"Sigh!" Again Ted and I agree (the world must be coming to an end!). The physics just look wrong to me for that falling Kong being a little wooden figure.

And okay, I know some of you have analyzed the climb up the ESB and identified it as being a stop-motion figure. But -- not having watched it one frame at a time, but having seen KK many times in theatres on a Big Screen -- it still looks to me like someone climbing in "real time," ergo, a guy in an ape suit. I may very well be wrong. But that's how it appears to me.

Rememeber (being redundant again) that a full-sized mechanical bust and hand were used when deemed more practical than using stop-motion. Seems to me, for a shot that far away, an ape-suited actor would be more practical than an animated model, especially when a (presumably) stuffed ape suit was already on set for the Big Fall.

As to that wooden model, I remember seeing a still in Forry's collection of what appeared to be a carved (presumably wooden) model of Kong clinging to the side of Skull Mountain. Makes more sense to me that this figure was a stand-in model used maybe for lighting a scene, rather than one actually used for the drop.