Walter Lantz | King Klunk / 1933 [animated cartoon]

klunky love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Manuel Moreno, Lester Kline, Fred Kopietz, Charles Hastings, and Ernest Smythe (animation), Walter Lantz (director) King Klunk / 1933 [animated cartoon]

 

A parody of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong, released in April of the same year, Walter Lantz’s animated film begins with its characters Pooch the Pup, and a girl coonhound arriving in Africa to photograph King Klunk, the largest gorilla in the world.

      Their adventure begins with a group of natives dancing a line dance, once more like Bobby Watson’s fairy chorus boys, wrists and hands waving in the air, while nearby a native woman placed in a dish as an offering for the Gorilla cries her eyes out.

      As the camera, Pooch, and his girlfriend walk in tandem toward the Gorilla’s location, King Klunk seeing what the natives have to offer, rejects it, grabbing up the coonhound girl in her place without Pooch even being cognizant of the fact, Pooch’s girlfriend immediately being replaced by the native virgin who when Pooch discovers her, mutters “Goona, Goona,” a phrase she utters through Lantz’s racist and homophobic concoction.

      Of course, Cupid appears, a baby sissy, who shoots love into the Gorilla’s heart, and accordingly instead of eating Pooch’s girl, dukes it out with a dinosaur to keep her out of his jaws. At one point it appears the remnant of an ancient age will overpower the gigantic mammal, sending him in a single punch around the planet; but King Klunk comes back to earth like a meteorite crashing into his opponent to wipe out the last of his species.

     Pooch rescues the girl coonhound briefly, but is chased by Klunk, the two on the run, discovering a giant egg—perhaps truly the last of the dinosaurs—and push it toward him, cracking him on the cranium, resulting in his defeat.

      Chaining him, they rush him back over the Atlantic to US soil, the Gorilla being so large that he walks behind the boat. As in King Kong, Klunk’s captor becomes his promoter as a crowd gathers to observe his antics. But basically by this time Klunk, just as we are, has become rather bored, the pesky Cupid returning to make him fall in love with the coonhound girl all over again.

     As Klunk clinks his chains in heated desire, the spectators flee the theater, he escaping and attacking New York before scaling the Empire State.

      To save his sweetheart once again, Pooch jumps on a fighter plane and flies off, attempting to do Klunk in with a cannon. The cannon doesn’t work, but a gun aimed at his derriere forces him to fall to his inevitable death, whereupon the native woman appears from nowhere, muttering “Goona, goona” as Pooch and coonhound kiss.

 

Los Angeles, April 21, 2022 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2022).