Click HERE for a guide to the best (or at least most interesting) printed Kong resources. Click HERE for a look at the famous John Berkey poster images created for the 1976 remake of Kong Thanks to SIDESHOW TOYS, you can now own a replica of the original King Kong Armature. Here are some snapshots of Bob's Kong artifacts as displayed at the 1983 50th Anniversary Celebration in Hollywood, as well as pictures of the giant Kong Bust replica as displayed at Mann's Chinese Theater.

Thankfully, yes. The Kong production crew created a world in miniature. Nearly every shot is a production painting come to life, and any fan of King Kong has a favorite visual memory from the film.

"Kong fighting the Allosaurus. To me, that's the moment," McGrath states. "Just the way It's so beautifully framed, with Ann in the tree. I especially like the Allosaurus swishing his tail. I remember seeing a dinosaur expert on TV saying, 'Of course, we now know that they can't do that' - but it's still his favorite part of the film."

Although a big fan of Kong, McGrath doesn't fill his home with gorilla-related mementos. "The problem with Kong collectibility is that there isn't anything out there," he noted. "I'd love to have the Aurora Kong model. I remember all of the Aurora's being 98¢ each until the Kong kit came out at $1.49." Today, an unassembled Kong model (1964-1968) is worth up to $450; the later glow-in-the-dark version (1970-1975) goes for under $100. The dearth of additional Kong items is due in great part to the generic nature of a "big ape." For a long time, companies would produce products that approximated the look of Kong without the cost of licensing.

McGrath owns a copy of King Kong, The Original Motion Picture Score (United Artists, 1975) that he considers sonically disappointing - - - it's a re-recorded version of the Max Steiner score - - - but precious for its liner notes by Ray Bradbury. "The album actually names the pieces of music, and the portion that was written by Steiner to accompany Kong's destruction of the elevated train is entitled 'And That Children, is Why There is No 6th Avenue 'El' Today,' McGrath said with a laugh. "I gotta believe Bradbury contributed that name as well."

"Steiner's music is as much a part of the Kong mystique as OBie's models," McGrath declares. In his Kong card copy, he calls the score "the standard against which all movie music has since been judged."

[UPDATE: RHINO RECORDS has produced the definitive soundtrack recording that you can purchase HERE at Amazon.com.]

The Girl in the Hairy Paw (Flair/Avon, 1976, edited by Ronald Gottesman and Harry Geduld) provided a good deal of material for McGrath while he was writing the Kong cards. "It's a great book. It's just loaded with stuff - the ultimate Kong fan-boy dream," he reports. Sure enough, Hairy Paw contains informative photos (though, unfortunately, mislabeling Mighty Joe Young stills as Son of Kong and identifying a closeup of the small Kong model's head on p. 207 as the giant bust prop) and essays by the likes of Fay Wray, Willis O'Brien and Marcel Delgado. Reproduced within its pages is a portion of Edgar Wallace's original screenplay, containing a charmingly helpful parenthetical note next to the title character's first appearance; "Kong is a huge ape about 30 feet high - EW."

No-nonsense Merian C. Cooper has responded to the idea of "subtexts" in his film by saying flatly, "King Kong was escapist entertainment pure and simple. A more illogical picture could never have been made." However, true to its subtitle ("King Kong as Myth, Movie, and Monster"), Hairy Paw reprints some great examples of pop culture Kong appropriations (ads, magazine covers, the Aurora Kong model instruction sheet, the entire Mad "Son of Mighty Joe Kong" parody), and examinations of the Kong canon by the likes of Bob Newhart (his "Night Watchman at the Empire State Building" monologue) and Philip José Farmer ("After King Kong Fell" is another of his characteristic "this-really-happened" tales). Your eye is sure to be grabbed by the bold subtitle "HOW BIG IS KONG'S PENIS" within a piece by someone named Kenneth Bernard, wherein he ruminates at length (sorry) on phallic dimensions and the copulative potential between a normal human woman and Kong. Disturbingly, Bernard never refers to the fictional character of Ann Darrow, insisting instead to frame his speculation based on actress Fay Wray. For the record, he calculates a score of 24" for Kong's, uh, inseam.

Collectors take heart; while the above material is out of print, it still turns up at libraries and book re-sellers. Remarkably, there is not one book on the current market that details exclusively the production of King Kong. The researchers best friends are the essential, yet out of print, The Making of King Kong (Ballantine, 1975. By Orville Goldner and George E. Turner) and CINEFEX #7, which contains a very in-depth look at Willis O'Brien by Don Shay.

