Monster of the Day #83

This sadly never actually happened, but it’s a neat publicity shot.

  • TongoRad

    Nice. I’d say it’s an order of magnitude above ‘neat’, though. Maybe two. I really love the steg in that shot.

  • I’m going to second TongoRad here; that shot’s too cool for school.

  • Rock Baker

    That’s the nice thing about stop motion monsters, they’ll pose for any publicity shot you want from them. I remember publicity stills from Caveman showing the Tyrannosaurus and the Horned Lizard dueling in the jungle!

  • zombiewhacker

    I remember an old issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland where they showed a still frame from “King Kong.” It was the scene where
    Denham’s men fall into the spider pit.

    Apparently, in the original concept of the film, the reason why Denham’s men simply didn’t climb off the log onto the cliff on the opposite side was because they were hemmed in by a Styracosaurus.

    FFOM showed an actual shot of Kong on one cliff, the Styracosaurus on the opposite cliff, and Denham’s men pinned in the middle. Since Willis O’Brien went to trouble of building the dinosaur and (apparently) filming it, I wonder why the styrac footage was never used.

  • Rock Baker

    The story I was told was that Cooper felt the extra dinosaurs and the spider pit sequence distracted away from Kong, and that the scenes were trimmed to keep the focus on the title beast. O’Brien used the styracosaurus in Son of Kong, the existing puppet no doubt kept costs down for the sequel. Word has it the trap-door spider in the cave sequence of The Black Scorpion was one of the models built for the cut spider pit sequence of King Kong.

  • John Campbell

    This is obviously the Carno-steg. The meat eating offshoot of the stegosaurus family.

    It’s the big pointy teeth that give it away!