Capeworld Comics

The FORBIDDEN Death Battle Prediction Blog Episode 4

 

Original Fight 2

 

King Kong (King Kong 1933) vs Rhedosaurus (The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms 1953)

 

Battle of the black-and-white stop motion monsters that predate (and inspired) Godzilla! 

 

Both rampage through NYC and die at a famous NYC landmark (The Empire State building for Kong, Coney Island for the Rhedosaurus). Both are the last of their race. Both were taken out of dormancy by acts of man and unleash acts of god in retaliation. Kong chilled on Skull Island until Carl Denham and the crew of the Venture intruded into his domain. The Rhedosaurus was literally chilling in an iceberg until Project Experiment (that’s what it was called) woke him up with a nuclear bomb.

 

No world-shaking powers. No skyscraper-dwarfing sizes. No nothing but two monsters going at it tooth-and-claw.

 

Mammal vs Reptile! Willis O’Brien creation  vs Ray Harryhausen creation!

 

Don’t call it a kaiju fight, because Godzilla was 1954.

 

It’s a giant monster fight!

 

King Kong 

 

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m here tonight to tell you a very strange story — a story so strange that no one will believe it — but, ladies and gentlemen, seeing is believing. And we — my partners and I — have brought back the living proof of our adventure, an adventure in which twelve of our party met horrible death. And now, ladies and gentlemen, before I tell you any more, I’m going to show you the greatest thing your eyes have ever beheld. He was a king and a god in the world he knew, but now he comes to civilization merely a captive — a show to gratify your curiosity. Ladies and gentlemen, look at Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World.”

The big ape himself, and one of pop culture’s most beloved icons. He’s inspired Godzilla, Donkey Kong,  Titano the Super-Ape, and Mighty Joe Young. He had the first monster sequel with Son of Kong, also released in 1933. He cameoed in 1980’s Crazy Climber, making Kong one of the first if not THE first pop culture icon to appear in video games.

 

If you haven’t seen his movie, you’re really missing out. King Kong is the perfect adventure film. It’s about the allure and fragility of dreams during a time when all the corners of the map were filling in. What The King of Elfland’s Daughter is to literature, King Kong is to cinema. And though its themes are heavy, it presents them with guileless ease. It’s a film made to entertain. It’s goal is to get you to leave the theatre feeling like you’ve seen something good. There is a primal purity to King Kong that has allowed it to survive the decades. No one that worked on King Kong is alive today, but the film they created is immortal.

 

King Kong and the Empire State Building:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVeF_E6M12A

 

King Kong Village Attack:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUJAgGE3AtI

 

King Kong vs Giant Dinosaur:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGNQ5vRxNU8

 

Size

 

This was a little tricky to figure out. It’s no secret that Kong’s size is inconsistent throughout the film. Kong is clearly not the same size atop the Empire State Building that he was back on Skull Island. This was because special effects god Willis O’Brien envisioned Kong as being kind of tiny, around 18 feet or so, and he and his crew created sets for Kong with this height in mind. But Meriem C. Cooper wanted a big Kong, around 40 to 50 feet, and used cinematography to make Kong appear larger.

 

Here’s a quote from Cooper that explains the inconsistent size:

 

“I was a great believer in constantly changing Kong’s height to fit the settings and the illusions. He’s different in almost every shot; sometimes he’s only 18 feet tall and sometimes 60 feet or larger. This broke every rule that O’Bie and his animators had ever worked with, but I felt confident that if the scenes moved with excitement and beauty, the audience would accept any height that fitted into the scene. For example, if Kong had only been 18 feet high on the top of the Empire State Building, he would have been lost, like a little bug; I constantly juggled the heights of trees and dozens of other things. The one essential thing was to make the audience enthralled with the character of Kong so that they wouldn’t notice or care that he was 18 feet high or 40 feet, just as long as he fitted the mystery and excitement of the scenes and action.”

 

Kong was like a Transformer or an Eva. How big is Kong? Big. Just big.

 

But for this battle, what size do we give Kong? 18 feet? 60 feet? The giant hand prop used in some scenes with Fay Wray scales to a 70 foot Kong! Well, RKO advertised Kong as being 50 foot in the papers, so I guess that’s as close to official numbers as we’re going to get. 

 

So for this fight, Kong will be considered to be 50 feet, which fittingly enough makes him the same size as Nancy Archer, protagonist of Attack of the 50 ft Woman.

 

Strength

 

–When he raids the Skull Island village, nearly the entire village and crew of the Venture brace against a giant barred door designed by the natives to hold back Kong. It takes some pounding, but Kong eventually breaks through. 

