"Lost" Styracosaurus Sequence Re: See Recreation of Kong Spider Pit Sequence

["Richard W. Travsky" <rtravsky@uwyo.edu>]

On Tue, 27 Dec 2005 Danvarner@aol.com wrote:
> Here's a clip of Peter  Jackson's recreation (NOT restoration) of the 1933
> Kong "spider-pit" sequence  bookended by scenes from the real film. I suspect
> the specs for the  Styracosaurus head came directly from Barnum Brown. It's one
> of the earliest  restorations done of this dinosaur. Jackson's model's head
> was scanned from the  original Marcel Delgado creation which Jackson now owns.

They actually xrayed the puppet to see what the armature looked like and 
set about duplicating it as best as they could. It was an exercise in 70 
year old movie technology...

> Of course the sequence  is much better on the DVD which you should get. I'm
> fairly certain that this is  legal as AOL is running other "youtube" clips, too.
> DV
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=1jp2VW5QWpk&search=king%20kong

The DVD goes into this in gory detail. They worked from the Kong script 
and tried to film it as closely as possible and hopefully in the same
spirit as the original, even going so far as to degrade the quality of
the enactment and make filler music. It's really creepy and has a good 
sense of panic. I don't believe the stated reason of Cooper's that it
"stopped" the movie, it's so creepy it may well have been too much
for those 1933 audiences.

I'd often wondered about the styracosaurus bit. I'd come across a coupla
mentions but not much more. The talking heads on the DVD feel the
sequence was filmed as there exist a couple of stills that would seem
to indicate it was. One of the stills is at

 http://www2.netdoor.com/~campbab/kong/kong11.jpg

To me, tho, it looks more like a promo composited shot. What really 
implies the sequence was filmed, tho, is that in the regular footage of 
the crew running away, they are looking behind them as if fleeing 
something. With the styracosaurus cut out, that never made much sense.