King Kong FAQ

Was there ever an animal like King Kong?

In 1933, when Cooper and O'Brien released King Kong no one knew very much about the gorillas of Africa. Few specimens survived outside their African habitat and stories about them were often prone to exaggeration, both in terms of their size and their desire for human females.

Having been to Africa himself, Cooper knew that the stories of giant gorillas were exaggerations, but he found the idea of giant gorillas who captured women fascinating and began to have an idea for a movie around it. He was also inspired by the story of W. Douglas Burden who in 1926 traveled to the remote island of Komodo and discovered there a giant breed of lizard now known as the komodo dragon and managed to bring two of the monsters back to New York alive.

Burden's "dragons" inspired Cooper to imagine a story where explorers went to a remote island like Komodo in a similar part of the world and discover not giant lizards but giant gorillas and bring one back to New York alive.

Unlike the komodo dragons no one had yet discovered a breed of gigantic gorillas living in some hidden part of the world. The largest African gorillas are six feet tall and weigh about four hundred pounds. Hardly King Kong material. But in 1935, just two years after the film was released, G.H.R. Von Koenigswald discovered some fossil teeth in a Hong Kong apothecary shop that could very well have belonged to a relative of King Kong. Later, scientists discovered more teeth as well as mandible fossils and they named the creature Gigantopithecus blacki.

Gigantopithecus blacki lived in south east Asia during the Pleistocene era, going extinct by the end of the era. Reconstructing the creature from its jawbone, scientists believe Gigantopithecus was a primate, similar to a gorilla but in the neighborhood of ten feet tall and could weigh upwards of a thousand pounds. That's much closer to King Kong's size. Whether Gigantopithecus lived behind a wall and had a taste for blondes and an aversion to airplanes and flashbulbs remains unknown.

• More Information On:
  • Gigantopithecus blacki
  • W. Douglas Burden

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