Admirable film.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

I saw this last night as the lead-in to the showing of the 1933 classic, King Kong. With the distance of time and evolved social awareness, I found this to be very offensive. Technically, it seemed quite rushed. The finesse of period Woody Woodpecker cartoons was totally absent. There was a very thin script, which seemed unnecessarily harsh in telling an angry story. This old white guy was appalled. I can only assume that the person who chose this short did so to magnify the evolution of national social consciousness.

Pooch the Pup was an evolution of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. After Universal Studios essentially stole the character from Disney, the new and much more bland character went through many changes. At first, he looked a lot like the Oswald of old but then the animation got better...and the stories MUCH blander and saccharine. When this killed off the series, Universal hadn't learned their lesson and instead of making the character and cartoons sillier and more chaotic, they just redrew Oswald and made him Pooch the Pup! If you look at a picture of Oswald circa 1932 and Pooch only a year later, you can easily see the similarity.In this installment, Pooch is there to capitalize on the popularity of RKO's big hit, "King Kong". So this finds Pooch going on safari to find a giant ape living along side dinosaurs. In addition to these characters, there are lots of locals....who are drawn in a manner that would be seen as VERY offensive today. But no need to worry too much...as practically no one gets to see Pooch today. This is NOT a bad thing but if you insist, you can find his cartoons on YouTube like I did.Now I am not saying this is a terrible film provided you can look past the racist drawings. The animation quality is good and the story fortunately lacks the saccharinely cute characters found in many of these Walter Lantz cartoons. Not terrible...which is high praise indeed for a Lantz cartoon.

King Klunk. You heard about it. You read about it (specifically in monster books that talk about anything related to the Eighth Wonder of the World). Now finally you have an opportunity to see it! It is either available on disc one of the "Woody Woodpecker Classic Cartoon Collection" DVD set or on YouTube. It starts off when Pooch the Pup, who looks like a combination between Bimbo from those Betty Boop cartoons and Mickey Mouse, takes his unnamed girl-friend down to the jungle to film the title beast. However, after the Klunk is munching on a sacrifice, he finds Pooch's girl-friend and with the help of cupid arrow, he falls in love with her. Meanwhile Pooch is trying to avoid the victim of sacrifice that the giant ape rejected and before you know it, the majority of the film is spoofing the original 1933 RKO classic, from the battle with the Tyrannosaurus Rex to the attack at New York where he climbs the tallest building (called The Broken Arms). Walter Lantz cooks up the film with his creative humor such as inanimate objects that have minds of their own (like the movie camera, the cactus and the airplane), the 6 7/8 gag (which appears in later cartoon as 1951's "slingshot 6 7/8" and those Inspector Willouby cartoons where his badge reads 'Inspector 6 7/8') and the most original gag in this cartoon, the drum-chest gag. On another note, the monster's size keeps changing. One scene he is as big as the gate, then he is as big as the sea. In another scene his head and shoulders are sticking out of the water while his feet is at the bottom. For the city scene, the gorilla's height is as big as the stage and then in the next scene he is holding the entire building above his head (must be "the think strong to be strong" technique which appeared in later cartoons). When he's chasing the people, the buildings are up to his legs and the panicking crowd are like ants. When he is holding Pooch's girl friend, the buildings are about his size, especially before he climbs up the building. This cartoon only aired on TV in the 1950's, but it never aired in the "Woody Woodpecker Show" (1988-1994). Why?! What's the matter? Is it because of the portrayal of the natives in this short are too racist? Is it because you are afraid of showing you early pre-Woody works from the 20's and 30's in fear that people will find them too boring? It worked on shows like "Donald Duck Presents", "Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon" and "The Popeye Show". Why can't you show it to the new generation of audiences, because black and white cartoons fascinated my brother and I when we were kids! Or is because you want nothing but Woody Woody Woody, so you can create a new generation of trouble makers to drive people of all ages bananas! Rant aside, this film should of been a short subject to the unmade Universal film, "The Legend of King Kong" (if Universal only bought the rights of original) or Peter Jackson's remake. Before I end this review, I would like to say that I uploaded for various reasons: 1. Because that DVD set is too expensive and I don't have any equipment to capture DVD footage to the computer. 2. I found a link to download it. 3. I stopped liking Woody Woodpecker when I was 10 because he was too mischievous. He caused nothing but trouble, drove people up the wall and gave maturity and growing up a bad name! Like "Hook Line and Stinker" (1969), where he was fishing and drove the guy next to him bananas and at the end, he was sobbing because he wanted some peace and quiet. Shame on you Woody! You make Popeye look like and angel!Bottom line: A must for anyone who is fan of (old) cartoons and monster movie fans (like me).No Motion Picture Association of America rating, but a G rating would work well (if it was re-released in 2005).

While back issues of Mad Magazine afford us the opportunity to study contemporary movie parodies since the 1950s, KING KLUNK, produced by the Walter Lantz animation unit at Universal Pictures, gives us a rare opportunity to see what happens when a famous monster film from 1933, KING KONG, is parodied in a nine-minute cartoon the same year. The hero here is Pooch the Pup, billed prominently in the credits, a dog character apparently modeled on Bimbo from the Betty Boop cartoons. He plays a filmmaker who journeys to the island of King Klunk with his unnamed light-colored female dog girlfriend. He takes with him a camera fastened to a tripod, which, in the fashion of cartoons of the era, walks on its own through the jungle.The natives on the island are portrayed in the typically stereotyped big-lipped fashion of cartoon "cannibals" in the 1930s. However, this cartoon does something really interesting in the midst of the racial stereotyping. You may recall that in KING KONG, the island natives had picked a girl from their village to be sacrificed to Kong, but once they spot blonde Fay Wray they completely forget about the native girl, who's never seen or heard from again in the film. Well, this cartoon doesn't forget her. When giant gorilla King Klunk spots Pooch's girlfriend, he decides he'd rather have her than the native sacrifice, so he deftly picks up the girlfriend as she's walking behind Pooch and replaces her with the native girl, all without alerting Pooch who then takes the native girl's hand. When Pooch turns and sees her and reacts with shock, the native girl declares "Goona," presumably the word in her language for love, and begins chasing Pooch with great ardor.The action quickly shifts to the pursuit of Klunk and Pooch's girl and includes a fight between Klunk and a dinosaur, as in the original, and an encounter between Klunk and a dinosaur egg, followed quickly by a voyage to New York, Klunk in chains on a Broadway stage, and Klunk's rampage through the city. (Just as Kong indiscriminately chomped on New Yorkers or dropped them to their deaths on the street below, Klunk picks up handfuls of fleeing pedestrians and tosses them off to the side.) Klunk takes Pooch's girlfriend again and climbs with her to the top of a building identified only as the "Broken Arms." Pooch takes to the air in a plane and combats Klunk singlehanded.In the final shot, the native girl makes a surprise return appearance with a gag bit that clearly broke a prevailing racial taboo of the era. It's quite a clever and subversive bombshell in an otherwise uninspired and not very funny cartoon.Klunk himself is, for the most part, a growling, drooling, fanged gorilla monster and, despite being hit with a native Cupid's arrow, is never quite convincing as the lovestruck ape Kong was in the live-action film. The match with the dinosaur is fun, though, with Pooch providing blow-by-blow commentary. This cartoon is found in the "Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection" DVD box set.