King Kong, and the most expensive fanfilm of all time?

During my Christmas vacation, I happened to wander into a music and video store and notice, in its bin of DVDs discounted in advance of getting them out of the store, a copy of the two-disc release of the 1933 King Kong. Taking advantage of the discount at hand by passing up any chance to search out a greater one, I bought the movie. I had seen the original King Kong before, but years ago, and in rewatching it I found the movie immensely entertaining. It's endlessly repeated nowadays that the movie's classic status comes in large part from the eponymous giant ape himself, brought to galvanic life through Willis O'Brien's stop-motion animation, and I wouldn't disagree with that. (We can probably all be glad that he saved producer Merian C. Cooper from having to develop his idea of a movie about a giant ape using his first idea, by taking gorillas from Africa and sending them east to fight Komodo dragons.) One thought I did have, though, was that there's been smoother stop-motion animation since: the snippets of footage in the extras of Mighty Joe Young, produced about fifteen years after King Kong by some of the same people who made the original movie, were illustrative that way. (This may, of course, just be my way of sidestepping that familiar snobbery about modern special effects methods.) Still, the effects do the most that might be said of any movie, and transcend their limitations.
( The humans and the fanfilm )