24. Kong Was Inspired By A Pre-Jurassic Lost World
The second daddy of the great ape was Willis O'Brien - the pioneer of stop-motion animation who first brought prehistoric reptiles (somewhat jerkily) to life. O'Brien animated The Lost World (1925), an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel about an isolated South American region where flora and fauna stayed the same for hundreds of thousands of years. It anticipated the great lizards and beasties that would populate Kong's Skull Island, and featured a missing-link apeman played by an actor in a furry suit. But the brontosaurus brought back to London was O'Brien's stop-motion creation; like Kong, his escape in the civilised world causes havoc and he knocks down Tower Bridge (mistaken by the movie's American makers for London Bridge).