Cheap King Kong (Collector's Edition) (DVD) (Robert Armstrong, Fay Wray) (Ernest B. Schoedsack) Price

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Customer Reviews of King Kong (Collector's Edition)

The 800-pound gorilla of DVDs
You know King Kong is a classic. It started a movie genre, and the title ape is an icon. It inspired two remakes and countless spin-offs (from "Mighty Joe Young" and its remake to "King Kong Vs. Godzilla"). Its combination of great special effects plus story telling is something that still eludes most Hollywood blockbusters today. So I'm not going to rate the movie any longer, I'm going to rate the DVD. <
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>And the DVD is fantastic. The movie looks gorgeous! I can't imagine how a 72-year-old movie can look any better. The same can be said of the sound, though unfortunately is in mono. The DVD and packaging extras are satisfying and complement the wonderful restoration. Some additions would have made this DVD perfect (surround sound, widescreen option) but as it is right now is worthy of the 8th Wonder of the World. Movie studios should check the work put on this DVD and take it as an example.

Slightly Disappointing Bonus Features In Otherwise Exceptional Package
Stop-motion animation was invented long before movies learned to talk. In the mid-1920s Willis O'Brien became the first great master of the form, and in 1925 THE LOST WORLD became the first feature-length film to display it. The film was a sensation, but the stop-motion process was laborious and extremely expensive. The early 1930s found O'Brien at RKO, where he worked on a stop-motion film tentatively titled CREATION. As the Great Depression deepened, however, studio executives became increasingly wary of the cost involved and ultimately canceled the project. <
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>This would have likely been the end of O'Brien's career--but for a quirk of fate. Production partners Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, famous for such exotic films as GRASS, CHANG, and THE FOUR FEATHERS, had arrived at the studio, and Cooper had a fantasy project: a movie about a gorillas. When Cooper saw O'Brien's footage for the scuttled CREATION, he had a brainstorm that would become one of the most celebrated films of the decade: KING KONG. <
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>Much of KING KONG's fascination arises from O'Brien's stop-motion animation process. At the time, it was the only way in which a film such as KING KONG could be realized, and the frame-by-frame animation process is "hand made" in a classic sense; adding to this fascination are the models themselves, beautifully rendered, and the miniature sets they inhabited. But KING KONG would go quiet a bit further than stop-motion; it was made with considerable technical creativity, a film of rising technology that utilized everything from rear-projection to in-camera processes to laboratory techniques. It captures a sort of critical mass in state of the art of its era. <
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>1933 audiences reacted to the film with amazement--and much may be said for contemporary audiences, albeit for considerably different reasons. Where 1933 audiences found the film frightening real, modern viewers are stunned by the meticulous detail of its pre-digital accomplishment. But if KING KONG were only a window on past cinematic technology, it would not be as widely embraced today as it is. <
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>The film has considerable merit in its directness, its pace, its score, its cast, its script, and the way in which the overall setting for O'Brien's stop-motion animation operates. It has tremendous charm, a strangely innocent quality, and it deals in archetypes that boil in our culture as powerfully today as they did more than seventy years ago. But most particularly, O'Brien and his artists and technicians succeed in endowing Kong with personality, and even today we relate to Kong in an emotional way. <
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>The recent double disk "collector's tin" package as a great deal going for it. KING KONG is one of the most frequently censored films in Hollywood history, with bits removed in virtually every re-release. With the exception of the "Spider Pit" sequence, which is likely forever lost, these cuts have been restored, and the quality of the restored cuts is as fine as the quality of the picture as a whole, something not always the case in previous video tape releases. As for the visual quality of the release, it is quite fine indeed, easily the best I have seen. Some complain that the sound has not been bumped into stereo, but I have no complaints on this point; KING KONG was filmed before the advent of stereo recording, and we hear it here very much as audiences heard it in 1933. <
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>The "collectors tin" is quite nice and the various paper items are enjoyable, but the bonus DVD material is of mixed quality. Two documentaries are available, and both "I'm King Kong!: The Exploits of Merian C. Cooper" and "RKO Production 601: The Making of Kong, Eighth Wonder of the World" are quite good. I found the latter particularly interesting inasmuch as it demonstrates how difficult modern film makers found it to reproduce the stop-motion animation process used in the 1933 film. Peter Jackson, director of the 2005 remake, also spearheads a recreation of the lost "Spider Pit" sequence to extremely interesting effect, and stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen offers commentary on the surviving and very interesting snip of the aborted CREATION. <
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>Unfortunately, the audio commentary is chiefly remarkable for being utterly dismal. Archival comments by Merian C. Cooper are interesting, but Ken Ralston clearly has only very superficial knowledge of the film and effectively leads Ray Harryhausen away from making any interesting remarks of his own. As for archival comments by Fay Wray, you'll have to pay very close attention to catch them; they are so short and so insignificant that it seems likely the producers of this package included them only in order to put her name in the commentary line-up. <
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>This seems a tremendous pity, for Wray gave numerous interviews over the years concerning KING KONG; it is an opportunity missed. But most shocking of all, once again Willis O'Brien gets the short end of the stick. He figures prominently in the two documentaries, but he is never given the same level of interest as Cooper. It is an opportunity lost. But even with such drawbacks to the overall package, KING KONG remains KING KONG. One can only hope there will be a more comprehensive package in the future. Until then, we will have to make do--and with such a beautiful print of the film itself, "making do" is a pleasure. <
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>GFT, Amazon Reviewer