World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island by Weta Workshop



I recently picked up three King Kong books as part of the King Kong fever sweeping my condo. Two are tie-ins to Peter Jackson’s movie, the other is an official sequel to the original 1933 movie. I'll get around to reviewing all three, but here's my thoughts on the best of them.



World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island is built largely around the concept art Peter Jackson had made for his movie, with supplementary text written as if Skull Island were a real place. According to the introduction, after the events of the movie Carl Denham lead a number of expeditions back to Skull Island to catalog the wildlife there. However the island was sinking, and by 1948 it was completely gone. This is both a nice nod to Son of Kong (1933) and a pretty good explanation of why wildlife is so dense on the island -- it's shrinking.

The art is beautiful, and creature designs are uniformly clever. As per usual with these fake non-fiction books the text and pictures aren't entirely consistent, and there are some strange quirks of organization, but those are small quibbles when you're talking about a book this gorgeous.

It will be interesting to see how many of these creatures will appear in the movie. Peter Jackson says that only a "handful" will make it to screen. The Brontosaurus (I think the archaic name is on purpose), V. Rex (like a T. Rex, but meaner), and the raptors are seen in the trailers, as well as the Piranhadon (the snake/fish thing swimming in the water). I'm guessing that Jackson won't give up the opportunity to have as many different creatures as possible in the crevice sequence. The video game based on the movie features the Terapusmordax (a bat/pterodactyl), and Toy Biz has a toy of a Foetodon (a land crocodile).

We'll definitely have a Peter Jackson cameo in the new film, probably with him as a pilot, but the book opens another interesting cameo possibility. On page 184 you can see the "Sumatran Rat Monkey" that appeared at the beginning of Dead-Alive. If you remember that movie, the rat monkey was, despite its name, captured on Skull Island.

Oh, and do you want to go to Skull Island? According to this book it's right here:



Posted: Sun - November 27, 2005 at      

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