Leaguepodcast #541 - King Kong (1976) Video Variant

The Gents go back to covering big monsters and take on the 1976 version of King Kong, starring Jeff Bridges, Charles Grodin, the lovely Jessica Lange, and a guy in an ape suit. The mechanical ape was only in the movie about 15 seconds. When Dino De Laurentiis set out to remake the 1933 classic, he promised the world a towering mechanical marvel. What audiences got instead was Rick Baker sweating in a gorilla suit — and honestly, it works better than it has any right to. The 1976 Kong ditches dinosaurs for oil company executives, drops Kong's origin into a corporate expedition, and somehow makes Charles Grodin the most compelling villain of the decade. Jeff Bridges is effortlessly cool as a stowaway primatologist, and Jessica Lange, in her film debut, turns a thinly written role into something genuinely charming. The Gents dig into the film's production chaos, the $1.7 million mechanical Kong that appeared on screen for about as long as it takes to read this sentence, and whether the movie holds up as the lovably sincere blockbuster misfire it truly is. Big monsters, corporate greed, and the Twin Towers standing in for the Empire State Building — it's a lot. Come for the ape suit, stay for the Grodin.