A Stegosaurus in the Clearing

Kong-blogging, essay 11 of 15 blog entries on

Skull Island in King Kong (1933)

Part One, The First Dinosaur Encounter

The Stegosaurus in King Kong (1933).

Enter Stegosaurus, stage left.*

Our first look at the Stegosaurus is over the shoulders of the ship’s crew.  The dinosaur enters a clearing in the distance, oblivious to the men in the foreground.

Our first sight of the Stegosaurus in King Kong.

There are at least five planes of depth visible at this point.  In the foreground, the actors playing the crew are on a jungle-decorated studio set.  Then (rear-projected) there’s a fairly lengthy animation table, dressed with miniature trees, vines, and a log.  Behind that is a matte painting on glass with more jungle details.  Then another animation table behind which stands a painted canvas.  That’s five levels, and I may have missed two glass paintings, possibly one in front of the background canvas and another closer to the foreground.

You look for the genius of King Kong within the shots—that’s where the magic is.  It’s in the way birds fly across the screen, left to right, in the mid-ground, as that Stegosaurus placidly enters the screen in the distance.  The planes of depth are not static.  There’s movement taking place on three of them.

The Stegosaurus re-emerges nearer to us.

Action at one layer can even move to another.  That distant Stegosaurus on the furthest animation table wanders out of the frame (stage right) then emerges much nearer to us, now on the middle animation table.  The Stegosaurus lazily munches on some plants (a nice example of the gratuitous detail the movie loves to indulge in!) then sees the men.

“He’s going to charge,” shouts Carl Denham, the men’s leader.

The Stegosaurus charges.

The line between the set decoration in the foreground (where the actors are performing) and the rear-projected animation table is beautifully hidden.  The Stegosaurus barrels forward, rapidly getting larger, filling much of the frame with his bulk, before he’s finally brought down by a gas bomb tossed by Denham.

The dying Stegosaurus.

The death throes of the Stegosaurus are masterfully realized.  Co-directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack had watched many animals die during their adventures in various remote areas.  I can imagine them offering O’Brien advice on just how a large dying animal would act.

Even after the gas bomb explodes, the Stegosaurus still has life in him.  Denham shoots and the dinosaur sways back onto its feet, only to collapse again.  This time Denham shoots the Stegosaur in the brain causing its head to jerk upward, quivering.  As Denham and first mate Jack Driscoll walk alongside the dying body of the immense beast, its tail still undulates as its life ebbs.

Some books have reported that Kong’s Stegosaurus may have been an intentional cross between a traditional Stegosaurus and a Kentrosaurus because of its unusual eight-spiked tail.  Stegosaurus is now known to have a four-spiked tail while its smaller cousin Kentrosaurus has a whole series of spikes extending down its back to its tail.  But famous paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh, who described the first-discovered Stegosaurus in 1877, approved a drawing of a Stegosaurus skeleton for the1896 U.S. Geological Survey that gave the giant animal eight spikes on its tail.  The following year, acclaimed artist Charles R. Knight depicted Stegosaurus with eight spikes, perhaps following Marsh’s lead.  So there may have been some scientific basis for the choice of eight spikes on the Stegosaurus tail—and, artistically, they sure look impressive as the tail rises and falls with a serpentine grace.

* Using classic stage directions, stage left refers to our thespian Stegosaurus’ left—the audience sees the dinosaur enter from the right side of the screen.

Part Two, The Eight-Spiked Stegosaurus

The eight-spiked tail of the Stegosaurus undulates
as the dinosaur dies in King Kong.

Eight-spiked illustration of Stegosaurus unngulatus approved by
paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh for the 1896 U.S. Geological Survey.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Charles R. Knight drawing of an eight-spiked Stegosaurus (1897).
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Charles R. Knight painting of an eight-spiked Stegosaurus (1912).
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Reference Sources

The Making of King Kong by Orville Goldner and George E. Turner

Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper by Mark Cotta Vaz

Willis O'Brien: Special Effects Genius by Steve Archer

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 1, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 2, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time by Richard Milner

All in the Bones: A Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins by Valerie Bramwell and Robert M. Peck
Special features on the two-disc special edition, King Kong (1933) by Warner Home Video Inc.

