Coming to the SWC blog this Saturday, February 18, is the first installment of Simian Saturdays, a series of reviews that will examine the movies (and other media) that have focused on King Kong, the giant monkey who’s captured generations of monster fans’ hearts over the course of eight decades.
Simian Saturdays is part of our countdown to the March 7 release of King Kong, the next addition to our Illustrated Classics library. Kong will be joining J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampiric paranormal romance Carmilla; Edgar Rice Burroughs’s science-fantasy adventure A Princess of Mars; and the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale Snow White.
King Kong is an e-book exclusive that will reintroduce monster fans to the 1932 novelization of the original movie classic. Written by Delos W. Lovelace, based on the story by Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper and the screenplay by James A. Creelman and Ruth Rose, it includes scenes that didn’t appear in the final cut of the film—including the notorious “spider pit” sequence in which Kong’s human pursuers are attacked by horrific arachnids and insects. Our version features six original black-and-white illustrations by comic artist Paul Tuma, whose pulp-influenced style has appeared in the pages of The Twilight Avenger, Flare, and Dan Turner: Hollywood Detective.
First up on Simian Saturdays will (naturally) be the movie whose novelization we’re publishing: the original, 1933 version of King Kong, starring Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot, and the stop-motion-animation magic of visual-effects master Willis O’Brien.
Then on February 25, we’ll take a look at Kong’s 1976 remake, which starred Jessica Lange in her big-screen debut alongside Jeff Bridges and Charles Grodin, and was produced by Dino De Laurentiis, who also brought genre film fans such hits as John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian, David Lynch’s Dune, and Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness.
On March 4 we’ll look at Kong’s 2005 remake, which was written, produced, and directed by Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings), and starred Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrian Brody, and motion-capture actor supreme Andy Serkis as Kong.
I’ll also have a review of the brand-new take on the king’s story, Kong: Skull Island (after that movie makes its debut on March 10). And after that? Well, there’s still quite a bit more Kong material to dive into—sequels, comics, sound tracks, etc.
So, join us this weekend for the debut of Simian Saturdays. See you then!
