Like a lot of monster movie fans from my generation, my first glimpse of the great ape wasn't the movie itself -- but in books like Ian Thorne's King Kong from the junior readers Monster Series that included this spectacular still of Kong force-feeding an Allosaurus a tree.

I didn't actually see King Kong until after the advent of the VCR when I was about seventeen. Up to that time I had really read up on the big ape and even managed to get my hands on Delos W. Lovelace's novelization of Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace's script and had every gruesome and hair-raising detail committed to memory. So imagine my surprise when the above scenario doesn't actually appear in the film along with several other scenes that were obviously, and disappointingly, omitted.

So what did we miss? Here's what I've been able to piece together.

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Scenes from the Script But Not Filmed

That appears to be a horned styrachosauraus.

You see, in the original script, while the rescue party was getting trampled, drowned or devoured by the sauropod while crossing the river, Kong was having a little trouble himself. 

With his prized possession cradled in his arm, Kong is pursued by herd of triceratops and other armored dinosaurs. Coming to an "asphalt field" Kong started firing huge rocks and boulders at his pursuers (after placing Ann down.) He scores a direct hit on one, breaking it's horn off, while another gets stuck in a morass while dodging another missile and slowly sinks to its doom. 

Kong continues his salvo until the stampeding herd breaks off pursuit and switch directions. Unfortunately, for the sailors (who didn't get trampled, drowned or devoured by the sauropod), the herd of wounded and angry triceratops are now heading right for them! They try to get away but one man is run down and gored on one of the beast's horns. 

The others escape and come upon the chasm spanned by the fallen log. One of the triceratops is blundering in the trees, hunting them, but can't find them. Driscoll and Denham decide the best plan is for Driscoll to keep after Kong while the rest of the survivors try to make it back to the wall for supplies and reinforcements. 

Driscoll makes it across the log just as the triceratops crashes out of the trees forcing the others to cross the chasm, too. They have to be careful not to fall off while crossing because of what lurks below (more on that in a sec.) The triceratops bellows after them unable to follow.

Before the others can get across, though, Kong appears (having deposited Ann in a tree) answering the perceived challenge of the bellowing triceratops (and I think it's supposed to be the one he broke the horn off of.) Driscoll manages to bail into a small cave under the log while Denham does the same on the opposite side of the chasm. The rest of the sailors are stuck between the two monsters. Kong grows enraged and starts shaking sailors off the log until he tosses the whole thing into the chasm then goes after Driscoll. The triceratops getting no more interest from Kong lumbers off. Kong keeps after Driscoll until Ann screams when she sees the Allosaurus.

I don't know why this didn't wind up in the film but budget and time constraints seem the likely culprit. The scenes would be pretty involved for the F/X department and might have put too much strain on the film's already strained budget. O'Brien and Delgado already had the triceratops models made from the scrapped film, Creation, but they were not used in the production. O'Brien and his team worked wonders on this film and I honestly think they could have pulled if off I just think they ran out of time.

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     After it's initial release in 1933, Kong was re-released four times and each time the censors went to work on cutting scenes deemed to gruesome or risqué and yanked them out. These deleted scenes were eventually found in an RKO film vault and restored around 1972.

   

After destroying their raft, a sauropod munches on and plays Toss-a-Cross with a few hapless sailors.

 

 

Curious Kong disrobes and examines his prize, Ann (Fay Wray). Naughty-Naughty.

 

Searching for Ann, Kong takes his frustrations out on the natives.

 

In New York, right after escaping the theater, Kong gets a quick snack.

 

 

Kong grabs the wrong woman, realizes his mistake, then drops her to her doom.

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Scenes Censored And Still Lost

This is the Holy Grail of all of Kong's lost scenes. According to the script, during the scene when Kong dispatches his pursuers by shaking them off the log suspended over the chasm, most of the sailors who fell off didn't die when they hit the bottom. Waiting for them below was an assortment of giant lizards, spiders and octopus like creatures. 

When watching the film we see the sailors landing in some kind of web but their screams are cut short so we assume the falls are fatal. However, in the original cut, the sailors survived the fall but were swarmed over and devoured by these creatures that lurked at the bottom of the chasm.

Here's an excerpt from the novelization:

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     "TWO of the men lost their holds [and went] whirling down to the decaying silt at the bottom. The first had no more than struck when the lizard flashed upon him...the second man landed feet first, sinking immediately to his waistline in the mud, and screamed horribly as not one but a half dozen of the great spiders swarmed over him."

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And it got worse from there. The audience reacted bad to these gruesome scenes. The film's co-producer, Merian C. Cooper, said "[the scene] stopped the film cold, so the next day at the studio, I took it out myself."

This is one of the few pieces of evidence of the scene's existence. This is a pre-production still of the models used at the bottom of the chasm. Note the web in the background...

It's the same set-piece that shows up in the actual film where most of the sailors (well, puppet sailors) fell to their demise and we were spared these gruesome scenes. (But I don't wanna be spared!)

The only real evidence of this scene that survives is when one of the lizard creatures crawls up a vine to menace Driscoll while Kong dispatches all his comrades on the log.

Special-effects wizard Willis O'Brien would later use the same spider and bug models to populate the bottom of the volcano in The Black Scorpion.

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More Missing Scenes?

Kong breaks up a poker game while looking for Ann in the hotel?

A longer jungle escape sequence for Driscoll and Ann?

There was a shot looking down towards the street of Kong falling off the Empire State Building but it had a glitch during the compositing and Kong turned transparent so it was left out.

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A behind the scenes look at the man himself, Willis "Obie" O'Brien, animating Kong in his cave. People often don't realize how big the models used in the stop-motion process are. Kong stood at 18-inches. People question why Kong's appearance kept changing over the course of the film? The answer is simple enough. After a days shooting Kong had to be "skinned" of his fur and rubber muscles so all his joints could be tightened with a screwdriver. When they put him back together he never was quite the same.

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Whoops!

It's true. If you do a frame by frame search you can see where they accidently left some of the equipment in the shot of Kong on his ledge. They also say that during the wrestling match, right after Kong flips the Allosaurus, that more equipment is visible.

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Who killed King Kong?

Denham claims it was "beauty killed the beast" but I'm pretty sure it was all those bullets he took followed by that really long fall. And who was manning the guns? None other than co-producers Cooper (on the stick) and Ernest B. Shoedsack (manning the gun.) The story goes that the producers decided that "we got the big ape up there so we might as well be the ones to knock him off." There's also an urban legend that the two were wrestlers and provided the choreography for Kong's fight with the Allosaurus.

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Our Kong Tribute Continues!  The History The Film Deleted Scenes Bibliography Knock-Offs Kong Index