I'm here to tell you a very strange story did you ever hear of the strongest living creature on earth oh yes I remember a legend it was a blood bath article after article hit faster and harder than a strand of bullets from a bip plane since 1933 King Kong's been a cap of cinematic spectacle he's had more faces than a galif Fran Time Lord I mean think about it he's been balloon dropped in to fight Godzilla he's had a heart transplant once he even fought a robot version of himself a Kong of Steel and yet possibly the most ambitious version of Kong came in 2013 when he starred in his own musical as a puppet Global creatures made a name for itself thanks to the Larger than Life Arena show Walking with Dinosaurs but if the reviews for King Kong the musical were any indication their first foray into traditional theater might be their last everything came under Fire the script the music the direction really only one piece of the show emerged from the destruction intacted Kong himself this is a story about an animatronics Empire that unexpectedly decided to make a musical about bringing an iconic movie monster to life about human beings ravenous appetite for spectacle and the value we place in it but above all else this is a story about one giant ass puppet the wonder of the world I have one minute to tell you something I think you'll remember the longest day you live it's about a man named Virgil MCM mrman a few weeks ago he walked into his office as a simple asbest salesman wouldn't you know it he hadn't been at his desk all of one minute until he was picked up by a giant gorilla that's when he suffered the slip and fall after a horrible incident like that calling Morgan and Morgan was a no-brainer with Morgan and Morgan there's no need to visit law offices and sit through long consultations they've taken the injury law process out of the 1930s and have made it so much easier to submit a claim sign contracts and upload documents you can even text your lawyer throughout the entire case whatever texting is whether it's a car accident or a daunting tumble don't overthink it take action to protect your rights and Morgan and Morgan will fight to get the compensation you deserve you can start a claim with the largest injury law firm in eight clicks or less at www. forthepeople.com slwe inthe Wings we're on the 86th floor of the Empire State Village the top of this structure is the highest thing in the world today the New York skyline got a little bit xier on May 1st 1931 with the completion of the Empire State Building the tallest building in the world at the time to Maran C Cooper it represented the perfect spot to end his new movie by the time Cooper found his way into filmm he'd essentially lived eight different lives he was a war pilot a global Explorer a grade A racist in 1929 he started working on a picture Loosely based on the adventures of his equally problematic friend William Douglas Burton who had recently brought three rare kodo dragons from Indonesia to the Bronx Zoo New York's famous Bronx Zoo boasts a pair of honest to goodness dragons huge 10-ft lizard monsters from Indonesia's Isle of Komodo where the only dragons in this modern world exist the dinosaur like lizards dazzled audiences for a grand total of a few weeks because they quickly died in captivity but even during their few weeks in the spotlight the live lizards were supposedly overshadowed by a stuffed gorilla very few people in North America had ever seen one so to a New Yorker in the 1920s seeing a gorilla in person was like seeing a unicorn when Mary and C Cooper joined RKO radio pictures he spent his free time conceptualizing a movie where he'd catch a real life Gorilla take it to kodo and make it actually fight one of these lizards cuz that just smells of box office gold the gorilla's name would be Kong for as long as humans have been curious someone's always been there to capitalize on it heck PT Barnum once charged a dime to see the Fiji mermaid which was actually just a monkey and a fish sewn together this curiosity still persists more than a century later that being said two dead animals and a bit of string really don't draw like they used to in 2006 a group of producers fed up with how boring family entertainment was approached one of Australia's richest men Jerry Ryan for $150,000 the reason to build 20 robotic dinosaurs the producers in partnership with the BBC wanted to turn the documentary series Walking with Dinosaurs into a theatrical Extravaganza so big it needed an entire Arena to house it Ryan who' never done anything in the live entertainment world before joined up with the production not only as a majority investor but as a fullon co-producer with only a little over a year to make the dinosaurs Ryan recruited animatronics engine Sunny tilders to lead the team tilders previously created puppets for Blockbuster films like Star Wars Revenge of the Sith and he even worked with the Jim Hansen company but this show was an entirely different Beast unlike puppets made for a film set the puppets in Walking with Dinosaurs needed to actually come to life in front of 10,000 people without any camera track for his first prototype tiers tried to build a T-Rex called M using 50 $50,000 and a cherry picker left it didn't really work dissatisfied tilders along with 50 artists and technicians came together with a complex Fusion of engineering mechanics and puppetry to remarkably create over 10 species of dinosaurs in less than a year and would don't you know it just like with burden's kodo Dragons or PT Barnum's monkey fish mermaid curious audiences flocked to witness the spectacle of real life-sized dinosaurs resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars of Revenue the show