So Big

 How tall is King Kong? 

If your'e not sure, I'll give you some choices: eight feet, a mile, twenty-five feet, fifty feet. It is completely acceptable not to care, but I do. The correct answer is fifty feet. Approximately. This is based on the specifications put forth by Willis O'Brien, who confessed that Kong's actual dimensions bent and stretched a bit for dramatic purposes. The suggestion was made, way back in 1933, that an eight foot tall gorilla is a scary thing, and anything bigger than that would be even scarier. But there is that sense of scale that comes into play when you think about holding a full grown Fay Wray in your paw, or climbing the side of the Empire State Building. You'd want to see Fay's legs wiggling, and she shouldn't get lost like a speck in his palm. Just like you shouldn't need a microscope or binoculars to pick out the King on the side of a skyscraper. 

Or maybe we should draw back the curtain and admit that the monarch of Skull Island was actually only eighteen inches tall. The stop-motion models used to create the illusion of Kong measured only a foot and a half, and were placed on sets and photographed to appear twenty to fifty feet tall. Drama and weather permitting. Giant apes, as it turns out, are imaginary creations. The idea that giant apes of the imagination would conform to any sort of convention is pretty absurd. Or fantastical. 

Which is why the actual height of King Kong is subject to debate. Film versions subsequent to the 1933 origin story have had Kongs of ever-increasing size. Toho studios pumped up everyone's favorite simian to go head to head with their lizard king, Godzilla. That ape was three times the size of the one that was knocked off his throne not by airplanes, but by beauty. That was a guy in a rubber suit, not unlike the guy in a rubber suit that showed up in the one where Jessica Lange took over for Fay Wray. It was a pretty cool rubber suit, but still a guy in a rubber suit standing around on miniature sets. 

We no longer need rubber suits or eighteen inch models to make giant apes. We have computer graphics. King Kong is scheduled to go head to head with Godzilla once again this March. He now stands pretty much nose to nose with his Japanese counterpart coming in around three hundred ninety-three feet. Kong is now about as tall as a skyscraper. A short skyscraper, but still.

When I was ten years old, my friends and I would sometimes wage battle against monsters, the bigger they were, the harder they fell. In our imaginations, anyway. The Creature from the Black Lagoon was pretty scary, but a Creature that was forty feet tall? Terrifying. Especially if you're ten. 

Which may explain the marketing strategy involved here. Bigger may not be better, but scary? How about spiders? They aren't very big. But one hundred feet tall? You'd need a pretty big gorilla to squash that bug. Not that I'm trying to give them any ideas.