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

Watch King Kong...

Purchase a King Kong DVD or Blu-Ray set at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Rent King Kong at Netflix or other rental service.

© 2012 Lee Price

13 Things We Know About Kong

Kong-blogging, essay 10 of 15 blog entries on

Skull Island in King Kong (1933)

13 Things We Know About Kong

Extreme closeup of Kong from King Kong (1933).

In all honesty, we don’t know much about Kong.  King Kong (1933) is very sparing in its sharing of information about the nature of its title character, Kong.  Declining to speculate, I’m restricting the following 13 observations to the limited facts imparted about Kong during the Skull Island portion of King Kong.

Surprised Kong.

1. Kong is an ape with some gorilla-like features. His appearance does not entirely conform with that of any currently existing ape species.

2. Kong’s height:  It’s hard to get a bead on the size of the animal.  In far shots, he seems to be 18 to 20 feet high, but the closeups of Kong with people, as well as his closeup hand size, would scale to an animal much larger, possibly 40 or even 50 feet tall.

3. Kong has been alive long enough to give rise to legends and superstitions in the region and for the

Curious Kong.

native civilization to build a giant wall.  The possibility that Kong had ancestors who generated the legends and prompted the building of the wall is neither raised nor dismissed by the movie.

4. Based on the comments and actions of the natives, it is reasonable to infer that Kong is the only large ape of his kind currently alive on Skull Island.

5. Historically, the wall at the native village has been sufficient to keep Kong out.

Suspicious Kong.

6. Kong’s protective instincts toward Ann Darrow reveal a new facet of his personality.  There is no indication that he has ever acted in this almost maternal way in response to the villagers’ previous human sacrifices.

7. Kong’s aggressive behaviors include chest-beating and roaring, mainly used as tactics of intimidation.

8. Kong is very strong, even for a hypothetical ape of his size.

Protective Kong.

9. Kong is an unusually intelligent fighter capable of using fairly sophisticated boxing and wrestling moves.

10. Kong is innately curious.

11. Kong may maintain a permanent lair within the cave on Skull Mountain.  Kong’s use of this space remains ambiguous.

12. Kong bleeds when cut or bitten.

13. Kong can be rendered unconscious by gas bombs, suggesting that his respiratory and nervous systems are
those of a typical mammal.

Victorious Kong.

Reference Sources

The Making of King Kong by Orville Goldner and George E. Turner

Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper by Mark Cotta Vaz

Willis O'Brien: Special Effects Genius by Steve Archer

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 1, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 2, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time by Richard Milner

All in the Bones: A Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins by Valerie Bramwell and Robert M. Peck
Special features on the two-disc special edition, King Kong (1933) by Warner Home Video Inc.

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

Watch King Kong...

Purchase a King Kong DVD or Blu-Ray set at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Rent King Kong at Netflix or other rental service.

© 2012 Lee Price

King Kong in Doré Land

Kong-blogging, essay 9 of 15 blog entries on

Skull Island in King Kong (1933)

Part One, The Backgrounds

 

Compare and contrast:  Gustav Dore's "Satan Walking in the Garden" from Paradise Lost on the left.  A detail of the jungle in King Kong (1933) on the right.

Skull Island is one of the greatest imaginary landscapes ever to grace the movies.  The quality of the production design and set decoration in this section of King Kong (1933) is phenomenal. 

As many have remarked, the backgrounds look like the work of Gustav Doré, the popular 19th century French illustrator and master engraver.  The impression is intentional.  Chief technician Willis O’Brien asked artists Mario Larrinaga and Byron Crabbe to come up with backgrounds in the style of Doré to set the scene on Skull Island.

With his choice of Doré, O’Brien embraced a wild, mysterious, romantic approach.  Doré’s backgrounds often achieve a semblance of great depth through their stylistic use of differently lit planes to give the impression of receding distance.  This contributes to their other-worldly, even primeval, appearance.

Mario Larrinaga and Byron Crabbe sketched hundreds of drawings, marrying O’Brien’s visual ideas with Doré’s style.  O’Brien selected his favorite sketches and worked with Larrinaga and Crabbe to capture them on glass paintings and painted canvas backings.  For a complex scene, the camera might be set up to peer through up to three mounted panes of painted glass and then a final opaque painted canvas.  Between the mounts, the technicians would place additional prop foliage to create even more layers of receding depth.  Like a Doré engraving, the film image presents sharp detail in the foreground then subtly transitions to more impressionistic shapes in the distance.

