King Klunk (1933)
** 1/2 (out of 4)
This pleasant Universal cartoon has been forgotten over the decades but it's in fact the first film to spoof RKO's KING KONG so that reason alone gives it some historic importance. In the film, Pooch the Pup takes his girlfriend to the Africa so that they can make a movie about a giant ape. They find the ape, return it to the U.S. and of course it breaks free and steals the girlfriend. The plot to this 9-minute short pretty much follows all the major points in KING KONG and I'm rather surprised how obvious it was as I'm sure there was some sort of legal matter that the studio could have done. With that said, fans of the giant ape will certainly want to check this out just to see how well it does spoof the film. I thought the stuff dealing with the fight between the ape and a dinosaur in the jungle was extremely well done and I won't ruin the ending but the final shot of the ape was perfect. The thing that keeps this short from being a classic is the Pooch character and the fact that he's just not that memorable or funny. There were several attempts at humor but most of them fell flat on their face. Some will probably find some of the humor around the jungle people to be offensive as it's the (for the time) typical black characters and their stereotypes.