King Kong | Trailers (1933-2005)

King Kong bears some similarities with an earlier effort by special effects head Willis O'Brien, The Lost World (1925), in which dinosaurs are found living on an isolated plateau. Scenes from a failed O'Brien project, Creation, were re-used for the 1933 Kong. Creation was also about a group of people stumbling into an environment where prehistoric creatures have survived extinction. As Merian C. Cooper stated in an interview, "I was a great believer in constantly changing Kong's height to fit the settings and the illusions. He's different in almost every shot; sometimes he's only 18 feet (5.5 m) tall and sometimes 60 feet (18.3 m) or larger. This broke every rule that O'Brien and his animators had ever worked with, but I felt confident that if the scenes moved with excitement and beauty, the audience would accept any height that fitted into the scene. For example, if Kong had only been 18 feet (5.5 m) high on the top of the Empire State Building, he would have been lost, like a little bug; I constantly juggled the heights of trees and dozens of other things. The one essential thing was to make the audience enthralled with the character of Kong so that they wouldn't notice or care that he was eighteen feet (5.5 m) high or forty (12.2), just as long as he fitted the mystery and excitement of the scenes and action."