King Kong: You're on the Air, Ya Big Ape!

Illustration By Robert Faires

At the cineplex this holiday season, the 800-lb. gorilla – make that 8,000-lb. gorilla – is Peter Jackson's little remake about the ape that scaled the Empire State, King Kong. But here in Austin, the simian sovereign of Skull Island will also be heard beating his chest in a live theatrical presentation. The Violet Crown Radio Players, those intrepid devotees of 1930s audio drama who brought us staged radio versions of The War of the Worlds and It's a Wonderful Life, among others, are mounting what they're calling the "lost" radio adaptation of King Kong, as produced for the Lux Radio Theater by Cecil B. DeMille. Whether that's indeed a nugget of forgotten history or a whopper the size of our monumental monk we'll leave for you to decide, but VCRP Creative Director Mark Finn has indeed cobbled together a script for Kong as radio drama, adapted from a novelization of the 1933 film that's now in the public domain. "That novelization has everything that the screenplay has, plus a few telling extras that were cut for budget and/or time considerations, like the infamous 'spider scene,'" he says. "Since we have virtually no special effects budget, we put the scene back in. And it's creepy!"

Finn allows that he's tempting fate by taking on the renowned gorilla, especially when a newer, showier version is hitting the streets, but his willingness to do so just speaks to his affection for the big ape. "I'm a huge fan of King Kong," he says. "It was a seminal influence on me. And there was no way I was going to try to do this if there was a chance that I'd screw it up. I'm happy that this project really keeps the spirit of the movie, while also doing it just different enough that you feel like you're seeing – make that 'hearing' – it in a way that you never did before."

And speaking of hearing the story, our sense of the title character in this radio version has to be created entirely through sound. How will this Kong be voiced?

"Believe it or not, I will be voicing Kong myself," Finn reveals. "I've been working on it for nine months – yeah, I'm that kind of geek. The original voice of Kong in 1933 was a backward-cranked lion and other gutteral animals. Kong's roar is a reversed lion. So I took a cue from that and started from there. I got help from Fred Newman, the guy who does the sound effects on the Road Show for A Prairie Home Companion. He's a childhood hero of mine; he wrote a book called Mouthsounds in 1981 that forever doomed me to a life of mischief. I met him when he was in town this March for a booksigning, and he was kind enough to chat with me about some key points."