Times have changed so much, Terry, with so much info available on the net.....I wasn't able to discover who Willis O'Brien was until I was 14: there was simply no access to this precious documentation [that was easy to obtain, at any rate] in my neck of the woods at the time.

There was---and possibly still is-----an awful lot of ignorance regarding advanced special effects [for that is what these FX were, up until the ' early 80s] and I remember asking an early-20s-something mate how he imagined how the '33 KONG effects were achieved: he honestly assumed a full-scale automated robot had been constructed for the giant ape effects: I showed him photos from the CINEFEX special I had on O'BRIEN, and he was genuinely astonished how so much was achieved in miniature.....I don't think he properly grasped exactly how stop-motion shots were achieved, but this was possibly due to my less-than-academic demonstration.

This same guy slated the KONG '76 effects, however, dubbing it the 'worst movie ever made'. [It's not quite THAT bad in my view].

'the horror..............THE HORROR!'


Cartoon-strip blog here [updated regularly]: