Do I even need to synopsize the story in this review? I mean, the image of Kong atop the Empire State Building swatting at biplanes in the finale is practically burned into our collective unconscious. There are a gajillion toys of Kong in various poses re-enacting scenes from the film. It's been parodied on The Simpsons, ripped off a zillion times by other movies and if I say "It was beauty killed the beast", most everyone recognizes the quote and its source.

Okay, on the off chance you're not familiar with the story (and if you are, please e-mail me as I'm dying to know what life is like on your home planet), the simple storyline is essentially this: A filmmaking crew led by adventurous director Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) heads to exotic Skull Island with the beautiful Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) in tow to make a film about the legend of Kong. They reach the island, populated by hostile tribes, rampaging dinosaurs, and the titular Big Ape and, after a series of heair-raising adventures in which sailor after sailor meets his doom, they capture Kong, bring him back to New York City, where he proceeds to wreak havoc.

And I should also mention that this film is also one of the greatest movies ever made. If you watch this and don't find it fun, I wouldn't want to know you. If you haven't seen it yet, by all means please buy this dvd and I can assure you that you will not be disappointed. If you have seen the film and you're like me, an afficianado of this, the gold standard of giant monster on the loose pictures, then this dvd is manna from heaven.

For starters, let's begin with the the transfer. This is the best King Kong has ever looked on a small screen (it still doesn't have the peculiar thrill of seeing it on a big screen, where Kong really is twenty feet high) and the print (taken from an archival British source with all of the scenes that were censored by the Hays office in the late 30's still intact and a wonder to behold) is terrific. The official line from Warner Home Video was that they pushed back the original release date for the dvd when this print surfaced (and not so that the video release would coincide with the release of the 2005 remake from Peter Jackson), and my hat goes off to them for going the extra mile in terms of quality.

They also go all out in terms of extras. For starters, there's a commentary track that I'm sad to say is the least impressive extra in the 2-disc set. Sad because the bulk of the commentary is by the legendary animator Ray Harryhausen, who became a filmmaker because, as he put it, "he saw King Kong and was never the same afterwards", and while you'd think he'd be brimming with tales of Kong's animator Willis O'Brien (who gave Harryhausen his first job in the business, as his assistant animator on Mighty Joe Young), and while yeah, he does have a few of those, he is surprisingly kind of dry. He is joined by animator Ken Ralston (who did some of the animation for the original Star Wars movies) and they mainly just say how great the movie is without really getting too deep in the nitty gritty. There are also contributions from director Merian C. Cooper and Fay Wray via the magic of archival audio. Cooper is very funny and seemingly can't utter a sentence without using the expletive "goddamn", so the commentary does perk up a little when they use his audio. Fay Wray's contribution to the track consists of two sentences. It's actually kind of funny how the moderator on the track will introduce Wray and you sit back, expecting to hear something and you get a sentence and that's it.

The extras on disc two, however, are some of the best extra material ever assembled for a dvd. First up is a one-hour documentary made for the Turner Classic Movies cable channel titled "I'm Kong", about director Merian C. Cooper. Seeing the film gives you an idea just how personal a project the film was to Cooper, and how closely he resembles the character of Carl Denham in the movie. This guy was a gung-ho adventurer who filmed wild tigers and stampeding elephants at close range, who filmed a brutal treck up a mountain alongside hardened Persian nomads and was a flying ace in both world wars (he also played the pilot of the plane that shoots down Kong).

And then there is a multi-part documentary titled "RKO Production 601" that details the making of the film in painstaking detail. Made with the considerable participation of Peter Jackson, whose effects crew performs a hands-on re-creation of Willis O'Brien's techniques, we're shown how the models were built, how difficult it was to move these models, how the sets were constructed, how new advances in technology were used to create certain effects shots, and how some earlier projects by Willis O'Brien influenced aspects of Kong's story (such as the ending of the silent classic The Lost World and his never realized project Creation, which is recreated via storyboards, test footage, and a reading of the screen treatment in the documentary).

This documentary runs over two hours and makes you appreciate both the film and the efforts of its makers even more. Every behind the scenes feature documentary should be this good.

As the cherry on the top of the documentary, Peter Jackson and his crew re-create (or re-imagine, in the best sense of the term) the lost scene from King Kong, the "spider pit" sequence. A good portion of the documentary shows how much thought Jackson put into making the sequence, which uses the same techniques as O'Brien used to make this into something really worth watching. It's obvous this wasn't some half-assed venture on Jackson's part, and the final product is a lot of fun to watch.

There is also a segement of O'Brien's test footage for Creation narrated by Ray Harryhausen that, interestingly, resembles certain scenes from King Kong. Warner Home Video knocks this release out of the park, a great dvd for a great movie.

A little footnote: There are several options available from Warner Home Video for you to get your Kong on. There is a basic 2-dvd set that gives you all the goodies mentioned in this review. There's also a "collector's tin" that offers all that plus a replica of the original program book from the Hollywood premiere at Graumann's Chinese Theatre in March of 1933 and five postcard-sized recreations of vintage Kong movie posters. That goes for ten bucks more. For the same price as the collector's tin, you can also buy a box set that includes the 2-disc set of Kong along with its sequel, Son of Kong, as well as the 1949 original version of MIghty Joe Young. But the best bang for your buck (and I hate to plug a chain store in this review, but the bargain is so good you need to know about it) you can get a box set available only at Best Buy for $37.99 -- that's two bucks less than the MSRP of the collector's tin -- that gets you the collector's tin, Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young, along with five more postcards of Kong posters.