Headscratchers / King Kong (1933)

• Carl Denham hires Ann Darrow to play the love interest in his adventure film ... but he doesn't appear to have brought any other actors on the ship with him, so there wouldn't have been much of a romance, or even much of a film.
  • He probably planned to use the Sailors on the ship as the other actors for the film.
• How did they get Kong on the ship?
  • A Really big raft.
  • Okay, but how did they fit Kong into the ship? Its entire hold wasn't much bigger than Kong himself, and was already full of supplies and divided into compartments by walls. They couldn't have just laid him out on the open deck without making their vessel so top-heavy that even a light squall would've tipped it over. And that's not counting all the extra tons of fresh water and plants they'd need to take on board, just to keep a 20-60 ton animal alive for the voyage home, or the fact they'd run out of chloroform long before reaching the nearest port. No way they'd "just happen" to have sufficient shackles to restrain the ape if he woke up in transit, not unless they'd been planning to trap a herd of elephants on a nearby island after finishing the Skull Island film.
  • The script to Universal's scrapped 1976 remake 'The Legend of King Kong' is, to date, the only time this has ever been explained: they used one of the giant gate's doors as a raft, and tied him down with chains so he couldn't move.

• Why did the villagers build a huge gate into their wall, big enough to let Kong through? The purpose of the wall is to keep Kong out. A small door would be sufficient, and a lot more practical, for the people to get in and out.
  • Well, the tribe is the remnant of a civilization that built the wall (see below) so maybe they needed a big door because they had huge armies they needed to send out. Or else, that part of the wall was damaged, and the best the villagers could do to fix it was to use wood.
    • Is it possible that the Kong-sized door was built to let Kong in long enough to expel the dinosaurs living on the part of the island the natives/civilization lived and once that was done, Kong could easily go back through the gateway?
    • On the other hand, if Kong can climb the Empire State Building/World Trade Center, the Great Wall should be no problem for him. He could probably just run and hop over the damned thing.
    • Agreed. He could easily climb or leap over the wall. So I think the army theory is the most likely. You need an army to hunt those gigantic dinosaurs after all...
    • The wall kept the dinosaurs out. Kong stayed on the far side of the wall because there wasn't much of anything for a giant herbivore to eat along the coastline.
    • One possible theory, which is sort of justified via the DVD extras, is that Megaprimatus kong are not native to Skull Island and may have originated in Asia. So you could guess that the ancient civilisation that colonised and built their cities on the island brought the giant apes with them as guards against the far more dangerous predators. At some point, the ancient civilisation fell or abandoned the island, but the giant apes were left behind. By the time Carl Denham arrives, the 'natives' are either remnants of the civilisation or the descendants of people shipwrecked on the island, whereas Kong is the last of his species. This would explain why the wall is large enough to let Kong through - because it was his races job to defend the civilisation. The natives could still worship Kong since he naturally defends the wall from the other predators.
    • Although that begs the question of why, if the natives' ancestors had the means of reaching Asia, they didn't just move there instead of sticking around on a crumbling island full of monsters. Or why a civilization would develop in such an unsuitable place, to begin with.
    • Robot Chicken lampshaded much of this.
• If there are sacrifices to Kong on a regular basis (lets say once a year, to be generous), why does he have a fresh batch of gigantic trees to knock over each time? Green natives replant them after each sacrifice?
  • Obviously he doesn't enter from the same area, or always knock down trees.
  • The natives may have only started offering the sacrifices specifically to Kong, to keep him from crossing the wall out of loneliness and entering the village. His ancestors had their fellow-apes to keep them company, so didn't need human playthings to amuse them. So the ritual may only date back a few decades, depending on how old Kong was in the film and whether any other apes were still alive when he was a youngster. Even if he does knock down a few trees every time, there's still thousands of them left standing.
• The Keep Kong Out wall is a mighty big structure, a pretty impressive achievement even with modern building materials. How is it that they keep Kong out of the village during the time it takes to build that wall? And if whatever it was is so effective in keeping Kong away, why don't they just do that instead of building the wall?
  • The special features on the DVD of the 2005 movie explain that the villagers are the remnants of a once (somewhat) large and (somewhat) advanced culture, who built the wall around their civillisation to keep the monsters out. However, due to the instability of the island, the coast collapsed gradually into the sea, breaching the wall and forcing the monsters in. This in turn destroyed the civilisation and forced the humans to live in the burial grounds outside the wall; the "village" we see in the film.
    • They actually talk about this in the 1933 original, that the wall had been built by a more advanced civillisation which decayed into the primitive natives seen in the film. They kept the wall in good repair, though.
  • What gives this troper the real Fridge Horror is the implication (possibly existing only in her own imagination) that they are...the way they are...because they don't have enough resources anymore; that they are the degenerated remnants of a people reduced to unspeakable practices to survive. Yep, a whole culture devolved into the Sawney Bean family: that idea has haunted me more than anything else in the movie (even the head-sucking worm) ever since.
    • The companion natural history book depicts the natives as living off shellfish, seagull eggs, seaweed and fish. The good news is, they don't eat one another; the bad news is that, while the largest Skull Island predators can't cross the wall to get at them, there are quite a few smaller predatory species (like that lizard-thing the V. rex was eating) along the coast that do.

• Why was killing Kong urgent enough to send biplanes after him? He was at the top of the Empire State Building, where he couldn't do that much harm. Either he starts to climb down eventually, at which point you could shoot him when he's closer to the ground, or he stays up there and starves. New York is a populous city, and flying a bunch of planes above it, with guns firing downwards, is not a good idea at all.
  • He most certainly would climb down to look for food eventually, rather than sit up there and starve. And he most likely would bring Ann with him, so the planes can't shoot him while he's climbing because they don't want to hit her. He might leave her up there where he thinks she's safe, but the pilots could probably not be completely sure.

• Exactly how did Ann lose her shoes? She's clearly already barefoot when she's offered to Kong, but apparently still has her shoes when she's kidnapped. Did she lose them in the struggle or did the natives take them from her so she'd fit in better?
  • Most likely the former. Ann clearly straggled as she was dragged to the village, leading to her loosing the footwear. Funny enough, according to novelization Ann still wore shoes when Kong picked her up for the first time.