The film copyright for King Kong is held by Turner Entertainment/AOL-Time-Warner (which accounts for the fact that you can see a colorized version of the film). In 1993, Turner released a Kong movie box set that included a videotape and goodies including a poster, three frames of mounted film frames, and a documentary. On the model front, Dark Horse Comics has produced some impressive Kong vinyl and cold-cast porcelain figures, including an exceptional effort sculpted by Ray Harryhausen. For enthusiasts with deep pockets, a company called Monsters in Motion is offering a limited edition bronze Kong bust sculpted by the late Marcel Delgado for $475

But, hey - anyone can buy that stuff. What of the actual props and models from the Kong production? The stop motion method by its very nature produces enormous amounts of hand-crafted, one-of-a-kind material. While the studio furnace often provided an ignoble end to some wonderful items, I knew some material had to have slipped through. My search for the ultimate collectibles, including the Holy Grail of Kong him/itself, proved to be very interesting.

Part II: In which the Author hunts down the lost, misplaced, and mislabeled artifacts of King Kong

Two Kong models as they appeared during filming. (From the collection of Bob Burns)

Wilkinson, now nearing 90 years old, maintained a film collection in his basement that he opened free of charge to the public. "For 17 years I had eight rooms full of displays in my 'Hollywood Museum of Movies,'" he explained. "I had gowns that Elizabeth Taylor wore from MGM, and Bela Lugosi's cape. Life magazine was here once to photograph me," he remembers. "I closed up the museum in 1965...or when I was 65 - one or the other; it's hard for me to remember. I still have a coffin from Hal Roach studios that I plan to be buried in."

I was astonished. He explained that he'd since sold it to "a young fellow and his girlfriend," but could not recall the name of the person. He also sold the note from Schoedsack and had no copy.

I would have been completely incredulous if it wasn't for Wilkinson's apparent lack of guile. "I exhibited him under a glass dome, and a lot of people were able to see him in my museum," he went on. It became clear where the "Kong in Baraboo" stories had come from.

A careful look at the only surviving picture of Wilkinson and his "Kong" [Note: amend that to "one of the only surviving pictures," as Steve Towsley has provided another photo that is included on the page linked above] solved the mystery; he actually had, in wonderful condition, one of the models used by OBie and understudy Ray Harryhausen for 1949's Mighty Joe Young. The "young fellow" who bought Joe from him many years ago is special effects artist Lyle Conway of California, who still owns it.

(An addendum to the Clark Wilkinson enigma: Issue 25 of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND ["Special King Kong Photo Filmbook," 1963] contains a contemporary picture of Harry Benham, the first screen Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde - provided by "his friend Clark Wilkinson.")

The Real Deal

Alas, the actual Kong is nowhere near as whole as his cousin Mighty Joe.

ABOVE: Bob Burns and Kong

"The Kong armature came along in about 1975," Burns recalled. "A fellow named Phil Kelison knew OBie pretty well, and loaned him [Kong] to a museum near Burbank called MovieWorld. When the place went belly-up, Kong just sort of disappeared." Burns kept reminding Phil about the item until finally provoking him to see about get Kong back. (Click HERE to see how it was displayed.)

"The guy gave Phil some sort of song and dance - 'Oh, he's lost..,'" Burns continued. "So I happened to be at this fella's place with a friend to pick up Robby the Robot, which he'd bought when the museum went under. Over in the corner of this big old storage building, I see Kong standing there, and I said, 'Whoa!"

Burns was unable to get it at that point, but alerted his friend Phil to the situation. "After some discussion with Phil, during which the guy claimed he wanted to open another museum in Oregon and exhibit Kong there, Phil said, 'No, I think you've had your chance,' and took it back. Not much later, he called me and asked, 'Will you take this guy off my hands and take care of him, please?'" He didn't have to ask twice.

Kong as he appeared in the late 1960's. (From the collection of Bob Burns)

"When Phil had Kong, he was basically coming apart," Burns says of his armature. "The rubber and fur 'flesh' of the son of Kong was only there in clumps, and it smelled terrible as the materials decomposed. Then a chemist friend of mine told us that the rubber was eating into the metal skeleton and gears, so we had to remove the remaining covering before the armature itself was destroyed." Phil took the crumbling figure to a local commercial cleaner where it was steamed free of "flesh." "When the guy was told what he was spraying, he started exclaiming, 'I'm killing King Kong! I'm killing King Kong!'" Burns recalls with a laugh. By the time Phil loaned Kong to the MovieWorld Museum, he was as he appears now, a metal skeleton.

The Smithsonian has been after Burns on a regular basis to donate the one-of-a-kind item to its collection, but he won't do it. Perhaps he still has a bad taste in his mouth from an early encounter with an outside contractor working for the museum.