grew faster than anyone could have ever expected especially Jerry Ryan in addition to being the majority owner of dinosaurs Ryan's shocking wealth bought him wineries resorts in online bike store and it even bought him a national basketball team the unexpected success of Walking with Dinosaurs led to a major managerial headache for Ryan who didn't have the bandwidth to oversee yet another company still he saw value in what they created and in 2008 he made a bold proposition to a woman named Carmen pavlovich as a former executive producer for Andrew Lloyd Weber's really useful group pavlovich was used to working with Dinosaurs but the idea of only creating shows about animatronic creatures didn't exactly appeal to her that said she did Tell Ryan that she would run the company on a few conditions in addition to Walking with Dinosaurs she wanted Global creatures to also produce traditional theater and for their first musical it needed to be based on her brother's favorite film King Kong during the height of the Great Depression Mary and Cooper faced a frustrating realization RKO Studios was on the brink of financial ruin there was no way they would pay for him to take a real gorilla to Komodo however after seeing a few test shots for a scrapped film called Creation in which a group of explorers encounter dinosaurs on this Mysterious Island Cooper made a realization the way to save the Kong project was with stop motion animation Creations uh Creator Willis O'Brien mastered this technique with stop motion Cooper could have a model gorilla fight some of O'Brien's dinosaur models left over from creation all from the comfort of the studio and just like that Kong went from a 12-ft gorilla to an 18t monster big enough to fight a T-Rex Marcel Delgado O'Brien's longtime collaborator created the actual model of Kong used in the movie now to this point stop motion models were traditionally made of clay which made them extremely difficult to adjust without the movements looking fake delgado's remedy for the King Kong model was to First build an aluminum skeleton fill it with rubber and then cover it with a latex skin and rabbit fur much like O'Brien and Delgado struggled to make Kong look real on film back in 1933 animatronics artist Sunny tilders struggled to make Kong look real on AIC iCal stage 70 years later we chose it Without Really knowing how complex it was ever going to be it seemed in my mind quite easy puppet little just store work but then the realization that it's actually more than just about a puppet for me more than just about a creature and this whole story connected to it the puppet not only needed to demonstrate strength and elicit fear but also show vulnerability the 2005 King Kong remake pulled off this blend of a aggression and human connection thanks to Sunny tiers arch nemesis CGI tiers once referred to CGI as the enemy of his art it's essentially what forced him out of the film industry through the entire process of Walking with Dinosaurs tilders made it a point to make hyperrealistic puppets that could never be matched by mere pixel trickery his rivalry with CGI inevitably bled into Kong tiers wanted to create a puppet more realistic than Peter Jackson's computer generated Kong and he wanted it to be entirely animatronic tilders and creature technology experimented with different methods to make the Kong puppet freestanding they even gave the T-Rex cherrypicker method another shot it still didn't work after countless prototypes the musical's director Daniel krer essentially told tiers he was doing it all wrong saying the theater is not the place for realism shows like The Lion King and warhorse push the boundaries on how puppets could help tell a story and the art form itself started to shift away from the traditional into the abstract part of what made them Stand Out was how they took inspiration from burau a classic form of Japanese puppetry where the audience could see the puppeteers now this went against everything Sunny tilders tried to achieve in walking with dinosaurs in that show he wanted everything from the mechanics to the puppeteers hidden from the audience Kramer hated this idea he felt it took away from Kong's power after countless debates one of which nearly ended with tiers leaving the project the two ultimately decided to embrace burau and have a group of puppeteers called the King's Men control Kong on stage moving his limbs by pulling different cables in plain view of the audience I was the right elbow of King Kong hi my name is David DJ so I would have to pull there was somebody who would be the wrist line and then another person right underneath um that would manually hold be underneath his palm and lift his palm in order for him to do certain parts I remember them pulling the lines out as hard as I could literally laying on the floor and watch walking around to make sure he's in the right position but I'd have to climb up to his shoulder on the timing i' jump off and then his shoot his arm up and then you know hit the floor right away they a little over maybe 35 ft in the air I would jump from in addition to being badasses the King's Men also added to the double vision of both the creatures life and the human beings creating the illusion much like Delgado stop motion Kong tilters started with the skeleton only this time instead of aluminum poles he used a steel space frame for Kong's skull they used a carbon fiber shell filled it with two hydraulic cylinders and 15 individual Motors that worked to move the face muscles fun fact Nasa uses those same type of Motors in Kong's face to steer the Mars rovers he was filled out with literally like um Sachs with like Styrofoam beads in him so in in essence he's probably the world's