There is only one official sequel to the original King Kong, and that is Son of Kong.
However, Mighty Joe Young is far more a proper sequel and love letter to that film than Son of Kong. It brings back many of the major players, and brought Ray Harryhausen into contact and work with Willis O’Brian in a major capacity.
Harryhausen is often credited for a lot of the animation in this film, particularly giving Joe one of his trademark quirks: punching the ground when he’s angry or frustrated. It’s a great little tick that’s exploited well.
It brings Joe to life in a very real sense, and that is key to his symbolism.
Let’s get this out of the way quickly. Joe is a Gorilla, which species is never really described in detail. Given the generics and the proposed “Location”, the Eastern Lowland Gorilla is the most likely candidate. But what’s going on with Joe? Why is he so big? His dimensions match those of the estimates made for Gigantopithecus blacki. However, it is very unlikely that he is some sort of evolutionary throwback for quite a lot of reasons: Gigantopithecus blacki is actually from central and southern Asian, not Africa; the genus was poorly known until the 1950s; these days it’s more closely grouped with Orangutangs than Gorillas; the idea of evolutionary throwbacks has long been discredited.
So what’s going on? Simply put, an extremely kind form of Gigantism. Joe would not live as long as a normal gorilla due to later medical complications, but at only about 10 years old, he remains healthy. By the time the film takes place, he’s likely going to start developing his silverback soon after the movie ends.
Symbolism
There’s two sets of symbolism to Mighty Joe Young. One of them is Meta-Narrative and related to King Kong. The other is, oddly enough, about animal rights. Yes, in the 1940s. Joe is as much of a character as any of the humans Harryhausen and O’Brian animated him with. He has his motivations, his character traits and even a small arc. He is not a special effect. Through his animators, he’s a performer. Because of that, it is extremely empathize with Joe and all the bad things that happen to him. And boy, do bad things happen to Joe!
Joe is orphaned as a baby, eventually taken to California and put through various ‘shows’ for the public’s entertainment.
These shows range from interesting to utterly humiliating. The worsts of them being an Organ Grinder Monkey gag. When he is intoxicated and attacked by even more intoxicated men while he is caged, the audience is on his side when he rampages through the nightclub.
Seeing it be destroyed utterly in Joe’s rampage (and the other heroes’ attempts to stall the police so Joe can get back to his cage and not be shot immediately) is completely cathartic.
The key idea here is that animals (at the very least, other primates) should be treated far better than this. This even extends to the man who put him in that situation to begin with, which leads us to the connection to King Kong.
The man who brings Joe to Hollywood is played by Robert Armstrong, and he is giving a lighter, more comedic spin to another character he played: Carl Denham of King Kong. He serves as the lynch pin between the two films, making Joe almost an apology to the treatment of Kong.
Kong’s death was a tragic moment, intentional or not. Joe is basically a re-write of King Kong in that sense. Here, the ape is saved by the very men who endangered him in the first place, and the only real bad guys are drunks. No, really, the only truly evil people in the entire movie are drunkards.
16 years later, and prohibition’s talons are still clawing at movies.
Anyway, Robert Armstrong’s character, Max O’Hara, is there to redeem Denham by proxy. He is, frankly, a nicer person than Denham by far and actively takes part in a big plan to secret Joe back to Africa when he’s scheduled to be murdered by the state for the aforementioned drunken rampage. By succeeding in freeing Joe and getting him back to Africa (in a sense), Denham is redeemed.
Basically, everyone felt bad for Kong, so they told a story where the same thing happens, but this time the people fix their mistakes
“And they lived happily ever after, in Africa.”
“They’re back home where they belong.”
These are the last two lines of dialogue in Mighty Joe Young and to modern ears, they definitely speak of an eco-centric, animal rights bent. Given the nature of the film and the time, the extreme degree we see today was not what they intended, but it’s what many can take from it today. Times change, and messages get re-interpreted.
Either way, it’s definitely towards better treatment for Joe.
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