In our last installment, we examined the great and glorious legend of the true grandfather of all Hollywood Monkeys, King Kong. This week we take a look at the other big ape of classic hollywood, The Mighty Joe Young (1949). I'm going to be honest here... THIS FILM IS TERRIBLE!!!

      It is essentially an attempt by RKO Pictures to do a King Kong remake without bothering to obtain the original's rights from Universal. In addition the plot is even more lame than the shoddy "special effects". Imagine if the Rat Pack rewrote King Kong and stuck it in post-war Hollywood. This is what you get. The fact that anyone liked this movie, and that Disney is even bothering to do a remake of it this year can be contributed completely to its star and title character Joe Young.

      You may remember Young, whose real name is Derril Asheantagolu-Vieers, a native of the Belgian Congo and former property of King Leopold II of Belgium, as the real life 40 -foot-tall gorilla who was rumored to have been cast as the title role of King Kong in 1933. Creative difficulties drove him from the set of that seminal Big Monkey film, and out of Hollywood for over a decade. The war years saw him defending his homeland single-handedly from an attempted Nazi occupation in one of the great unsung victories of the Second World War, and the subsequent independence of his home allowed him the freedom to return to his greatest love - ACTING.

      After accepting the role of JoeYoung, on the condition that no poop of any variety would be thrown, he recreated the character of Kong as he would have played him, and, despite a ridiculous plot, horrific dialogue, and terrified costars, he succeeded. Due to the international panic that the revelation of his true existence would have caused, the myth was created that "special effects" were responsible for his life-like appearance and amazing interaction with "real" actors. Audiences still were amazed by the power and pathos of his performance.

      Sadly Derill, as he was known to his friends, never recreated the sensation of his film debut, and retired to the newly created nation of Zaire. There he founded a jungle community for outcast freaks of nature and Hollywood rebels. Rumors have it that Marlon Brando based his Apocalypse Now character Kurtz on Derill Asheantagolu-Vieers, both in girth and in demeanor, having lived in that outcast community for several years in the late 1960s.