biggest Beanie Baby hi my name is John H and I was the voice of King Kong and one of the voodoo puppeteers taking all this into account puppet Kong was surprisingly lighter than he looked for the arms and the legs creature technology opted to use high pressure inflatable tubes the tubes not only made it easier for the King's Men to maneuver they also ensured that the set wouldn't be destroyed if an appendage went rogue but they still had to solve the problem of how to physically move Kong around the stage mixing new technology with old art forms they hung the puppet from a giant Gantry crane via two industrial winches then using automated Motors on a trolley in the ceiling they could physically lift and move him around the stage this essentially turned King Kong into a 2,000lb marionette all this Tech while definitely impressive meant nothing to Sunny tilters if the audience didn't believe the puppet in front of them was actually alive it wasn't enough for the puppet to just wave its arms and move around it needed to breathe dogado had the same Epiphany in 1932 when building the model for the movie and installed an inflatable bladder inside the the 18-in model to create the illusion that Kong was breathing a bigger model required a bigger solution and the team from the musical swapped out the inflatable bladder for inflatable airbags that literally breathed life into the creature you could hear all of us sort of collectively inhale and exhale because then we could all hear and collectively feel that and transfer that back into the puppet hi there my name is is James wi Duncan I was one of the animatronic swings and cover voice for King Kong after 4 years and two full-size prototypes creature technology and Global creatures finally unveiled a King Kong vastly different from the hyper realistic version tilders envisioned at the start this looked unlike any other Kong that had come before it this wasn't a rabbit for model or an electronic Kaiju this Kong was a moving sculpture sure I can't sit some near the screen it hurts my eyes in 1933 RKO radio pictures went into receivership in a final attempt to Stave off bankruptcy only a 3-year-old Studio RKO suffered from flop after flop alongside decreased theater attendance from the Great Depression they really needed a hit and they needed one fast with nothing to lose RKO Chief David OS selnik pumped extra time and money into the Studio's last big swing King Kong the movie opened at a perilous time for the United States the entire Financial system was collapsing nearly 13 million people were out of work and hundreds of thousands of families were evicted from their homes Just 4 days after the King Kong Premiere President Franklin D Roosevelt forced a bank holiday to stop people from pulling all their money out and speeding up the collapse of these Banks and yet remarkably in those same four days King Kong became a commercial smash it brought in $90,000 and somehow turned RKO into one of Hollywood's major Studios reviews noted that while the actual story and characters of King Kong left a lot to be desired the visuals really made the movie work still from an audience standpoint the Larger than Life Adventure story offered a refuge from reality the movie starts with Ando being pulled from a breadline for a reason for just 10 cents they too could escape the turmoil of real life and be transported to a world of spectacle 80 years later in June of 2013 Global creatures needed their first big swing into traditional theater to be a massive hit if they they wanted to be viewed as more than just a robot dinosaur company Kong was slated to be one of the biggest musicals ever staged in Australia pavlovich had even bigger dreams for him she hoped that with good enough reviews and ticket sales she could take the eighth wonder of the world to New York City when King Kong the musical finally opened in Melbourne Australia a majority of reviews mirrored 1933 with Kong's technical elements reigning Supreme however this time around the critics were much more ruthless in how they shot down everything else it seems that by focusing so much time on the creation of the actual puppet the other elements of the musical were overshadowed they spent 2 years developing the puppet before they even started writing a script Additionally the music relied on a bold mix of modernized 1930s Broadway hits then also songs from artists like justice The Avalanches and Sarah M llin the approach while definitely daring left critics and audiences confused about what tone the show was going for leaning into a beautiful traditional Musical on one end and this sexy avantgard Extravaganza on the other but if the tech elements and spectacle were enough to save the original movie maybe the same could happen for the show regardless pavich declared that King Kong the musical would conquer Broadway within the next year that is if they could find a theater believe it or not finding a theater that can house a 20ft puppet is a surprisingly tall order the original plan to move into the Foxwoods theater by December of 2014 ultimately fell through due to an entire restructuring of the creative team and slight hesitations about unfair comparisons to the Foxwoods last 10 the $75 million disaster Spider-Man turn off the dark years passed creative team members came creative team members went eventually any Prospect of Kong actually making it to Broadway looked Grim one afternoon in Melbourne pavlovich went up to Ryan and told him Jerry if you want out just say it I'm just worried about how long this is all taking the multi millionaire responded I'll just say nine words to You Carmen that my mother always said to me don't give up don't give up don't give up Ryan's Hope