Though it feels like a test market product, Peter Jackson's Production Diaries: King Kong is the first time the extra material has been released on DVD before the movie is even out in theaters. Actually, the material has been around since September of 2004 online. The question is then: why do we need this?

There are a lot of reasons, surprisingly. The 54 individual making-of features are the key. These premiered on kongisking.net, and they continued to run through production. What makes these so interesting is that they were filmed as the movie was being shot. It's an entire video document on the making of a heavily hyped $207 million remake. There has obviously been more care taken with the later ones, and you can almost pick out the point where they realized these would be a finished product.

If you've seen them online, you'll recognize all of them. If you haven't you'll be engrossed. Fans of the original film will be stunned to see the models used in a special diary (Day 42). The brontosaurus models may be in rough shape, but it's still a sight to behold. There's a classic April Fools joke that can't be spoiled here. It had more than a few people falling for it at first. The menus are sorted in various ways to make the material as convenient as possible to flip through (date released, play all, filming locations).

There is one extra piece that was never available online, and that's a nearly 20-minute look at a critical action sequence between Kong and the T-Rex family. The piece finishes with the entire segment in completed form. The first disc has an introduction from Peter Jackson to all of these mini-diaries and how they came about. Those are the only extras on the two discs themselves, with the rest being made up of items inside the oversized box.

Sadly, this isn't complete. The final featurette is from early April 2005, and there have been several others on the website since then. Nearly all of the digital effects and sound diaries are missing. Arguably the best is one in which collector Bob Burns brings the only original surviving Kong model to the set — and it's not here. They even "re-animated" (per se) the model in its wire frame form. You wouldn't know this happened if you get this DVD.

It probably would have made more sense to wait until the full DVD release and just throw these on as extras, but at around four hours of content, they likely had to be separate if they were going to make it to the finished product somehow. As it stands now, these certainly feel like blatant marketing for die-hard fans no matter how good they are. If you haven't watched them all though, their ability to avoid spoilers and engrossing documentary quality through the filmmaking process is worth the price of admission... assuming you want to keep them in physical form. They're still available online. (**** out of *****)