RMWC Reviews: Shin Super Robot Sunday: King Kong Escapes

The road to 1967's King Kong Escapes is a curious and twisting one. The original 1933 King Kong is a certified masterpiece of special effects and adventure. In the early 1960s, King Kong's original animator, Willis O'Brien, outlined a Kong sequel where the giant ape fights a Frankenstein's Monster in San Francisco. A film producer by the name of John Beck got a scriptwriter, George Worthing Yates, turn it into a script, then shopped it around. Toho Studios bought the script, then had Shinichi Sekizawa (a Toho regular who would write several kaiju films for the studio) re-write the script, and Frankenstein was replaced with Godzilla. Original King Kong co-director Merian C. Cooper evidently tried to sue to stop the production (and felt insulted that Kong would be portrayed by a man in a suit instead of as a stop motion puppet), but the movie went ahead anyway, and 1962's King Kong vs. Godzilla (from director Ishirō Honda and special effects supervisor Eiji Tsuburaya) would become the third entry in the Godzilla franchise, the first in color, and a smashing success that revitalized Godzilla into an entertainment powerhouse.

This begat a 25 episode 1966 television series co-produced by Videocraft (the original name of Rankin/Bass Productions. Yes, the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer people) and Toei Animation called The King Kong Show, where a friendly Kong teams up with kid hero Bobby Bond, and they have adventures where they thwart the machinations of the evil Dr. Who (no relation).

What matters here is that one of Dr. Who's attempts to defeat King Kong takes the form of Mechani-Kong, a piloted giant robot.

This then leads to the main event of this post: King Kong Escapes. Released in Japan in 1967 and 1968 in the U.S., it was co-produced by Toho and Rankin-Bass, directed by Ishirō Honda with Tsuburaya as special effects supervisor again.

The movie completely eschews the boy adventurer plotline in favor of a more traditional mad scientist kaiju storyline. Dr. Who is the mad scientist in question, who is digging up the highly radioactive Element X at the North Pole and is using the gigantic Mechani-Kong to do the work, but the radiation is too much and the robot Kong breaks down. With his financier Madame Piranha breathing down his neck to get results, Who manages to get to Mondo Island where the real King Kong is chilling out and fighting dinosaurs, and hypnotizes Kong to bring him back to the North Pole to dig up Element X.

Through the intervention of a joint US-Japan task force, the plot is uncovered and King Kong escapes and swims to Japan, where he and the repaired Mechani-Kong 2.0 have a final showdown at the Tokyo Tower while a beautiful young woman's life hangs in the balance because that's what you do with King Kong stories.

The movie version of Mechani-Kong is a great design. Measuring 20 meters (65.62 ft) tall and a solid gunmetal gray instead of brown, this version possesses great strength, a belt of large grenades intended for digging but also useful for destroying other stuff, and bright lights in the head that can either blind or hypnotize the real Kong.

This would be the final King Kong movie project from Toho Studios, but not for a lack of trying. The studio tried to get a remake of either of their King Kong movies off the ground in the 90s, but without the likeness rights it went nowhere. Mechani-Kong would, however, make an appearance in the 1992 manga series Godzilla, King of the Monsters from Kodansya Comics. There, Mechani-Kong teams up with MechaGodzilla in a two on one fight against Godzilla, but both are defeated.