encouraged pavlovich to continue the fight finally in May of 2017 it was announced that King Kong the musical would Voyage to the Broadway Theater in New York in the decade since his first $150,000 investment with Walking with Dinosaurs Jerry Ryan continued to pour an ungodly endless stream of money into his passions he paid $225,000 for a Melbourne Cup winning racehorse pumped $12 million a year into a worldclass tour to front cycling team and he even paid $16 million for the Redevelopment of this high-end Winery but if you're like me at this point you're probably wondering where did all of this money come from was he connected to the mafia was he an ultra successful hedge fund manager was he the descendant of a Royal bloodline no Jerry Ryan became a multi-millionaire thanks to two words camper trailers Jerry Ryan founded the camper manufacturer jco in 1975 with a $110,000 line loan by 2016 The company generated over $1.5 billion in Revenue Ryan was once again ready to place another colossal bet on live entertainment AS Global creatures set out to stage four high-profile shows on three different continents at the same time this included musical versions of King Kong and Mulan Rouge in all the Endeavor was expected to cost $75 million with Kong alone taking $3 36.5 million of the pot as Ryan put it in an interview with the New York Times I'm a long-term investor I know this is risky but the higher the returns the riskier it is but really the sheer size of King Kong the musical exhilarated the show's new American producer Roy Ferman who told reporter Michael pson there's an audience for big scale Productions something people can't see at home if Done Right Spider-Man was instructive even with all its problems it was the third highest grossing show when it was running outfitted with an entirely new creative team and a new cast The King Kong that set up in the Broadway Theater was completely different from the show in Australia the musical continued to hit roadblock after roadblock on the jump to New York Martian Norman replacement for the original writer Craig Lucas churned through nine different drafts until admitting she couldn't write a script for a musical where the lead character doesn't speak or sing there the Beast and here the beauty she has lived through an experience no other woman ever dreamed of and she was saved from the very grasp of [Music] Kong the portrayal of Kong as a character and his connection to Ando has always been difficult to describe and even harder to portray on screen for as long as Kong existed the story's racial sexist and even beastial undertones have been scrutinized as writer sah Nadia McDonald puts it since Cooper brought him to the screen Kong has been an enduring symbol for white Americans imagined fears of black male sexuality the long troubling fear of the other at the heart of King Kong is undeniable and only adds to the complexity of how each and daro reacts to him a relationship that more often than not ends with each white androw screaming in Terror as she waits to be rescued from the Beast King Kong on Broadway attempted to break away from this tradition by casting christiani pittz as the first black andera a decision that once again changed the relationship McDonald Dives deeper into this relationship this story and the complexities of Broadway casting a black and Darrow in an article that's Linked In the description whereas the 2005 movie had the advantage of CGI to bring this relationship to life tiers didn't have that same luxury it wasn't enough to just swing Kong from one end of the stage to the other he needed to really make a true connection with an in order to bring the hulking mask of Steel and foam to life tilders brought back the same Tech he used for the brochi asaurus in Walking With Dinosaurs the voodoo ring Kong's finer details were controlled by a group of three puppeteers in a special room that was up on the mezzan I had two joysticks and one of them kind of controlled his his neck and one of them controlled his head so if I moved the controls together I you know I would be the one that kind of made him look look where he needed to go so I really was um in control of where he was focused on and then on the other side of you is the face ring uh that was much more like The Walking with Dinosaurs one that just had a different configuration that had connected to all the servos in his face that allowed you to move his eyebrows his forehead his nostrils could flare he had a snarl on either side and at the same time I had a microphone and I was uh giving him a live voice every night but I can I can kind of go through some [Music] stuff and we found it was actually really good that the face operator was in charge of opening the mouth because trying to open the mouth as you physically roed into the microphone was a lot of work but also the vocoder had a eighth of a second delay if you were in the center and said ah the person next to you would uh would push by the time they sort of heard you and responded was the really good timing for about Kong to open his mouth and respond to it the operator of the shoulder rig also carried the huge responsibility of communicating and coordinating with the 10 puppeteers on stage now renamed the king's company alongside the addition of two women the technology proved to be the last touch the King Kong puppet really needed to truly come to life however at the end of the day he was a 2,000lb puppet with a lot of intricate machinery and technology and what's the one thing we all know machinery and technology is really good at malfunctioning Wi-Fi signals from cell phones in the audience occasionally interrupted Kong's com signal meaning that he couldn't received the signal