Shackled in chains, Kong is taken to New York City and presented to a Broadway theatre audience as "King Kong: the Eighth Wonder of the World".
Denham shocks the world when he unveils King Kong to a stunned audience at the Alhambra Theatre, but the theater is destroyed when Kong escapes his chains and attacks the panicked crowd.
After Fay Wray's death in 2004, the Empire State Building memorialized the actress by briefly dimming its lights in honor of her legendary climb with Kong.
After Kong falls, Denham pushes through a crowd surrounding Kong's corpse in the street. When a policeman remarks that the planes got him, Denham tells him, "No, it wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast".
Four models were built: two jointed 18-inch aluminum, foam rubber, latex, and rabbit fur models (to be rotated during filming), one jointed 24-inch model of the same materials for the New York scenes, and a small model of lead and fur for the climactic plummeting-down-the-Empire-State-Building shot.
Kong's roar was created by sound effects artist Murray Spivak by playing a tiger roar backwards against a lion roar forward, both at half speed. Spivak himself provided the "love grunts" Kong used while trying to win over Ann.
Opting to capitalize on the film's astounding success, RKO studios re-released it in 1938, 1942, and 1952. The scene of Kong undressing/sniffing Ann was cut from the 1938 release due to stricter decency rules put in place by the Production Code.
The story picks up about a month after the original film and follows the further adventures of filmmaker Carl Denham, now implicated in numerous lawsuits following the destruction brought by Kong and threatened with criminal indictment.
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