Years ago, I was in a book store and saw a children's book version of King Kong. It was a simple retelling of the tale with illustrations and, aside from the fact that it told the same story, it never referenced the original film. It just was: Kong as mythic a creature as the Big Bad Wolf or Rumplestiltskin, a fable about the hubris of man versus nature or the explosiveness of rage. It was then that, though I was a stop motion nut, King Kong really began to excite me. I realized that Kong is one of the first, if not the first, filmic myths, myths whose origins began when the lights went down in some movie theater somewhere (I'm hard pressed to come up with another one right now, though I think Freddy Krueger might be another example of a purely filmic myth). So, while I loved the idea of Kong, every now and then I'd remember that I had never actually sat down and watched the whole thing from beginning to end. As a kid, I watched bits and pieces of it when it came on TV, but I had a short attention span back then and had trouble accepting anything in black and white. So this was, I believe, my first viewing of King Kong from beginning to end, though I'd probably seen the entire movie in chunks prior to this.
And, finally watching it, I realized why it was a myth that refused to die and why children still know through cultural osmosis about Kong atop the Empire State Building (how many know about Mighty Joe Young's fight with lions?). King Kong is made of the same stuff as the Grimm Brothers' Tales. It's got the logic of a fairy tale (particularly when he randomly climbs up the Empire State Building) and whatever the moral of the tale is, it's delightfully obscured by the sheer narrative of it all, slim though the narrative may be.
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