Log crossing in Gustav Dore's "The Two Goats" from
The Fables of La Fontaine, 1867.

Log crossing in King Kong (1933).

Cave entrance in Gustav Dore's "Daniel in the
Lion's Den," one of his Bible illustrations, 1866.

Cave entrance in King Kong.

A high ledge in Dore's "Satan Overlooking Mt. Nephrates"
from Paradise Lost, 1866.

A high ledge in King Kong.

Part Two, The Foreground

 

Compare and contrast:  Fay Wray and Joel McCrae chased through the jungle in The Most Dangerous Game (1932) on the left.  Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot chased through the jungle in King Kong (1933) on the right.

To keep costs appearing reasonable on the studio balance books, co-producer Merian C. Cooper borrowed much of Skull Island’s foreground from sets prepared for—and charged to the account of—other RKO movies.

The Great Wall that separates the native village from the wilds of Skull Island is a redressed Jerusalem wall from The King of Kings (1927).  Some of the native village huts are leftovers from Bird of Paradise (1932).  But Cooper’s biggest steals of all were from The Most Dangerous Game.

Still in production during Kong’s early shooting days, The Most Dangerous Game was being filmed by Kong co-director Ernest Schoedsack and happened to co-star Kong actors Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong.  Since The Most Dangerous Game took place on a remote jungle island, Cooper realized their settings could be virtually interchangeable.  He looked for serendipitous opportunities to piggy-back his complex ape movie on Schoedsack’s simpler adventure-romance.

Thanks to the combined skills of RKO’s set designers and Willis O’Brien’s technicians,  Kong’s visual mix of borrowed sets and original glass paintings works nearly seamlessly.  It’s so effective, in fact, that it’s now hard to watch The Most Dangerous Game without expecting a Brontosaurus to appear in the misty swamp or for an enraged Kong to appear on the other side of the log that Fay Wray and lead actor Joel McCrae must cross.

A chase through the swamp in The Most Dangerous Game (1932).

A chase through the swamp in King Kong (1933).

Fay Wray and Joel McCrae on the log in The Most Dangerous Game.

Sailors cross the log in King Kong.

Reference Sources

The Making of King Kong by Orville Goldner and George E. Turner

Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper by Mark Cotta Vaz

Willis O'Brien: Special Effects Genius by Steve Archer

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 1, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 2, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time by Richard Milner

All in the Bones: A Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins by Valerie Bramwell and Robert M. Peck
Special features on the two-disc special edition, King Kong (1933) by Warner Home Video Inc.

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

Watch King Kong...

Purchase a King Kong DVD or Blu-Ray set at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Rent King Kong at Netflix or other rental service.

© 2012 Lee Price

Willis O'Brien and Marcel Delgado

Kong-blogging, essay 8 of 15 blog entries on

Skull Island in King Kong (1933)

Part One, A Stampede of Dinosaurs

Closeup of the Allosaurus from The Lost World (1925).

The Brontosaurus in The Lost World.

Allosaurus attacks Styracosaurus in The Lost World.

Styracosaurus and Stegosaurus in an out-take from The Lost World.

Baby Allosaurs feast on dinosaur remains in The Lost World.

Part Two, Willis O’Brien and Marcel Delgado

Willis O’Brien wanted to make dinosaur movies.  When film was still in its infancy, O’Brien figured out the mechanics of stop-motion animation, fashioned some clay models, and made a short test reel.  The result was good enough to obtain financing for his first short, The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915).

O’Brien held to his vision and leveraged upward, convincing the Edison Company to let him make more prehistoric shorts.  R.F.D. 10,000 B.C. (1917) and Prehistoric Poultry (1917) followed.  Then O’Brien cut a deal with another producer to make a longer and more serious dinosaur movie, The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918).

While O’Brien had a genius for understanding film’s technical potential to capture fantasy, he realized that his sculptural skills fell short of his vision.  He went looking for a collaborator.  In 1923, he found Marcel Delgado, a young Mexican-American student studying at the Otis Art Institute.  O’Brien became convinced that Delgado had the right combination of skills needed to make his dinosaurs.

