Godzilla is very silly. Not the 1954 film that introduced him to the world. That’s still one of the most somber and haunted horror films I’ve ever seen. But the multiple series starring the king of the monsters, in Japan and the United States, do not have many such movies. Most are slugfests between Godzilla and other giant monsters of various magical or pseudoscientific origins coupled with human drama of varying quality. And that’s fine! Kaiju on a rampage through lovingly-crafted miniature cities is a complete fantasy and once the original allegory behind Godzilla is stretched as far as possible, the material is perfect for some physically impossible fun. As silly as the monster vs. monster concept is, not many Godzilla movies could be called outright comedies. But one of the few that does belong in that genre was most responsible for making a viable series out of kaiju brawls: King Kong vs. Godzilla.

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We’re not talking about Legendary’s 2021 entry in their MonsterVerse, a series that is simultaneously just as unrealistic as any kaiju film and desperate to pretend otherwise through tone and style. We’re talking about the original clash of kings from 1962. One of the films used by Toho to hail their thirtieth anniversary, it was a massive hit in Japan when it was first released and a popular draw in the United States too. The American recut of the film went worldwide, bringing in more dough. And it’s a movie that features Kong and Godzilla playing volleyball with a boulder.

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Image Via Toho

King Kong vs. Godzilla wasn’t developed in-house. Willis O’Brien, the stop-motion pioneer behind the effects in the original King Kong, had cooked up an idea for Kong to fight a giant monster created by a descendent of Dr. Frankenstein. Sadly for O’Brien, his luck with producers wasn’t equal to his impeccable craftsmanship. The concept was taken away from him, passed around, and eventually sold to Toho, who swapped out Frankenstein for Godzilla and, per the book Ishirō Honda: A Life in Film, never gave O’Brien credit.

Putting Godzilla in allowed Toho to make use of one of their most famous characters, but his career wasn’t yet that of a stable series lead. The quickie sequel Godzilla Raids Again in 1955 was creatively unsatisfying to producer-creator Tomoyuki Tanaka and did only middling business. Godzilla had been off the screen for seven years by the time King Kong vs. Godzilla began production and Kong was still more famous than his rival even in Japan. The entertainment landscape in Japan had also changed radically since Godzilla’s first appearance. Television was making inroads into cinema’s audience and the quality of programs on TV attracted fierce condemnation for its mindlessness and stupefying effect on the audience (the more things change…)

The critics may have had a point in 1962. A not-insubstantial chunk of programming was devoted to publicity stunts to win ratings, never mind how ridiculous or inconsiderate of audiences’ intelligence. Screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa and director Ishirō Honda decided to use that. According to A Life in Film, their newest movie would be a satire of the ratings war. The only reason King Kong ends up in Japan in the film is that a pharmaceutical company wants to give the shows it sponsors a ratings boost. The corporate lackeys put in charge of the campaign (Tadao Takashima and Yū Fujiki) are obligated to chase after Kong throughout the story, hounded in turn by their high-strung boss, Mr. Tako (Ichirō Arishima). This dig at television does fall away in the second half of the film as the monster action picks up, but until then, the ad campaign’s blundering on Kong’s island and their obliviousness to how wrong their plan could go are a delight.

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Image Via Toho

So are the multiple battles between Godzilla and Kong. Besides the aforementioned rock-volleyball game, they get into anthropomorphized wrestling, more animalistic tooth-and-claw brawling, and the pure fantasy of radioactive breath and electrically-charged fingertips. The latter was presumably an effort to make Kong a credible opponent for Godzilla, as was scaling him up by a few hundred feet; the King Kong of the 1933 film could easily be trampled underfoot. Does lightning giving Kong electric powers make any sense? No more than an atomic bomb giving a dinosaur atomic breath, but who cares when the two kings of movie monsters get to duke it out in full color and widescreen, the first such outing for both of them? (By the way – check every film from this to Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, and you’ll see that Godzilla isn’t green. He’s either charcoal gray or black. Kong here has reddish-brown fur and one of the stiffest and unconvincing faces ever put on a gorilla suit, but there is something endearing in his vacant, lidded expression.)

Having the monsters be so silly – having them fight at all – wasn’t Honda’s idea. The director of the original Godzilla, and someone who took its metaphor to heart, he never fully reconciled himself to the studio’s pushing the series into monster battles with an ever more humanized monster star. After his time as series director ended, he was polite but frank in interviews (quoted in A Life in Film) about feeling like a company man obliged to do his best with a vision he didn’t like. Producer Tanaka would later regret Godzilla’s evolution too and rebooted the series to bring him back to his roots. But special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya was delighted with the change. He was a massive Kong fan, crediting the original film with getting him into special effects in the first place. He also loved children and wanted his films to be accessible to them. His own crew thought his directions could be over the top, but Tsuburaya held significant clout at Toho, and he and Honda were good friends and partners despite being at odds over the future of Godzilla; the child-friendly antics stayed.

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Image Via Toho

King Kong vs. Godzilla isn’t all kaiju slapstick and the exaggerated bumbling of ad men. Large stretches of the plot are played straight and Akira Ifukube’s musical score is characteristically foreboding without any nods toward humor. Much of that score was replaced with equally humorous but less appropriate stock music when Universal-International released their recut, which seemed to miss the satire. And in any cut, King Kong vs. Godzilla isn’t as consistent as the first Godzilla or later sequels. But it is one of the most entertaining Godzilla films and its phenomenal success at home and abroad let his career blossom after a rocky second entry.

Other horror series have veered into humor, but rarely in a manner that was so deliberately controlled (if reluctantly on Honda’s part) by the key personnel behind the original outing, or so creatively successful. And if later Godzilla sequels weren’t outright comedies, King Kong vs. Godzilla opened the floodgates for comic moments. Godzilla’s dance on Planet X, his tail slide into Megalon, his bug-eyed son, his having any humanistic traits at all? They may never have happened without that 1962 rumble with his rival king.