The New Creature Canon: The Monsters of The Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” Specials

There’s been plenty of harping on this webzone about the importance of gateway media when it comes to monster stuff especially—few of us would ever think to be interested in this stuff if not for something else, likely with a broader reach, introducing us to it. Much of the time, that gateway comes from a writer or artist calling back to something that was important to them, sharing that love across the years to another generation, and making the younger and less familiar members of the audience curious about what those things are. That could be a more straightforward informative work, or a homage with more modern sensibilities, or an affectionate parody. Let’s talk about that third one.

Plenty of kids watched The Simpsons, and it became a part of us all by pitching plenty of jokes at our younger level while also throwing in many adult-oriented ones that we could look back on and appreciate later. That’s especially true for reference-based jokes—there’s a number of direct nods to movie and television especially, with full scenes from Citizen Kane and The Godfather recreated on a regular basis (and even more hardcore callbacks to things like William Friedkin’s Sorcerer), down to the shot composition and staging. There’s so many that fans would be able to stitch together those jokes to make passing facsimiles of the movies themselves. This is a perfect example of gateway media: many people were probably introduced to these things through The Simpsons, and sometimes don’t even know it until they decide to check out the source material themselves.

This is especially true for the show’s annual Treehouse of Horror Halloween specials, a staple since the second season in 1990, each consisting of a collection of short segments that are more often than not directly lifted from famous horror stories. The Treehouse specials are an important venue not just for the writers and animators to shove in even more parodies, but also to allow them to go outside the (relatively) grounded nature of the show and really up the wackiness, and especially up the bloodshed in a winkingly grotesque manner—I can imagine getting to reshape and slaughter this series’ beloved cast over and over again is really fun for the people behind the scenes. Of course, if they’re doing parodies of scary stories, that’s going to include a fair share of classic monster stories as well (while the Treehouse segments would include more contemporary references, a good chunk of them from the first ten or so years were based on decades-old standards)—so, basically, the same things I write about on here. I mean, the mascots of these episodes are Kang and Kodos, a pair of classic Bug-Eyed Monsters that are a perfect Simpsons distillation of pulp Sci-Fi from the forties and fifties, so it’s clear that monster stuff is close to the hearts of the crew. For this post, I’ve singled out three segments from three different Treehouse of Horror episodes, all of which demonstrate how well-observed and inventive The Simpsons‘ comedy recreations of monster media could be.

Ink & Pain: The King Kong Show

<Insert Invasion of the Body Snatchers reference here>

Considering that I wrote about Godzilla’s first failure of a foray into animated television, it only makes sense that I should do the same for his predecessor/rival, who managed to land a cartoon a decade before. But The King Kong Show, which aired 26 episodes from 1966-1969, is notable in a historical sense for a few reasons, some of which connect it to Godzilla almost directly. For one, this series was produced by Videocraft, the original name for Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass’ production company (back when they really only had Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to their name), in collaboration with Toei Animation in Japan, making this the first time an American cartoon was outsourced there. More importantly to kaiju fans, though, Rankin and Bass got the rights to make both a King Kong cartoon AND a movie, the latter of which they gave to Toho (who had produced King Kong vs. Godzilla a few years earlier), leading to both Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster (based on a rejected script) and King Kong Escapes, which is technically based on this series. There’s a lot of other interesting names attached this cartoon as well, including some prominent anime directors producing the shows, and American artists like Mad Magazine’s Jack Davis providing the designs (although I find it amusing that most sources indicate that Davis only designed “angry Kong”), and you should check out articles like this one and this one to learn more about that stuff, because you’re probably not going to get the idea that this show has any significance or that real talent was behind it from reading the rest of this post.

Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration—while this does share some style and format qualities with the other sixties cartoon I’ve covered, The Beatles (which it aired contemporaneously with, and they were sometimes even advertised side-by-side), those qualities actually do it some favours every once in a while. The King Kong Show exists in a strange liminal realm, between American and Japanese cartoons of the time, and between the limitations of sixties cartoons and the somehow even more strict limitations of seventies cartoons, and for that reason alone it’s actually kind of fascinating.

The New Creature Canon: The Mighty Kong (1998)

Sometimes, even the logical explanation for something doesn’t seem enough—case in point, The Mighty Kong, an animated family musical film released direct to video in the late nineties, in the waning days of the VHS glut I wrote about in another post. I don’t remember ever seeing this video on store shelves around the time, but at some point during the Internet age I stumbled upon it and learned that it was the “cartoon version of King Kong that has a happy ending”, and that was about the tall and short of my knowledge. That description reminded me of the massively hacked up 1930 movie version of Moby Dick , where Ahab is a hero with a love interest and an evil brother, that a friend told me about. Co-distributed by Warner Bros. (who, many years later, would distribute a bigger King Kong reboot, and will be providing us with the long-awaited new version of King Kong vs. Godzilla) and a company that went out of business a year after this released, the basic idea here would be to make a watered-down family-friendly version of the Kong story (a movie that was beloved by children for decades because it was not family-friendly), and because people are familiar with it, they’ll use it as an electric babysitter for their dumdum kids. On paper, that makes some kind of mercenary business sense—but the actual product raises even more questions. For starters, considering the obvious cash-in nature of this thing, which is an officially licensed version of the movie complete with all the proper character names and truncated but mostly accurate recreation of the original plot, why did they spend all the money necessary to not only get Dudley Moore on as a marquee voice, but also hired the Sherman Brothers (of Mary Poppins and a bunch of other classics) to write the songs? It’s almost as if they were serious about this project—but I can tell, after watching it, that they were most certainly not.

The New Creature Canon: King Kong 2: Ikari no Megaton Punch

Back in the King of the Monsters entry, I lamented the paltry number of giant monster games made over the years, and also how few of them are truly exceptional in any way. The closest thing to a generally no-caveats success in this category probably was Peter Jackson’s King Kong, the tie-in game to 2005’s Kong remake: maybe it’s just because it was one of the more polished releases around the time the Xbox 360 debuted, or maybe the novelty of splitting gameplay between the first-person shooter human sections and smashing dinosaurs as Kong himself was simply appealing, but that game was the one that has received the highest regards. It does feel appropriate that the most well-received giant monster game is based around the original giant movie monster, even if he only stars in about half of it (they do include an alternate happy ending, though)—even more so when you consider that while there have only been a few King Kong games, the character has had an outsized influence over video games as a whole…I mean, Donkey Kong is all that needs to be said, right?

But there have been a few King Kong games aside from the ones based on the Peter Jackson movie. The one with the strangest history released close to twenty years before that: King Kong 2: Ikari no Megaton Punch (which translates to “The Furious Megaton Punch”), published on the Japanese Famicom (that’s the NES, just so you know) in 1986 by Konami. How does this one to earn the title of “King Kong 2” (not even Son of Kong got that honour), you ask? That’s actually the Japanese title for King Kong Lives, the reviled follow-up to the Dino De Laurentiis remake, made years after anyone cared—Lives is the Jaws: The Revenge of King Kong movies. Considering what an amazing flop the film was, how costly the license probably was, and how early in the lifespan of the NES this released, it’s pretty understandable why Ikari no Megaton Punch never made it over to English-speaking countries, despite the minimal amount of text in the game, which would have made localization a snap. Also considering that it released mere months after Castlevania in Japan, that probably made it much less of a priority. Still, this tie in to the worst King Kong movie turned out to be way weirder and more ambitious that you’d think, so it does deserve a place in the discussion of giant monster games.