Mighty Joe

SPFX: Mighty Joe Young is one of my favorite films. What's the story about you getting an actual Mighty Joe animation model?

CONWAY: I saw a picture of it once in a Famous Monsters magazine and they showed the owner with about three or four of these things in front of him and Joe's just sitting there with a Preying Mantis and the Tyrannosaurus model from The Land Unknown. It just stuck in my head that there is someone out there with what looked like a perfect Joe model. I don't even remember how I got the guy's name up in Wisconsin, but his name was Clark Wilkelson [sic]. I called and we talked about me coming out to see him and he thought the model was from King Kong. Schoedsack sent it to him as Kong. Clark told Schoedsack he had a little basement museum and wanted a piece of memorabilia from his career and Schoedsack said he would send him Kong.

So we went up to see him and he had a pretty nice little museum with some good stuff … and Joe. I made him an offer but he wouldn't take it. When I got home I contacted him again with another offer, cash, single dollar bills and he agreed. Before I went back to see him I wouldn't answer the phone all week because I was afraid he would change his mind

SPFX: How much did you pay for the little guy?

CONWAY: I can't tell you.

SPFX: Aw, Come on!

CONWAY: No way, forget it.The next week a friend of mine drove me up and Clark said he tried calling me all week to tell me he changed his mind but since I drove all the way up there and I literally had all the money in singles he figured he'd might as well. I carried Joe on my lap the whole way back thinking if we ever got in an accident, with this glass dome, it would have gone right through my body. I just kept saying, I got Joe, I got Joe.

SPFX: What year was this?

CONWAY: '76, '77.



	A big thanks to Steve Towsley for the photos above: STEVE TOWSLEY: We printed the attached photo (above left), perhaps taken by The Milwaukee Journal, in our last issue of The Animation Journal in 1966. This was the last issue of AJ and was the issue in which we announced that complete sets of our fanzine had been delivered to both Ray Harryhausen and Darlyne O'Brien. This is the issue that was sold at the 1966 Worldcon, by the way, and the issue that had the highest printing ever, about 100 copies. The back page was devoted to our article on Clark Wilkinson written and submitted by our talented cover artist David Prestone. He provided three pictures with the article, all of which we printed, including two of Wilkinson's Joe on its display base (above right), but without its glass cover, and one of Clark with Joe which I have attached. This is the one that probably came from a newspaper shoot. It shows Clark with Joe, also holding a model of the Deadly Mantis, and bookended by a model of a T-Rex that reminds me of the one in Land Unknown, only smaller.
	Back to THE GILL NET HOMEPAGE © 2004 John Michlig


		LEFT:Clark Wilkinson of Baraboo, Wisconsin, with his "Kong" - - actually a model used in the filming of Mighty Joe Young. (Scroll down for additional pictures recently brought to light.) ABOVE: A picture taken later of the same Mighty Joe Young armature. (From the collection of Bob Burns)