 

NASA shows that on average, a person can push about 1000 Newtons provided they have something at their backs to brace against–which the mob pushing against the door would have since they’re packed together. It’s difficult to count how many were pushing against the door, and you would have to factor in how much force was being exerted by those indirectly pushing on the door by pushing on the ones actually touching the door, but a very conserative estimate would be that thirty people were pushing on the door. This means Kong overcame at least 30,000 Newtons worth of force in addition to what was needed to break through more than 50 foot tall door itself.

 

–Ripped apart a giant dinosaur’s jaw (and then played with it). Some say it’s a T-Rex, and it’s probably meant to be a T-Rex, but Kong is 50 feet at max and a T-Rex is 12-20 feet on average. This dinosaur looked to be slightly bigger than Kong, so no way was it just a normal T-Rex. Besides, everything else on Skull Island was giant sized, even the bugs, so it makes sense that the T-Rex would be giant sized as well. A normal T-Rex had a bite strength of 431,000 psi. Kong overcame this and then some as the dinosaur he fought was more than twice the size of a T-Rex.

 

–Picked up a giant log and dumped the sailors on it into a ravine where in deleted scenes they were attacked by giant insects.

 

–Was shackled with chrome steel (“Don’t be alarmed ladies and gentlemen, those chains are made of chrome steel!”) but broke out when he got pissed enough. But a caveat–though Carl Denham acts like chrome steel is some sort of wonder metal, you don’t add chrome to steel to increase its tensile strength–you add carbon. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the steel Denham used for Kong’s chains was weak. There’s a lot of steels, and a lot of “chrome steels.” Steel can have relatively weak tensile strength. For instance, A36 steel has an ultimate tensile strength of just 500 MPa while maraging steel has an ultimate tensile strength of 2693 MPa! 

 

What steel did Denham use for Kong’s chains? There’s a lot of “chrome” steels.But I think chrome-vanadium-steel is a safe bet. It’s fairly strong for steel but far from the strongest with an ultimate tensile strength of 940 MPa. It’s yield strength, for when it starts to warp and bend, is lower at 620 MPa, but I feel it is more accurate to use ultimate tensile strength for this feat as Kong didn’t slowly bend them until they broke. He snapped them with a single pull.

 

Durability

 

–His fingers were hurt by Jack Driscoll’s knife, but it didn’t seem to do any real damage. It didn’t even seem to draw blood.

 

–Withstood a giant dinosaur biting his arm and then pulled it free of its jaws.

 

–During his rampage in the Skull Island village, the village warriors threw spears at Kong that stuck in him but did no real damage. He just pulled them out and picked up a tree to smack them with.

 

–While obviously not bulletproof given how he died, Kong is bullet resistant. A rifle does nothing to him during his rampage in the Skull Island village. During the Empire State Building scene, he was strafed by machine gun equipped biplanes twelve times before he finally tumbled off the Empire State building. The first four attacks hit him without noticeable effect, though it is possible that some attacks straight-up missed him. On the fifth attack, he started bleeding as the bullets wounded him right above his heart (how poetic). He then starts to move sluggishly as he bleeds out under continued gunfire. The eleventh and twelfth shots make him recoil in pain and seem to open up wounds in his neck. Good thing he was in a G-rated film. Overthise, he would have made the Empire State Building look like an erupting volcano with all the blood.

 

Speed

 

–Swatted a biplane out of the air.These biplanes were Vought O2U Corsairs which have a maximum speed of 167 mph. Though they obviously weren’t going at max speed making turns around Kong, they were still speedy little targets.

 

–Dodged bites from a giant dinosaur.

 

Skill

 

Perhaps Kong’s strongest weapon isn’t his bestial strength but his human-like brain. He’s very intelligent for an animal, and that intelligence allowed audiences to slowly identify with Kong as he transformed from fearsome antagonist to sympathetic victim.

 

–During his village rampage, he picked up a tree and used it as a club. 

 

–During the log scene, Kong realized that Jack Driscoll was hiding from him.

 

–During his fight with the dinosaur, he went for its back, dodged its bites, bit its eyes, grabbed it around the neck so it couldn’t bite him, and attacked its legs. He used tactics to overcome a larger opponent.

 

–Kong knew enough to try and find a high place to nest in when he was trapped in New York. Though this backfired horribly, the same idea kept his lair relatively predator-free back on Skull Island. So it wasn’t a bad idea, just the wrong idea for the environment–which adds to the tragedy of how Kong went out.