Allosaurus on the prowl
from The Lost World.

For O’Brien’s upcoming project, a big-budget feature film of The Lost World, Delgado constructed approximately 50 detailed dinosaur models, drawing inspiration from both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s descriptions of dinosaurs on an Amazon plateau and from Charles R. Knight’s acclaimed paintings of prehistoric life.  Unlike O’Brien’s rather crude wood-and-clay models, Delgado’s sophisticated puppets were made with an articulated aluminum armature, ball-and-socket joints, foam rubber musculature, and latex skin.  They averaged 18 inches in length and some of them were fitted with interior rubber bellows to achieve realistic breathing effects.

O’Brien supervised the animation of Delgado’s models, painstaking moving them bit by bit, shooting a frame or two at a time.  When projected at normal speed, the dinosaurs came to life on the screen.

A pterodactyl from
The Lost World.

The Lost World (1925) is a solid adventure film, highlighted by many delightful dinosaur scenes.  However, unlike the later King Kong (1933), The Lost World seems to suffer from some clumsy scripting (although it may be presumptuous to be too critical since 30 minutes of the original two-hour release print are missing in the currently available 90-minute restoration).  King Kong always carefully integrates its dinosaur scenes into the narrative; The Lost World doesn’t.  Its dinosaur scenes sometimes appear to be arbitrarily dropped in and they are often filmed from perspectives not available to any of the characters.  Kong would correct these faults.

After The Lost World, director Harry Hoyt, O’Brien, and Delgado invested considerable time in the development of a follow-up which was to be called Creation.  Delgado sculpted the dinosaur models and O’Brien shot a small amount of footage only to have their production shut down on the recommendation of Merian C. Cooper.  Although fascinated by O’Brien’s special effects, Cooper thought Creation lacked a compelling story.  Cooper decided that O’Brien and Delgado should be working on a giant ape picture instead—a movie that could even use some of those Creation models that Delgado had already completed.  Kong moved into production and even got the Creation hand-me-downs.

Brontosaurus seen through binoculars in
The Lost World.

Reference Sources

The Making of King Kong by Orville Goldner and George E. Turner

Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper by Mark Cotta Vaz

Willis O'Brien: Special Effects Genius by Steve Archer

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 1, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 2, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time by Richard Milner

All in the Bones: A Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins by Valerie Bramwell and Robert M. Peck
Special features on the two-disc special edition, King Kong (1933) by Warner Home Video Inc.

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

Watch King Kong...

Purchase a King Kong DVD or Blu-Ray set at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Rent King Kong at Netflix or other rental service.

© 2012 Lee Price

Early Cinematic Dinosaurs and Dragons

Kong-blogging, essay 7 of 15 blog entries on

Skull Island in King Kong (1933)

Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), a film by Winsor McCay.

Theoretically, it would seem like dinosaurs and dragons were tailor-made for the movies.  But as filmmakers quickly learned, believable giant monsters—with the stress on “believable”—turned out to be difficult to capture on film. Therefore, most early films went the easy route and excluded giant scaly beasts from their casts.  Mary Pickford became a star; T. Rex had to wait.

Fortunately, there were some uncompromising early visionaries who insisted their art demanded the presence of a dinosaur or dragon.

McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur
dances for the camera.

First visionary: Winsor McCay was an artist of dizzying talent, nationally famous for his extraordinary “Little Nemo” and “Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend” comic strips.  With his vaudeville background, McCay became an early movie enthusiast and began considering the possibilities for animating his drawings.  His first major film success was a dinosaur cartoon: Gertie the Dinosaur.

Created in 1914, Gertie the Dinosaur is a remarkably sophisticated hand-drawn cartoon.  The first version was five minutes in length and was designed to work in tandem with McCay’s rapid-fire cartoon-drawing vaudeville act.  While the film was projected, McCay interacted with the brontosaurus on the screen.  But the real magic wasn’t in the mixed-media performance but rather the charming puppy-like personality that McCay gave to Gertie, the first saurian star of the screen.

