King King Escapes (1967)

This was made by the Rankin Bass Company - yes the guys who made all those classic animated holiday specials and Japan's Toho studio who perfected these kind of giant monster movies. This one has all the elements you want in a great Saturday matinee - giant robots, evil scientists, cool miniature vehicles and photography and Kong smashing every thing he can find to smash. Mecha Kong was one of the coolest things I can remember from my childhood.



Cinema Strikes Back did a good review of the film that gets into more detail than I want to get into here. The trailer kinda tells you all you need to know anyways.

http://www.cinemastrikesback.com/?p=812

 

King Kong Escapes is a kaiju (Japanese monster film) picture through and through. All the tropes of the genre are present. We have our giant, ambiguously-heroic monster, his equally-large, unambiguously-evil nemesis, a group of proper human heroes, and a counteracting group of dastardly humans (sometimes they were aliens, but here the villains are humans, just funny-looking ones).

 

 

 

 

Check out these beautiful lobby cards. It's too bad they don't do that anymore but with the internet and the ability to find production pictures online before the movie premieres, this kind of in-theatre advertising is no longer necessary. I remember at the cool theatre on the base as a kid. They would have these lobby cards in a glass case outside the theatre in the lobby. It was something I always looked at while waiting to buy my ticket. Most films they got no doubt came with the old lobby cards because I remember some of them being pretty beat up.

 

Mecha Kong is one of the coolest ideas they ever came up with. I just love the look of the giant robot. Why make it look like Kong what a regular looking robot would do the same job? Why the hell not? It's better not to ask those kind of questions with these kind of films.

 

Of course Kong sees a blond girl and has to beat the living hell out of a guy in a dinosaur suit just to show her that he's the better man (in this case a guy in a gorilla suit and an obvious gorilla suit at that).