The Monster Island Film Vault Posts

So, with the episode on Son of Kong, I was surprised to hear Nathan and Tim telling me what to do with my notes. It’s my blog, dangit, and I’ll not be told what to include! Then I discovered that, unbeknownst to Nathan (supposedly), I’m contractually obligated to include whatever he tells me to research.

(sigh) I was a NASA engineer once….

Anyway, here are my notes:

• There hasn’t been an incident where any of the monsters on the Island ate any children. That was just a joke by Nathan and Tim. I assure you, Monster Island has an excellent safety record…so long as alien disco nuns aren’t involved.
• If we go by authorized publications, there were actually two book sequels and one prequel to Gone with the Wind, although none of them were written by Margaret Mitchell. Tim was probably thinking of Scarlet by Alexandra Ripley (no relation to Ellen) published in 1991, which was made into a TV miniseries featuring Timothy Dalton in 1994. There was also Rhett Butler’s People by Donald McCaig in 2008 and Ruth’s Journey (also by McCaig) in 2014.
• Tim calls it the island in the film “Skull Island”…again. And Nathan didn’t correct him. What the heck?
• They got the dates for the Universal horror sequels pretty accurate.
• Merian C. Cooper pitched a sequel to RKO in March 1933 and principal photography started April 4. Yeah, it was that fast!
• I reached out to one of Nathan’s grad school professors, Dr. Kaufmann, about 1930s film credits, and he pretty much agrees with Nathan and Tim: “I wouldn’t call it common, but it certainly was done at times.  I couldn’t say when or where it originated, but I haven’t seen it in film for a while now except as a joke.  It seemed more like a TV thing back in the day (70s and 80s).”
• Sadly, Noble Johnson isn’t in the opening credits of this film.
• I can’t believe I researched this, but “the finger” (“flipping the bird” or whatnot) actually dates back to ancient Greece and ancient Rome and had essentially the same meaning as it does now. The first usage of it in the U.S. was in the 1890s when it was brought to the country via Italian immigrants, although the first documented use of it in the U.S. was in 1886 when a baseball player was photographed making it. In other words, it was a thing in the 1930s. Read all about it here.
• Tim says, “Anna,” when he meant, “Ann.” I guess the lost “A” from MPAA moved to her name. 😛
• Do Kiko and Kong get along? Well, Kiko is now a kaiju clown. He entertains the kids who visit Monster Island, which disappoints Kong a little. Thankfully, he forages his own make-up from plants growing on the Island, so the Board doesn’t have to allocate any of their budget to his shenanigans.
• According to John LeMay’s new book, Kong Unmade, the “midquel” Kong film would’ve been titled The New Adventures of King Kong. Nathan said it would’ve been set in Africa when it actually would’ve been the Malay Archipelago. I don’t recommend he audition for Where in the World is Carman Sandiego?
• The Wizard of Oz was and wasn’t set in the 1930s. It’s weird. According to this thread, the Kansas scenes seem likely to be in 1900 (when the novel was written), but the Oz scenes use what was then modern technology (which is odd if it was all Dorothy’s dream). So, it’s strangely (and brilliantly) ambiguous.
• The 1932 film I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang was actually based on a book published the same year titled I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! by Robert Elliott Burns. So, the book at least is set in Georgia, not Alabama. The book is about the author’s time in a chain gang in the 1920s, but the film has a fictional protagonist. Burns was still in prison in New Jersey when the film was released. He and many other chain gang prisoners were able to appeal and be released in January 1933 as a result of the social outcry from the film. So Tim got some of the details between the film and book mixed up (but then again, so does Wikipedia, which at one point lists Burns as the film’s protagonist when it was James Allen. Got to love crowdsourcing).
• The MPAA was actually started under a different name in 1922 and had its name changed in 1945 (and now they’ve dropped the second “A”). You missed that date by a lifetime, guys. 😛
• On a related note, the Hays Code wasn’t a government mandated thing. It was an industry standard adopted by the MPAA under its first name while Will H. Hays was its president (1922-1945).
• Notorious was released in 1946. I’m surprised the Criterion crowd hasn’t sent Nathan any hate mail for getting this wrong…yet.
• There was one other sequel to the original King Kong, and it supplants Son of Kong. It was a short story written by science fiction author Philip Jose Farmer titled, “After King Kong Fell.” I showed Nathan a video on it from the Omni Viewer, and he now wants to read it. It’s noteworthy for cameos by Doc Savage, the Shadow, and the Shadow’s girlfriend Margot Lane.

With these out of the way, here are Nathan’s leftover notes from the episode. Most of these are excerpts from his sources.

