio did wake them up right away, then (between onscreen scenes) gave them directions to Castle Plun-Darr and ordered them to move all the usable equipment while they (the three leaders) took off on the vehicles to go attack the Thundercats right away. (This would, if nothing else, keep the Cats busy while all the equipment was being taken to the castle.)

One of these scenarios would account for the presence of Mutant extras in other episodes. And yet different episodes also make clear that the Mutant leaders are alone. So what happened to the nameless troops? Why do they disappear and reappear?

Maybe S-S-Slithe liked to put them in stasis when they weren’t needed, so he wouldn’t have to feed them, but at some point something went wrong and they expired without being woken up.

Maybe some of them were made to serve as crew on the Ratstar and more were killed off each of the many times it crashed. (The ship couldn’t be kept in operation entirely by two or three people on the bridge, right?)

Maybe the show is too kind to show us that any time a hench-Mutant got caught spying on Willa’s Treetop Queendom, the Warrior Maidens did away with him and their numbers gradually dwindled.

Maybe the Mutant trio used the hench-Mutants as messengers to Mumm-Ra when they had something unpleasant to say, and such messengers didn’t come back.

Certainly any dangerous job would be assigned to an underling, and that may have steadily eroded the supply of underlings, who couldn’t be replaced by reinforcements.

Reflections: King Kong (1933)

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photo of the cover of the Warner Archive Collection blu-ray edition of the original King Kong film

I’ve seen the original, the 1976 version, and Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake. The best special effects are in Jackson’s version, not surprisingly, but in most other ways the original King Kong is superior to its later imitators.

And in fact the original’s special effects are far better than what you should expect from 1933. Willis O’Brien not only made supposedly impossible shots possible, he turned a monster into a character.

The Premise

In all the versions I’ve seen, the King Kong story has at its center a preposterous notion: that a gigantic gorilla has any interest in a human woman except perhaps as something to chew and swallow. 

One of the many remarkable things about the film is that it doesn’t simply ask you to believe that an ape is interested in a woman, it shows you that Kong cares about her, and you believe it.

And yet you can’t justify Kong’s interest in any natural way. Yes, for a moment or two maybe Kong would be curious about this odd creature, bleached white unlike all the other humans he’s seen, puzzled enough to pause and poke at her before deciding what to do—but the answer, reasonably, would have to be either “eat” or “throw away as too risky to eat.” But you don’t have much of a movie that way, so you simply have to go with the idea or give up.

Unless we invent a story nowhere hinted at in the film that as a baby, Kong was cared for by a human woman—it would not be a white woman, but an islander—after his own gorilla mother was killed (presumably by a dinosaur). If infant Kong was nurtured by a human woman, up to the point where he could fend for himself in the wild, or maybe when that woman was herself killed somehow, then he could indeed have some obsessive (completely non-sexual) desire to possess and be around a human woman. The fact that Ann is white would be little more than a temporary distraction—him thinking, Okay, she looks a little weird, but, all right, no, this is basically the same as the mother-creature. Carrying Ann back to his lair and setting her up on a ledge would then be the same thing he’s done with all the “sacrificed” women over the years. He brings them home and dimly expects that they will fill the niche his foster mother once did, satisfying a garbled psychological need.

(Just think—that kid at the orphanage in Cider House Rules might’ve been on to something.)

Each woman would last a while but eventually expire—maybe he fails to feed her properly or she accidentally falls off the ledge or he picks her up too roughly or she fails to meet his expectation somehow so he gets mad and smashes her. The only thing unique about Ann’s case is that this time people come after her, armed with guns, gas bombs, and little concern for consequences.

Racism

Viewers today ought to be prepared to face head-on the issue of racism in King Kong.

Most immediately evident are the islanders, presented in stereotypical ways with appearance, customs, and actions probably chosen to signal “primitive.”

But it’s fair to note that many of the condescending and bigoted things the movie tells us about the islanders (like the idea that they’ve been degraded and lost the civilization that the wall-builders possessed) come out of the mouths of white men thoroughly ignorant of their history and culture, and we can easily suppose that what we’re hearing is the result of these men’s own biases, arrogance, and sense of cultural superiority, not anything remotely like an accurate assessment of the islanders.

In other words, we can often pin the racism not on the movie itself but on the characters, and observe that they are being people of their time, idiotically spouting things they don’t know because it suits their hyper-inflated ideas about white culture. Instead of pointing at the islanders and saying, “Wow, they’re savage!” we can point to Denham and the sailors and say, “Wow, they’re clueless and prejudiced!” if we choose to.

Logically the people of the island ought to be Pacific Islanders, or conceivably Indigenous South Americans, and not Africans, but the movie seems to have relied largely on African American actors to play these parts (and maybe a few white men painted to look black). In some shots the filmmakers have apparently made a special effort to emphasize people’s hair and facial expressions in ways that are brief but cringeworthy.

On the other hand, note that the islanders are entirely ready to throw spears at Kong and fight him, hopeless or not. They are not trapped in any superstition about the sanctity of an “ape god” as we might expect to find in a movie of this era. They know very well Kong is a threat and that he is not so sacred they must be passive before him.

