King Kong/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • How did they get Kong on the ship?
    • A Really big raft.
  • What exactly is Kong? Is there a whole race of these things or is he a one off genetic mutant?
    • We see some other giant ape skeletons in Jackson's version, so he's probably the Last of His Kind.
      • According to A Natural History Of Skull Island, Kong is the last of a species of ape called Megaprimatus kong.
      • According to publicity materials from 1933, Kong is "a gigantic prehistoric ape"... but NOT a gorilla.
  • Why did the villagers build a huge gate into their wall, big enough to let Kong through? The purpose of the wall is to keep Kong out. A small door would be sufficient, and a lot more practical, for the people to get in and out.
    • Well, the tribe is the remant of a civilization that built the wall (see below) so maybe they needed a big door because they had huge armies they needed to send out. Or else, that part of the wall was damaged, and the best the villagers could do to fix it was to use wood.
      • Is it possible that the Kong-sized door was built to let Kong in long enough to expel the dinosaurs living on the part of the island the natives/civilization lived and once that was done, Kong could easily go back through the gateway?
        • On the other hand, if Kong can climb the Empire State Building/World Trade Center, the Great Wall should be no problem for him. He could probably just run and hop over the damned thing.
  • If there are sacrifices to Kong on a regular basis (lets say once a year, to be generous), why does he have a fresh batch of gigantic trees to knock over each time? Green natives replant them after each sacrifice?
    • Obviously he doesn't enter from the same area, or always knock down trees.
  • The Keep Kong Out wall is a mighty big structure, a pretty impressive achievement even with modern building materials. How is it that they keep Kong out of the village during the time it takes to build that wall? And if whatever it was is so effective in keeping Kong away, why dont they just do that instead of building the wall?
    • All There in the Manual the special features on the DVD of the 2005 movie explain that the villagers are the remnants of a once (somewhat) large and (somewhat) advanced culture, who built the wall around their civilisation to keep the monsters out. However, due to the instability of the island, the coast collapsed gradually into the sea, breaching the wall and forcing the monsters in. This in turn destroyed the civilisation and forced the humans to live in the burial grounds outside the wall; the "village" we see in the film.
      • They actually talk about this in the 1933 original, that the wall had been built by a more advanced situation which decayed into the primitive natives seen in the film. They kept the wall in good repair, though.
    • What gives this troper the real Fridge Horror is the implication (possibly existing only in her own imagination) that they are...the way they are...because they don't have enough resources anymore; that they are the degenerated remnants of a people reduced to unspeakable practices to survive. Yep, a whole culture devolved into the Sawney Bean family: that idea has haunted me more than anything else in the movie (even the head-sucking worm) ever since.