Dr Justin Mullis drops into the Explorers Club to discuss the 2017 film Kong: Skull Island. Topics include:

-Japanese cryptozoology

-The depiction of apes in popular culture

-Kong as a colonial Lost World story?

-the ecology of Skull Island

-The significance of the 70s Vietnam setting

-John Goodman and the Monarch organisation

-Kong’s reinvention as a Kaiju

-Some of the best CGI in a recent creature film?

-The Skullcrawlers’ link to the original 1933 King Kong

-Cryptozoology in the Monsterverse

-The mystical gateway that often guards the Lost Worlds

Links:

-Justin’s academia edu

-Justin's Notes for the episode (availability pending)

-Justin at Adventures In Poor Taste

-From Cryptids to Kaiju

-Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, John Rieder

-Kaiju Transmissions episode

-G-Fest 2024

-King Kong Cometh, Paul A. Woods

-Kong Unmade, John Lemay

-Encyclopedia of Weird War Stories, Paul Green

-The Great War and Prehistoric Memory, Ross J Wilson