Godzilla wins! On the other hand, in the USA & England, for instance, Kong wins!”Įven if this is the myth’s origin, but it doesn’t fully explain the story. “Spacemen lets you in on a secret: 2 endings have been filmed & if you see King Kong vs. Its final paragraph is ground zero for the King Kong vs. It’s filled with breathless exclamations, nitpicks about continuity, and occasional digressions into monster film history. Instead, it’s more like a Wikipedia synopsis written by an overexcited kaiju fan.
Godzilla. It’s not quite a feature on the making of the movie there are no interviews with any of its creators. A story in 1963’s Spacemen #7 called “Return of Kong!” describes the events of King Kong vs. So where did the myth about multiple endings come from? The first known mention of it comes in an issue of Spacemen, a sci-fi magazine owned by Warren Publishing. Why would it? Even if you were operating under the assumption that American audiences wanted to see “their” monster win, Kong already won in the Japanese version. It did not change the outcome of Kong and Godzilla’s final battle, though. Godzilla included new material, and even threw in some stock footage from other Toho projects to beef up the monster drama. Then he spliced these new sequences into the Japanese version, shot by director Ishiro Honda.īeck’s English-language King Kong vs. journalists and scientists reporting on Kong and Godzilla’s fight. A small cast of English-speaking actors shot insert scenes explaining and contextualizing the action in this case, they mostly played U.S.
Godzilla.Īs part of the deal, Toho gave Beck the rights to make an English-language version of the movie - which he did, using the same basic structure as the Americanization of the original Godzilla. Beck turned around and sold the idea to Toho, who then used that premise as the basis for King Kong vs. Godzilla concept from American producer John Beck, who bought original King Kong stop-motion animator Willis O’Brien’s pitch for a King Kong vs. Toho, the Japanese film studio that created Godzilla in 1954, acquired the rights to the Kong vs.
At best, it was a draw.Įven if there aren’t two different outcomes to the final fight, there are two different cuts of King Kong vs.
Although Godzilla’s final fate is ambiguous, the fight is not: Godzilla didn’t win, even though this is the Japanese cut of the film.