00:00I did about a year's work I suppose at RKO. Willis O'Brien made a number of tests just
00:06to show how the animals would move. It was the first time the dinosaurs took on this
00:12realistic approach. It's a question of keeping the head and the arms and the legs all in
00:20synchronization so that the movement looks natural and not just a stiff puppet that moves
00:26around like Pinocchio. But it's rather static and there's not a great deal of
00:33drama but I think it was just made as an example of what the animals could do.
00:40O'Brien made stars of the dinosaurs and I think that was important that he brought
00:49them to life where you can't go out and photograph a dinosaur so you have to
00:54create one. And that's the beauty about Willis O'Brien's technique of the single
00:59figure. He made that very popular. How many people remember who was in the lost
01:05world but they remember the dinosaurs? And here they combine live-action with the
01:10animated character to show them in comparison with the live-action. I worked
01:17with Obi about a year before. I knew pretty well what was in his mind. He liked
01:22dynamic things. He liked the spectacular and he contributed enormously to the story
01:29values which he seldom gets credit for. And when Cooper took over RKO he saw the
01:37tests. But Marion Cooper being a bigger-than-life character felt there was no
01:43drama in just showing animals moving around. Cooper felt there should be a central
01:49character such as Kong to give the story a forward motion. And he had always wanted
01:58to make a film about a giant gorilla. But when he saw all of Obi's creation he saw
02:05where they could be incorporated and Obi convinced him that Kong could be made in
02:12the same way. And he felt that his idea about a gorilla fighting possibly the Komodo lizards
02:19would could be done right in the studio with the stop-motion technique. So he
02:25canceled creation.
02:31I think the next scenes show a composite. Obi liked to do a lot of them in the camera, saving
02:38the cost of
02:39building sets. There's a bird flying over the river. That's a technique that I used in
02:46my fairy tales. I always had a bird fly through if it was a static scene so that
02:51you wouldn't get bored with just looking at a straightforward shot. They probably put
02:57that water in the foreground as a bi-pack in the camera and then wound the film back and exposed
03:05the animation.
03:07Now this is a composite shot made with the Williams process where you see the live action in conjunction
03:16with the animated character. We used to be criticized a lot when we made the remake of One Million B
03:23.C.
03:23that man never lived in the age of the dinosaur. Well every year you hear a new theory that man
03:31went back
03:31more than a million years ago. If you don't have humans with the dinosaurs you have no size comparison,
03:38you have no drama, so we have to take that liberty. After all we're not making these pictures for professors.
03:46They probably never go to the cinema anyway. This of course would tug on your heartstrings to see this
03:53man shooting this baby dinosaur. Oh, he's shooting them in the eye. Ah, the villain.
04:03My mother hears it and comes running to the rescue of her child.
04:23A lot of scenes from creation, designs from creation actually filtered into King Kong. So I think if
04:34creation hadn't been started, probably a lot of King Kong would be very different than what we finally saw.
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