Incredibly, the exhibit coordinator evidently had a similar ape-like puppet pulled from the archives and began to exhibit it as "The Model Used in the Movie King Kong." The fraud appeared along with a large sheet of Mario Larrinaga storyboard art for the unfinished film "Creation" (which morphed into "King Kong" after Merian C. Cooper canceled it), the familiar concept drawing depicting Kong atop the Empire State Building (created by Willis O'Brien, Byron Crabbe and Larrinaga), and a very large French Kong poster.

	The fake Kong armature that hoaxed local and national media while exhibited in a 1986 Smithsonian traveling exhibit called "Hollywood: Legend and Reality." The puppet was evidently pulled from the Smithsonian archives and may actually pre-date Kong. It can be seen momentarily in a short program that ran on PBS called "Here at the Smithsonian: Hollywood, Legend and Reality." (Photo courtesy Jay Gowey) UPDATE: For years many suspected - - based on the Smithsonian rep's threat - - that the puppet was actually specially made for the "Hollywood: Legend and Reality" exhibit. New information from animator Chris Endicott indicates that the puppet may have been pulled from the archives or borrowed from another collection and actually pre-dates Kong. This same puppet was displayed at the Los Angeles County History Museum as recently as 1980's and labeled as being used in the production of "King Kong." It was removed in 1986 and put into storage. Endicott may have solved the mystery. In the late 1920's or early 1930's, an animator named J. L. Roop created nature films with stop motion armatures. In fact, Endicott reports that recently unearthed outtakes from Willis O'Brien's "The Lost World" hints that Roop may have worked for O'Brien on that production. The L.A. County Museum Seaver Collection had possession of the very same model as late as 1999; Roop and Marcel Delgado had been employed there creating miniature displays. UPDATE 2: From reader Keith West comes the following theory: "I believe it was created by Roy Seawright as a miniature for the 1938 Hal Roach production of Swiss Miss, starring Laurel and Hardy. In the film, Stan and Ollie are moving a piano across a rope bridge in the Swiss Alps. Halfway across the bridge, they encounter a gorilla, played by Charles Gemora wearing his famous suit. The gorilla starts to rock the rope bridge back and forth, threatening to hurl them all into the chasm below. Eventually, the rope bridge breaks and the gorilla and piano fall into the gorge while Laurel and Hardy cling to the remains of the bride. "In the sequence, the long shots are clearly miniatures, including models of Stan, Ollie and the Gorilla. In my opinion, the gorilla model appears identical to the purported "Kong" in the Smithsonian exhibit. The scale of the model also appears to match the long shots in the sequence, shot in miniature against a painted Alpine backdrop." Anyone out there have a still from the scene in question?

A news crew filmed the fake Kong, believing that they were seeing the real deal, and the story went out on CBS. "I worked at CBS, and everyone at the network knew I had the real Kong. We did our own cut-in with the actual Kong in time for Dan Rather to make a correction. The Smithsonian just about died." The fake Kong remained on the tour, however, with a plaque that was amended to read "This may have been the model...". Its current whereabouts are unknown, but don't be surprised - or fooled - if it turns up in the near future.

Burns also owns an armature for Mighty Joe Young. "It's smaller and lighter than Kong, but is considered to be the best armature ever designed and made. When Industrial Light and Magic was doing The Empire Strikes Back they borrowed Joe from me to study it while they built tauntauns." Ray Harryhausen, who worked with Willis O'Brien on Mighty Joe Young, has since informed Burns that he has "Joe # 1," the model that OBie himself used. "Roy looked at it and knew right away that it was '#1' because it has hinge joints. The newer armatures, including the other Joes used in the movie, had ball-and-socket joints; only OBie could deal with the tricky hinge joints and actually preferred them, so this one is his," Burns said.

Also in his collection; a scale "guide" model of the great wall and gates, the head of the Elasimosaurus that comes up out of the water in Kong's cave, and a foot from the Kong model. "I had one of the original programs from the premiere in 1933, but like an idiot I gave it away about 30 years ago," Burns recalls. "The guy cut it apart and sold pages at $100 a piece. It wouldn't hurt so much if he wouldn't have destroyed it." If there were a way to assign a cash value to Burns' collection of Kong material, it would mean little to him. "I could never sell these artifacts," he said. In fact, much of the intrinsic value of Burns' items is derived from the spirit with which they were given to him. These treasures are in good hands.

In 1983, Burns joined a large group of craftsmen in the construction of a recreation of the long-gone Kong "big head" prop for exhibit at the 50th anniversary re-premiere of King Kong at Mann's (Graumann's) Chinese Theater. His wife, Kathy, created and constructed the large fur pattern needed to cover the bust, and the fruit of their labor stood in the east forecourt just as he did in 1933 at the first premiere. Kong was so authentic looking that several news reports indeed mis-identified it as the original prop. Sadly this giant bust is no longer exists, a victim of the elements and looters while in storage.