that the film, with the one word title of Kong, would be mistaken as a docudrama like Grass and Chang, which were one-word titled films that Cooper had earlier produced, he added the "King" to Kong's name in order to differentiate it. Appearances and abilities In his first appearance in King Kong (1933), Kong was a gigantic prehistoric ape. While gorilla-like in appearance, he had a vaguely humanoid look and at times walked upright in an anthropomorphic manner. Like most simians, Kong possesses semi-human intelligence and great physical strength. Kong's size changes drastically throughout the course of the film. While creator Merian C. Cooper envisioned Kong as being "40 to 50 feet tall", animator Willis O'Brien and his crew built the models and sets scaling Kong to be only tall on Skull Island, and rescaled to be tall in New York. This did not stop Cooper from playing around with Kong's size as he directed the special effect sequences; by manipulating the sizes of the miniatures and the camera angles, he made Kong appear a lot larger than O'Brien wanted, even as large as in some scenes. As Cooper stated in an interview: Concurrently, the Kong bust made for the film was built in scale with a ape, while the full sized hand of Kong was built in scale with a ape. Meanwhile, RKO's promotional materials listed Kong's official height as . In the 1960s, Toho Studios from Japan licensed the character for the films King Kong vs. Godzilla and King Kong Escapes. For more details on these versions of the character, see below. In 1975, Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis paid RKO for the remake rights to King Kong. This resulted in King Kong (1976). This Kong was an upright walking anthropomorphic ape, appearing even more human-like than the original. Also like the original, this Kong had semi-human intelligence and vast strength. In the 1976 film, Kong was scaled to be tall on Skull island and rescaled to be tall in New York. Ten years later, Dino De Laurentiis got the approval from Universal to do a sequel called King Kong Lives. This Kong had more or less the same appearance and abilities, but tended to walk on his knuckles more often and was enlarged, scaled to . Universal Studios had planned to do a King Kong remake as far back as 1976. They finally followed through almost 30