 

Rhedosaurus 

 

“You know every time one of those things goes off, I feel as if I was helping to write the first chapter of a new Genesis.”

 

“Let’s hope we don’t find ourselves writing the last chapter of the old one.”

 

1953’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is required viewing for anyone interested in science fiction cinema. You can trace the evolution of the giant monster movie from King Kong to it to Godzilla. In Ray Harryhausen’s biography An Animated Life, he writes:

 

“The task of instilling pathos into a creature that was, after all, an innocent victim of circumstances was something I had set myself from the outset, although I was restrained by the script… The Beast is a poor lost soul brought back to life by man and then destroyed by man. If it sounds familiar, it is. King Kong was a huge influence, as he would be in all the other creatures I would be father to.”

 

The Godzilla connection comes from the plot. Stop me if you heard this one–an ancient dinosaur is woken up by atomic testing. It’s first contact with humanity comes when it sinks a fishing boat. It predominantly lives in the water, but surfaces to rampage through a major metropolitan city. The monster brings sickness with it, but is eventually destroyed  by a scientific invention.

 

It’s not like the connection was something the creators of Godzilla tried to hide. During production, Godzilla was called Kaiteinimanmairu kara Kita Daikaijū or The Giant Monster from 20,000 Miles Under the Sea.

 

Fun fact 1: On how Rhedosaurus got the name RAY-do-saurus, Ray Harryhausen had this to say:

 

“For some reason the creation was called a rhedosaurus, and although I can’t remember where this name came from, I suspect Hal Chester or one of the writers coined it. Over the years, people have suggested that the first two letters relate to the initials of a certain animator. I have no comment.”

 

Fun fact 2: Did you know that originally Rhedosaurus was going to breathe atomic fire? You can even see this on some movie posters. That’s another thing Godzilla owes to Rhedosaurus! Fortunately for Kong though, we aren’t going to give Rhedosaurus an ability that was left on the cutting room floor.

 

Colorized Scenes of the Rhedosaurus:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSZiwug48eo

 

Rhedosaurus attacks NYC:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3iMQPO_G-U

 

Size

 

Fortunately, Rhedosaurus’ size was easier to pin down than Kong’s. During the climax, Rhedosaurus ends up on Coney Island next to the famous Cyclone roller coaster.

 

Can you believe it’s still standing? It’s more than 90 years old!:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7u0ppgpxGg

 

The Cyclone is 85 feet tall, we can see that Rhedosaurus on all fours is far shorter than it’s 85 foot peak. I’d say it was around 30 feet or so. Of course, it would be taller on its hind legs like when it knocked over the lighthouse. But even when it’s on its hind legs during the roller coaster scene, it’s still not anywhere close to the peak of the Cyclone.

 

Height is only one piece of the puzzle though. Rhedosaurus is 200 feet long from head to tail. Kong is taller, but lying on his side only makes a fourth of Rhedosaurus’ length. In terms of raw mass, Rhedosaurus has Kong beat. Its tail might actually be as big as Kong. So in this fight, Kong is basically fighting a table–something shorter but wider than he is.

 

Strength

 

–Flipped over and sank the fishing boat Fortune. An attack on a fishing vessel being the first time the monster goes “loud” is another element Godzilla lifted from Beast.

 

–Knocked over a lighthouse. This might seem very impressive, but the lighthouse seemed to have been made out of concrete. While concrete has excellent compressive strength, its tensile strength is actually rather poor.

 

–Ate Dr. Elson and his diving bell, which may have inspired the end of Godzilla with Dr. Sherizawa diving after Godzilla to kill him with the oxygen destroyer. 

 

–Crushed a car with one stomp. Mechanical car crushers which similarly flatten cars exert around 2,000 psi.

 

–Crashed its way through a building.

 

Durability

 

–A policeman emptied his pistol into Rhedosaurus to no effect.

 

–Several policemen shot Rhedosaurus with rifles. It recoiled in pain and fled, but was virtually unharmed

 

–Had a very durable skull. It was shot in the head with a mounted gun which only caused it to recoil in pain without any real damage. (“His skull..it’s at least eight inches thick…”). After failing to do any harm, the Colonel on the scene stated that it would take a 3 inch shell to get through the skull, which means something like an M1903 artillery gun. 3 inch shells are around 15 pounds by the way, hence why the M1903 was often called a 15-pounder. This durability is, of course, specific to its head.

 

–Survived, but was significantly wounded, by a bazooka to the neck which caused it to roar in pain and bleed all over the streets. This wound would later lead to its death as it gave an opening for a radioactive isotope to be shot inside it. 

