Toho Studios partnered with Rankin/Bass studios for this monster mess. Rankin/Bass primarily made stop motion holiday specials for American television studios. They are probably best remembered for their Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer special featuring Burl Ives as Sam the Snowman. To have these two studios team up on a film about King Kong you can probably guess what you are going to get for an end result, a film squarely aimed at children.
It seems an evil villain named Dr. Who, has built a robot version of King Kong for the purpose of digging up something called "element X." The actor Mie Hama probably best known to western audiences as James Bond's assistant "Kissy Suzki" in You Only Live Twice is an agent for an unnamed foreign government interested in purchasing element X which will help them take over the world.
Into this story comes American actor Rhodes Reason the leader of a United Nations submarine exploring Mondo Island in search of the real King Kong. Rhodes Reason was the brother of Rex Reason who I last saw flying around in a spaceship towards the planet Metaluna in This Island Earth. But that's another story.
Along with Reason is his trusty assistant Akira Takarada who appeared in many Honda monster movies which stared Godzilla who was usually versus something. Also in the mix is a young woman who was an American model in Japan named Linda Miller as a member of Reason's crew. Miller is an interesting performer in that she can't really act but has that all American blonde look that appealed to a lot of people. For years Miller was a mysterious presence, she didn't appear in a lot of films and had kind of vanished. It took the internet to finally track her down.
The film was written by Takeshi Kimura an old pro at this kind of film. The running time is 104 minutes.
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