Good morning,
The forecast for Whitewater calls for another day of thunderstorms, with a high temperature of fifty degrees.
I’ll post comments on the spring elections later today.
Today is an famous anniversary in American cinema, as Wired recalls — April 7, 1933: King Kong Opens Wide:
1933: Depression-era moviegoers hungry for escape line up outside theaters for the first nationwide screenings of King Kong.
They emerged stunned by groundbreaking scenes crafted by visual effects wizard Willis O’Brien. The stop-motion pioneer transformed an 18-inch gorilla doll into a hulking monster that appears to swat airplanes atop the Empire State Building (brand new at the time) while cupping damsel in distress Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) in his paw.
King Kong opened on the day Prohibition was eased, and it enchanted an economy-battered audience with its fantastical tale: A giant gorilla roaming free on Skull Island in the Indian Ocean is captured by exploitation-minded filmmaker Carl Denham. He displays King Kong to New York as the Eighth Wonder of the World….
The King Kong character was created by American adventurer Merian C. Cooper. He co-wrote, co-directed and produced the movie after getting kicked out of the U.S. Naval Academy, chasing Pancho Villa in Mexico, and serving time in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp following a stint in the Polish Air Force.
Cooper got the idea to make King Kong, he said, after waking up from a dream about a giant gibbon on the loose in New York City.
Ever the daredevil, Cooper and King Kong co-director Ernest B. Schoedsack piloted the plane that fires the final rounds into the mammoth primate.
I think that the original version, and the Peter Jackson remake, are among the best films that I have ever seen.
Here’s the trailer from the 1933 original — Enjoy —