• “Escapism” (Wikipedia)
  • “Escapism is the avoidance of unpleasant, boring, arduous, scary, or banal aspects of daily life.[2] It can also be used as a term to define the actions people take to help relieve persistent feelings of depression or general sadness.”
  • “The word ‘escapism’ often carries a negative connotation, suggesting that escapists are unhappy, with an inability or unwillingness to connect meaningfully with the world and to take necessary action.[5] Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary defined escapism as ‘The tendency to seek, or the practice of seeking, distraction from what normally has to be endured.’[6]”
  • “However, many challenge the idea that escapism is fundamentally and exclusively negative. C. S. Lewis was fond of humorously remarking that the usual enemies of escape were jailers;[7][8] and considered that used in moderation escapism could serve both to refresh and to expand the imaginative powers.[9] Similarly J. R. R. Tolkien argued for escapism in fantasy literature as the creative expression of reality within a secondary (imaginative) world, (but also emphasized that they required an element of horror in them, if they were not to be “mere escapism”).[10][11] Terry Pratchett considered that the twentieth century had seen the development over time of a more positive view of escapist literature.[12] Apart from literature, music has been seen and valued as an artistic medium of escape, too.[13]”
  • “Freud considers a quota of escapist fantasy a necessary element in the life of humans: ‘[T]hey cannot subsist on the scanty satisfaction they can extort from reality.  “We simply cannot do without auxiliary constructions”, Theodor Fontane once said’.[14] His followers saw rest and wish fulfilment (in small measures) as useful tools in adjusting to traumatic upset;[15] while later psychologists have highlighted the role of vicarious distractions in shifting unwanted moods, especially anger and sadness.[16][17]”
• “Escapism and Leisure Time 1929-1941” (Encyclopedia.com)
  • “In 1938 social science researchers hypothesized that unemployment leads to emotional instability. These studies seemed to indicate that the longer a person was unemployed, the more likely his or her personality would become fatalistic and distressed. In an attempt to escape from this psychological state, it was speculated that people were turning to popular forms of entertainment such as the movies, radio, or reading. Such speculation is not unreasonable given studies that show children will play even during the worst of times. The fact that very few popular culture forms dealt with the realities of the Great Depression in any explicit way further supports popular culture as a vehicle of escape. Using pop culture to escape emotional stress can also be supported through the generally accepted psychological idea of ‘flow.’”
  • “Flow is that point within any activity when you lose your sense of self and become one with whatever you are doing. With the complete absorption in an activity, time disappears, along with the sense of self and all that it might have been feeling prior to absorption. It is plausible that becoming absorbed in an off the wall comedy, a radio adventure, melodramatic pulps, or dancing to the Lindy Hop would provide relief from the uncertainties associated with everyday life.”
  • “Nine years into the Great Depression the National Recreation Association completed a study of five thousand people asking them to name the recreational activities in which they participated the most. Among the most frequently mentioned activities were reading newspapers, magazines, and books; listening to the radio; going to the movies; visiting or entertaining; motoring; swimming; writing letters; conversation; card parties; picnicking; going to the theater; attending parties and socials; hiking; family parties; tennis; and serious study.”
  • “A more positive legacy of the period may be that popular culture allowed the United States to become a more integrated society. For example, the enormous popularity of swing allowed for more interactive relations between black American and European American communities. At least one scholar has argued that American popular culture is far more pluralistic, dynamic, and tolerant than United States legal and political culture. The Great Depression also was an era in which folk music became popularized as large numbers of people simultaneously learned of its ability to communicate the hardships of daily life and as a musical form able to contain a political purpose. This legacy was first fully realized during the protests by young people during the 1960s.”
• “How the Great Depression inspired Hollywood’s golden age”
  • “Even in the depths of the Great Depression, between 60 and 80 million Americans went to the movies once a week or more, and back in those days they really got value for money. In the early 1930s, an American movie ticket would buy you a cartoon, a newsreel, a B-feature and the main film, which amounted to something like four hours’ entertainment for a nickel, the price back then of a gallon of petrol or a packet of cigarettes.”
  • “How bitterly audiences must have laughed when, in Duck Soup, Groucho’s Rufus T Firefly sang ‘If you think this country’s bad off now, just wait till I get through with it!’”
  • “Though the studios rode out the first few years of the Depression comfortably enough, by 1933 their massive debts were catching up with them. All had borrowed heavily to finance the mass purchase of movie theatres and their conversion to sound, leaving them with combined debts of over $400m.”
  • “And by 1933, as mass unemployment took hold of America, cinema attendances began to fall — in that year by a massive 40pc. Attendances would not recover until the late 1930s, and by that time Hollywood had to cope with the strictures of the newly formed League of Decency, which had raised a formidable political lobby and attacked films for their immoral content. From that point on, Hollywood would have to start selling America instead of attacking it.”

That’s all the important stuff.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have other things to research. Like auditory theories related to space kaiju.

Follow me on Twitter: @NasaJimmy

#JimmyFromNASALives

#WeShallOvercome