from the voodoo Booth leaving him motionless additionally Kong was filled with oil to keep all the Pistons running smoothly which required a technician to watch the rising oil temperature like a nuclear reactor if the levels ever got too hot they'd have to stop and wait for him to cool down he had these shoulder cables that could lift him up into like a standing position I had a very small margin of error to make sure that I didn't clip his head on those cables cuz if I did it would instantaneously cut him and then the styrofoam that was kind of filling out his face would just poof out onto onto stage and it would look like all of a sudden it was snowing on stage for some strange reason um it may have happened once or twice a lot changed on King Kong the musical's journey to New York City but the pupp it didn't the only new thing about him was an oil change producers hoped that the new cast led by Cristiani pittz the new script by Jack Thorne New Direction by Drew mcone and new music by an equally as new composer named Eddie perfect would be enough to elevate the actual content of the show to the Mythic Heights of its giant puppet and hopefully help it recoup that $ 36.5 million investment King Kong the musical officially opened on November 8th 2018 and within no time the airplanes started circling again the reviews were merciless the New York Post called it a gorilla size mess and the Observer declared it was a $35 million crime against puppets in a move that shocked and angered many in the Broadway industry even those not directly attached to Kong the New York Times didn't even bother to write an official review opting instead for a dialogue driven piece where critics Ben Brantley and Jesse Green tried to talk each other into hating the show with really inaccessible in jokes even though the show received disastrous reviews it still brought in $1 million the following week because everybody wanted to see the puppet the only shot for the show's survival was by selling the spectacle King Kong the musical started an aggressive marketing campaign specifically focused on showing off the giant puppet to Taurus in hopes of making it to the Tony Awards in June Kong was everywhere at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on the Steven colar show in elaborate television ads heck James cordon's parents even wrote him at one point for the better part of 7 months Kong fought to stay alive and repeatedly pulled in over $800,000 a week miraculously the show made it to the Tony Awards but it was too little too late you see something that producer Roy Ferman forgot to factor in with his statement about Spider-Man turn off the dark was that just because the show was making all that money that didn't mean it was profitable yes Spider-Man turn off the dart constantly pulled in $1 million a week but it also cost 1 milon ion a week to Stage meaning that more often than not the show made no money that same thing happened to King Kong yes on paper it looked like a commercial smash but with running costs over $700,000 a week any possibility of recouping that 36.5 million investment looked less and less likely with ticket sales coming in $100,000 under running costs and with no noticeable bump in attendance after the T Awards producers announced the show would close 2 weeks later King Kong the musical closed on Broadway on August 18th 2019 King Kong wasn't supposed to climb the Empire State Building the original plan was to send him up the Chrysler Building the tallest building in the world at that time and have him get struck by lightning then the empire State Building took the title and plans changed filmmaker maryan C Cooper subscribed to the dominating showman mindset bigger was better and it didn't get much bigger than an 18t tall gorilla climbing the Empire State Building and yet while the spectacle of Kong climbing the world's tallest building and fighting the dinosaurs was a great way to capture people's attention it wasn't the reason they kept coming back over and over again or why the movie is still relevant 90 years later Broadway is no stranger to spectacle hell the entire industry was built on it but in musical can't survive on spectacle alone it's happened time and time again a big budget show arrives on Broadway audiences are initially intrigued and then a few months later nobody gives a because they aren't emotionally moved one month before King Kong closed Global creatures second crack at Broad way opened at the AL herfeld theater much like Kong Mulan Rouge packed its fair share of spectacle it had an 18t tall puppet a towering red Windmill and an entire score of pop songs now on paper that show should have been destroyed by the critics but instead it was a New York Times critics pick it won the best musical Tony Award and it recouped its investment 3 years later so why did Mulan rou succeed but King Kong didn't it's the same reason that King Kong succeeded in 1933 but the rushed sequel released that same year did not the spectacle made audiences curious but everything else made them care the King Kong puppet was a technological Marvel that absolutely deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as other iconic set pieces is I mean heck it won its own Tony Award but its steel skeleton and fiberglass shoulders were never going to be strong enough to carry the weight of the entire show in the end it really wasn't the critics who killed King Kong the musical it was beauty that killed the Beast the only thing more difficult to make than a giant 20ft puppet is a fullsize chandelier that has to crash down on an audience without killing anyone click on this video to hear the incredible story of what went into making the iconic Phantom Chandelier