.

Speed

 

Rhedosaurus has very little in the way of speed feats. It lumbered through a city like the giant monster archetype that it is.

 

Skill

 

Uh….none. It’s a big dinosaur. It moves exactly like how you think a big dinosaur would move.

 

Disease-ridden Blood

 

The Rhedosaurus comes with a nasty surprise. What saliva is to a komodo dragon, blood is to a rhedosaurus. When it gets wounded by a bazooka to the neck, it flees. Soldiers pursue it by following its blood trail, but they quickly find that they’re too tired to go on. They’ve been infected by prehistoric bacteria kept preserved in the ice just like the rest of the Rhedosaurus (this likely inspired the radiation poisoning Godzilla gave to Tokyo in the original film). 

 

Though the military knows it can kill Rhedosaurus with a bazooka shot or two, doing so would splash blood particles across the city. Burning it with flamethrowers would be even worse as it would send the pathogens into the air through the smoke. But fortunately they came up with a radioactive isotope that would chemically burn Rhedosaurus from the inside out (ouch!) killing it without shedding a drop of blood. The idea of having to come up with a special device to kill the monster completely might have contributed to the oxygen destroyer from Godzilla.

 

The Match-Up

 

Strength

 

Kong has the better strength feats. Both he and Rhedosaurus crash through buildings, but Kong is the only one to snap giant metal chains using just one arm-pull per chain. Rhedosaurus crushed a car, but you only need 2,000 psi for that. Kong ripping up his dinosaur opponent’s jaw is more impressive as a real life T-Rex’s bite strength was 431,000 psi–and Kong’s opponent was larger than a real-life T-Rex. It’s conceivable given the similarities between Kong’s opponent and Rhedosaurus that Rhedosaurus could also have an incredible bite strength, but by that same token it’s also conceivable that Kong could rip its jaw off just like he did in his film.

 

Durability

 

Rhedosaurus takes this category. Kong was eventually overcome by bullets. It took a lot of them, but they eventually got him. Rhedosaurus was never wounded by bullets. It did turn and flee when faced with concentrated rifle fire, so it’s possible that if subjected to the same machine gun barrage as Kong it would go down. But we can’t say that for sure. It’s possible that machine gun fire would only bruise it. It’s 8 inch thick skull is also incredibly durable. As a comparison, the glacis (official term for tank armor) of an M1 Abrams is only 2 inches. But in a fight, Kong would have no reason to attack the skull instead of the neck.

 

Speed

 

Kong takes this one handily. Rhedosaurus has no real speed or agility feats to speak of while Kong does. Kong swatted a biplane, and more salient for this fight, he dodged the bites of an enemy dinosaur.

 

Skill

 

Kong takes this and then some. Kong knows how to fight. He knows how to pick up objects and use them as weapons. He knows how to throw things. He knows how to go for the weak spots. Rhedosaurus is quite simply dumb compared to Kong.

 

Would Kong Catch the Disease?

 

I’m going to have to say probably not, and if he did I don’t think it would work on him fast enough for it to matter. Remember, the disease was prehistoric bacteria. Skull Island is one of those “lost world” type locations inspired by Maple White Land. It’s a time capsule and its very likely that whatever disease Rhedosaurus is carrying Kong has already been exposed to and built an immunity to. Even if the disease is novel, it’s not going to affect a giant super-strong gorilla the same way it did tiny humans. Maybe the disease can make Kong sick, but it wouldn’t take him out instantly and certainly not before the fight is over.

 

The Fight

 

I have to give this one to Kong.

 

Kong has the speed and skill to avoid Rhedosaurus’ bites while getting his own hits in. With his greater strength feats, he’s going to wrestle around Rhedosaurus until he can get the kill in either by tearing out its long, vulnerable throat or ripping up its jaw like it did to dinosaurs back home on Skull Island. His ability to use objects is also going to give Kong a huge advantage. He can throw things to keep Rhedosaurus away or pick up something to use as a club. 

 

If Kong can deal damage to Rhedosaurus at all, then Kong wins. And I think it’s reasonable to expect that he can damage Rhedosaurus. A bazooka round gave Rhedosaurus a giant wound. Can Kong deal damage anywhere close to a bazooka round? I think so. A Bazooka round tears through inches of steel armor, and Kong can snap inches of steel chain. Just look at how he gets his feet loose. He just reaches down and ting! Off goes the chain. Now think of him using both hands to go for Rhedosaurus’ neck. He wouldn’t even have to break through its scales then–just squeeze until it stops moving.

 

In this fight, Kong remains king.