Also some of the shots of islanders facing Kong have clear parallels in the shots of New Yorkers facing him. Kong reaches into a two-story hut to pull out a nameless victim; Kong reaches into a hotel window to pull out a nameless victim. Kong throws a hut wall that lands on islanders in the foreground; Kong throws an awning that lands on New Yorkers in the foreground. Kong puts an islander in his mouth; Kong puts a businessman in his mouth. The island defenders hurl spears; the city defenders fire pistols. There’s no difference in bravery or panic or commotion, only a difference in technology.

•

Charlie the Chinese cook speaks in stereotypical language, and his role on ship is subservient, but in his actions and behavior he’s never a caricature or a joke. In fact when he finds a pivotal clue he immediately knows what to do and correctly takes the initiative without hesitation or doubt, setting in motion the next portion of the plot. He’s a capable, intelligent individual, not just a servant to white people.

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In addition to all that is Kong himself. Yes, he’s a gorilla, not a human being, but the racist comparison of Africans and African Americans to apes has a long history, and this is an ape with an obsession for a white woman, and such obsession is another old racist trope. You can watch and enjoy the movie on its surface terms without getting the idea that Kong symbolizes black men or a black man, but when you’re aware of racist slurs and imagery it’s hard to believe the filmmakers weren’t playing with this notion on some level, though it would be more as a way to heighten white viewers’ anxiety than as any kind of direct allegory or analogy. (There’s no reactionary social message here like you can find in Pierre Boule’s Planet of the Apes novel or the movie[s] made from it.)

King Kong doesn’t try to tell us what the islanders are thinking when they go out of their way to sacrifice Ann. Viewers may assume—and may have been expected to assume—that it’s because her whiteness makes her a “superior” sacrifice, but this is hardly a necessary conclusion. It may simply be that since the outsiders ruined the first ceremony, one of the outsiders should become the replacement sacrifice. Maybe the islanders also thought that although this woman looked bizarre to them, Kong might like a little variety, and it meant no one from their own community needed to die.

On the other hand, we do not actually know that this is a human sacrifice meant to appease the giant ape; for all we know, the local woman who was nearly delivered to Kong was being punished for some terrible deed, and that gong they rang to summon him was sounded only when they happened to have a capital punishment to mete out.

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In any case we ought to marvel at and respect the resilience, ingenuity, and intelligence of the islanders and their ancestors for creating a viable human community in such an intensely inhospitable place.

Natural History

It is hard to imagine any natural history that would allow giant gorillas to develop on an island populated by dinosaurs, even if we accept giant gorillas as biologically possible. (There was, at least, gigantopithecus, apparently a massive prehistoric orangutan.) I would propose that the dinosaurs, reptiles, and insects are native to the island but gorillas are not. Giant gorillas, let us imagine, are native to some other island (or mainland) and were brought to Skull Island by the humans who journeyed there—possibly as a necessary condition for settlement. It may be that without giant gorillas protecting them they would not have been able to establish a community in this hostile place. Suppose that these humans had tamed giant gorillas in their previous home, and brought several along as breeding stock, but at some point in intervening history the gorillas became feral and mostly died out, leaving Kong as probably the last survivor.

Miscellaneous

You’d think the path to the captive sacrifice would already be clear of trees, unless it has been a LONG time since the last one.

Most of the time when you use a dummy for a human body it looks silly, as when the brontosaur-type lake creature grabs people in its mouth. But when Kong shakes the men off the log and the “bodies” land on the rocks below, the limp, flailing limbs kind of work, uncomfortably.

Kong has brute strength, but he doesn’t defeat a tyrannosaur with that. He wins by using intelligence and skill, able to outfight his deadly opponent with dodges and wrestling moves.

Ann screams too much (with provocation, yes), and you can see that some of this has been added to the soundtrack when Fay Wray is not mouthing any screams.

Kong’s scale is inconsistent. How big IS he compared to a human being? His size shifts around even on the island.

I’m pretty sure that instead of skirting around Kong and climbing down a cliffside on a vine, I would go back the way I came, on foot.

It’s not really clear how Kong locates Ann in the city. How does he know what building to look in? Was he able to track Driscoll-taking-Ann just as Driscoll tracked Kong-taking-Ann?

In 1933 I’m not sure I would expect a police chief to think of airplanes without prompting from a civilian.

Kong is tough. It takes repeated passes of those planes shooting him before he starts wobbling even a little.

Notice there is not the slightest hint in this film that Ann feels any sympathy for Kong or is sorry for him being killed. There are, though, displays of Kong’s tenderness towards her and maybe even a recognition—at the end when he picks her up the last time—that he should set her down so she won’t be harmed, regardless of what happens to him. And even if Ann is terrified or traumatized, we the audience sympathize with Kong. We have seen him as a feeling, living being with yearning and regrets and anger and posturing and curiosity, and we can be sorry that things turn out the way they do.