McCay later revived her for a sequel, Gertie on Tour (1921), where Gertie left her original prehistoric setting and toured contemporary America.  While only a short fragment of the sequel has survived, McCay left tantalizing drawings of Gertie using the Brooklyn Bridge as a trampoline—four years before another brontosaurus took a plunge off London Bridge in The Lost World (1925).

An animated Buster Keaton
perched atop an
animated brontosaurus in
The Three Ages (1923).

Second visionary:  Buster Keaton’s acrobatic comedy and movie-making prowess resulted in a string of brilliant shorts and features in the 1920s.  For his first self-directed feature, The Three Ages in 1923, Keaton realized he needed a dinosaur.  He envisioned a gag entrance for himself, riding on the back of a brontosaurus and then scrambling to the top of the dinosaur’s head to scan the horizon in a typical Keaton pose.  As comfortable with special effects as he was with slapstick, Keaton employed early stop-motion claymation to bring his dinosaur to life.

Closeup of the dragon
in Siegfried (1924).

Third visionary:  Over in Germany, up-and-coming film director Fritz Lang corralled the mammoth resources available at UFA Studios to film a two-part Die Nibelungen, based on the legendary Norse stories of Siegfried, Brunhild, and Kriemhild.  The first of the two films, Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924), begins the hero’s journey with the slaying of a dragon.  Sparing no expense, Lang had the studio technicians construct a massive 60-foot long puppet dragon, operated by a full crew sweating inside the beast.  The dragon appears to be based on the model of the recently discovered Komodo dragons, dressed up with some dinosaurian spikes down its spine.

Fairbanks slays the dragon in
The Thief of Bagdad (1924).

Fourth visionary:  American film star Douglas Fairbanks saw the Siegfried dragon and instantly knew he needed a dragon, too.  An often-underestimated pioneer of commercial Hollywood, the very athletic Fairbanks virtually invented the Hollywood swashbuckler with The Mark of Zorro (1920), added grandeur to the formula with the massive set designs for his Robin Hood (1922), and was on the lookout for an even bigger project…  He settled on an Arabian Nights pastiche, The Thief of Bagdad, with a plot that would easily incorporate a Siegfried-style confrontation between hero and dragon.  Working with production design genius William Cameron Menzies, Fairbanks and his chosen director Raoul Walsh were able to fashion a fire-breathing dragon that nearly lived up to its German predecessor.

Not counting the Willis O’Brien work that we’ll get to soon (and maybe a half-dozen minor shorts by others), that’s just about it for dinosaurs and dragons in the years preceding King Kong (1933).  It took considerable effort to make a believable dinosaur or dragon in those days, and only a few film visionaries—those mentioned above—were prepared to invest the time or money.

Surprisingly, the tremendous success of King Kong didn’t change things, with 1930s and 1940s Hollywood cinema remaining largely dino-free.  Perhaps Kong set the bar too high.

Reference Sources

The Making of King Kong by Orville Goldner and George E. Turner

Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper by Mark Cotta Vaz

Willis O'Brien: Special Effects Genius by Steve Archer

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 1, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 2, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time by Richard Milner

All in the Bones: A Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins by Valerie Bramwell and Robert M. Peck
Special features on the two-disc special edition, King Kong (1933) by Warner Home Video Inc.

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

Watch King Kong...

Purchase a King Kong DVD or Blu-Ray set at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Rent King Kong at Netflix or other rental service.

© 2012 Lee Price

Kong's Debt to Charles R. Knight

Kong-blogging, essay 6 of 15 blog entries on

Skull Island in King Kong (1933)

Part One, A Charles R. Knight Dinosaur Gallery

Tyrannosaurus confronts a family of Triceratops
by Charles R. Knight, circa 1919.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Trachodons by Charles R. Knight, circa 1905.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Nesting Protoceratops from Charles R. Knight's murals for the
Field Museum of Natural History, circa 1925.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Jurassic scene with Archaeopteryx, Compsognathus,
and Rhamphorynchus from Charles R. Knight's murals for the
Field Museum of Natural History.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Allosaurus eating a Brontosaurus by Charles R. Knight, circa 1904.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Part Two, Knight Paintings in Motion

At this point, we reach an artist whose work had a profound impact upon King Kong (1933) and whom I view with awe.  Charles R. Knight’s dinosaurs look like real animals, fully alive in the moment and informed by individual personalities.  Many great paleoartists have followed the path blazed by Knight, but this isn’t a case where they could see further for standing on the shoulders of a giant.  In certain important respects, Knight remains the unsurpassed master.

