Kong Skull Island's movie trailer dropped at Comic-Con 2017 & has sort of faded into the background of the pop culture landscape. That is for the moment, the cast looks incredible, the effects are interesting, the trailer's editing is very well done & that soundtrack with John Goodman's voice over is great. But we've been fooled by trailers before so this is going to be a wait & see for me. A bit of background on this film, its a remake or set up for King Kong vs Godzilla 2020. This is nothing new at all in fact this movie set up goes all of the way back to 1962's King Kong vs Godzilla;King Kong vs. Godzilla (キングコング対ゴジラ Kingu Kongu Tai Gojira?) is a 1962 Japanese science fiction Kaiju film featuring King Kong and Godzilla, produced and distributed by Toho. It is the third film in the Godzilla franchise and Showa series and the first of two Japanese-produced films featuring King Kong. It is also the first time both characters appeared on film in color and widescreen.[2] The film is directed by Ishirō Honda with visual effects by Eiji Tsuburayaand stars Tadao Takashima, Kenji Sahara, and Mie Hama. Produced as part of Toho's 30th anniversary celebration, this film remains the most attended of all the Godzilla films to date"
By the way Godzilla vs King Kong isn't a rip off so much as a Japanese homage to King Kong; it was supposed to be King Kong vs Frankenstein but things took some very weird turns;"The film had its roots in an earlier concept for a new King Kong feature developed by Willis O'Brien, animator of the original stop-motion Kong. Around 1960, O'Brien came up with a proposed treatment, King Kong meets Frankenstein,[4] where Kong would fight against a giant version of Frankenstein's monster in San Francisco." Read more on the production here its a very interesting run through of the politics of Hollywood. We ended up with the 1962 Japanese classic King Kong vs Godzilla. And now here's where we're going to go south from Skull Island material.
So what does this have to do with classic old school games? Well as long as I've been playing Metamorphosis Alpha 1st edition & Gamma World there have been giant radioactive monsters & mutated dinosaurs being thrown into the mix. But where are all of these mutated monsters coming from on all of these lost islands across the globe? Well for years the thought among Edgar Rice Burrough fans is that the dinosaurs & lost world horrors are following ancient migration tracks to the upper surface. For years there has been speculation among ERB fans that Pellucidar has been supplying Skull Island with its dinosaurs according to author Rick Johnson's Island Of The Skull And then the ball is picked up further by Den Valdron again in King Kong The Lost Civilazations of Skull Island & King Kong II: How did that Monkey get so Big? This is all reference back upon itself in more of Rick Johnson's articles Doorways to Pellucidar: Zanthodon And Doorways to Pellucidar: Zealandia
A bit of thought about the Mahars, the dinosaurs all of the tribes from 'At The Earth's Core' . I've recently reread all of these novels & it seems to me that the empire of the Mahars was seemed tired. A society that had undergone some ancient conflict with another empire. What if David Innes & Perry had encountered the remains of a post apocalyptic society. It always seemed as if the Mahar's empire didn't put up or have much fight in them. Could that possibly be because they've had competition over the centuries with other lost world or inner Earth alien civilizations? Why was it that each & every human in the Inner Earth had a psionic homing sense & a mild telepathic psionic ability? Because they were designed that way. Mankind is the byproduct of some ancient and dangerous experiments.
GRAB THAT RIGHT HERE
In my estimation the inner world has all kinds of conflict between various mythos races because in Lovecraft's writings it was the paradise & refuge to Elder Things, the serpent men, & other alien races not to mention the dinosaurs. Saurians, reptilians, snake cults, mutant cavemen, etc. Mankind is basically the hamburger of Pullicidar. Basically I've used the Inner Earth as one big sort of catch all sand box for campaigns and an area where the back wash of millions of years of warfare has caused all kinds of merry havoc with the locals via magickal contamination and horror. Lovecraftian Demons and god things are attracted to the wastelands because of warfare and destruction that had taken place there eons ago with the Great Old Ones and the god's creations.
Technically the Mahars & their 'empire' were nothing more then a glorified post apocalyptic community knocked over by another adventurer & his partner. Monsters, mutants, madmen. & even possibly aliens are all biological & invasive weapon systems left behind on an alien wasteland of Pellucidar. The cavemen & various human tribes are survivors and experimental stock left behind by not so extinct masters. Each & every radioactive dinosaur &
mutated Slurpasaur might have come from the inner world biological weapon systems that have become self sustaining species in their own rights.
Growing up in the 1970's & 80's we were bombarded by UFO & flying saucer movies,comic books, etc. many of which made mention of inner Earth UFO bases. So its no wonder that I've a number of alien races carving out their own niches in hidden cities and bases.
HP Lovecraft wrote about subsurface survivors in the Mound; " "The Mound" is a horror and sci-fi novella H. P. Lovecraft wrote as a ghostwriter from December 1929 to January 1930 after he was hired by Zealia Bishop to create a story about an Indian mound which is haunted by a headless ghost. Lovecraft expanded the story into a tale about a mound that conceals a gateway to a subterranean civilization, the realm of K'n-yan. The story was not published during Lovecraft's lifetime. A heavily abridged version was published in the November 1940 issue of Weird Tales, and the full text was finally published in 1989." This is only one of three alien worlds that described by Lovecraft in rich and lurid detail. The Shadow Out of Time & At The Mountains of Madness being the others. The necrotic & highly technically advanced race of K'n-yan will be playing a very important role in this upcoming campaign. Members of the 'kingdoms of the K'n-yan empire' have been making appearances in my games over the last couple of years with various NPC's being encountered here and there.
They've popped up in my Warlords of The Outer World campaign & Accursed Atlantis. The various aliens, Lovecraftian horrors, races, etc. have all exploded from inside the inner Earth because they were waiting & preparing for mankind to do itself in. They've then moved across the wasteland to take over once again & prepare the way for the Old Ones. This has happened with my forrays into Crawling Under A Broken Moon & DCC as well as my hybrid OSR home campaign. My own home campaign uses Goblinoid Game's Mutant Future as well as Dark Albion plus a range of OSR materials.
Now over the next couple of months my crew is going to taking another journey into the heart of the inner world & plunging head first into the heart of a dark Lovecraftian horror & prehistoric weirdness!
Skull Island, King Kong, King Kong Vs Godzilla are copyrighted to their various copyright & mark holders. This blog post is not an attempt to violate the trademarks or copyrights of those properties. Crawling Under A Broken Moon is a trademark and copy right of Shield of Faith Studios. Dark Albion, Mutant Future, Goblinoid Games are trade marked & copyrighted to their holders. All else is copyrighted and trade marked to Dark Corner Productions 2016. Erol Otus art work is copyrighted & trademarked to Wizards of the Coast & is not used with permission. This blog post is for entertainment & educational purposes only
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