THE SOUND OF KONG

There are lots of monster movies that I consider favorites, but RKO's original 1933 KING KONG tops them all. I know, there's DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN, THE MUMMY and scads of others that are true classics, but none quite compare to the combination of adventure, fantasy and horror that sets this film apart from the rest. While researching material to include in my article on the 90th anniversary of The Eighth Wonder of the World for PREHISTORIC TIMES magazine I came across this article from POPULAR SCIENCE (April 1933) that does a deep-dive on the sound effects for Kong and the various dinosaurs seen in the movie.

Murray Spivak was hired as the sound effects supervisor and his first order of business was creating vocalizations for the "non-human players". He did not want to use anything that people would recognize as typical animal sounds and ended up modifying and mixing known sounds by lowering the pitch or otherwise manipulating them. When completed, he had a completely new sound library of prehistoric "grunts and growls" as he called them.

My article will appear in the summer issue of PREHISTORIC TIMES (#150). I'll give a shout out when it's published.