As a boy, Charles R. Knight (1874-1953) had special access through his father to the backrooms of the American Museum of Natural History where he had the privilege of watching the taxidermists and exhibition preparators at their work.  He learned animals inside and out, observing their muscular construction and skeletal structure.  He obsessively studied nature and drew the animals he saw with a rare talent—and it wasn't long before his special skills were noticed.

In 1894 when Knight was still a very young man, a friend at the American Museum of Natural History recommended him for an assignment to depict an Elotherium, an extinct pig-like animal.  Knight’s painting was exactly what the museum wanted.  It was scientifically accurate and artistically exciting.  Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the museum, took Knight under his wing, convinced that his artwork could communicate the wonder of prehistoric life to the museum’s public.

By the time that Willis O’Brien and Marcel Delgado teamed up in 1924 to create the dinosaur models for the movie of The Lost World, Charles R. Knight had achieved a high reputation for his depictions of prehistoric life both at the American Museum of Natural History and in published illustrations.  O’Brien and Delgado elected to use Knight’s work as their guide in creating approximately 50 dinosaur models for the movie.

There was an interesting symmetry in the complementary work of Knight and Delgado.  When working on a figure, Knight would often begin by determining the skeletal and muscular form of the animal and then he would sculpt a three-dimensional model.  He said this was important to see how shadows would naturally fall.  Only after gaining a thorough understanding of the sculpture would Knight embark on his painting.  Now… reversing this process, Delgado began with Knight's paintings, studying them to identify what the skeletal and muscular forms must have been.  In a way, Delgado's three-dimensional models returned the paintings back to their sculptural beginnings.

In the eight years between The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933), Knight received one of his greatest commissions, enabling him to paint a spectacular series of murals for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.  As O’Brien and Delgado worked on the (ultimately abandoned) Creation project and then King Kong, Knight’s evolving artwork continued to be their primary inspiration in creating their dinosaur models.

Many decades later, Willis O’Brien’s protégé Ray Harryhausen (who went on to become the greatest stop-motion animator of his generation) expressed his own feelings about Knight’s legacy.  “His dinosaur and prehistoric animal paintings and sculptures had more than just a realistic surface quality; they also possessed scientific reality and natural beauty.  He was the first to reconstruct prehistoric life in a romantic form and the first to work in close collaboration with paleontologists to attempt to achieve scientifically accurate anatomy.  His long experience in drawing and painting live animals in zoos, together with his romantic and vivid imagination, helped to instill his prehistoric reconstructions with a ‘charisma’ only found in living creatures...”

Equally miraculous, Marcel Delgado and Willis O’Brien somehow caught that ‘charisma’ and transferred it to film, creating magical images of Knight’s dinosaurs in motion.

Part Three, Comparisons

Charles R. Knight's 1897 painting of an Agathaumus (based on
bones later identified as Triceratops).
Source: Wikimedia Commons

A dinosaur cut from the final release of King Kong.
A Styracosaurus, looking very similar to Knight's Agathaumus,
chases sailors onto the log.

A detail of Charles R. Knight's Tyrannosaurus painting
from the gallery above, showing the family of Triceratops.

Marcel Delgado's models of a parent and baby Triceratops
from The Lost World (1925).

Charles R. Knight with his working model of a Stegosaurus.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Willis O'Brien with Marcel Delgado's model of a Styracosaurus
(ultimately not seen in the final cut) for King Kong.

Reference Sources

The Making of King Kong by Orville Goldner and George E. Turner

Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper by Mark Cotta Vaz

Willis O'Brien: Special Effects Genius by Steve Archer

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 1, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 2, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time by Richard Milner

All in the Bones: A Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins by Valerie Bramwell and Robert M. Peck
Special features on the two-disc special edition, King Kong (1933) by Warner Home Video Inc.

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

Watch King Kong...

Purchase a King Kong DVD or Blu-Ray set at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Rent King Kong at Netflix or other rental service.

© 2012 Lee Price