On Christmas Eve, Jonas was feeling a little overwhelmed by 20+ largely unfamiliar (to him) family members doing Christmasy stuff. He retreated to an upstairs room, and I went to check on him. While we were talking, he mentioned wanting to check out some of the older Godzilla movies, so I pulled out my phone and we started watching “Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla.” He thought it was hokey and hilarious, but in just the right way, keeping him enraptured throughout. I was impressed that a subtitled film had that affect on him.

We decided to make watching older kaiju movies a new father/son thing. I decided our next one should be one I had never seen.

Film 17: “Kong Kong vs. Godzilla” (1962).

My excuse for not seeing it: Half my reason for wanting to watch this was my excuse for not seeing it. Back in 1988, I wanted to see this movie so bad. I had seen “King Kong” and its remake, along with several Godzilla movies. The idea that they would fight? Nine-year-old me was sold!

And what luck, it was going to be on a cable channel, like TBS, or USA, or WGN. I don’t remember which one. The bad news? My parents wanted to go see Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis speak in downtown Des Moines. I was crestfallen!

Luckily, we had recently gotten a VCR, which meant we could record the movie and watch it later. Young couldn’t wait to see that monkey vs. lizard action! We saw Dukakis speak, I even shook his hand, but the entire time I was wondering how King Kong and Godzilla would watch up. Was a giant ape even a match for a fire-breathing monster? Plus, I knew it was a Japanese movie, so I assumed Godzilla would come out on top. My mind was abuzz running through potential outcomes.

We got home and I ran to the VCR. I rewound and pushed play. Something was wrong. It had started recording at the end of the movie. I saw King Kong wading away in the ocean. He had won, but I didn’t know how or why.

I had missed the battle of the century. Then, a few months later, George Bush became the King Kong to Dukakis’s Godzilla. Basically, 1988 was a terrible year in every way.

While HBO Max has a lot of classic Godzilla movies, “King Kong vs. Godzilla” is not one of them. We had to add a random Roku channel that had it. It was the dubbed version, and random ads would play in the corner of the screen regularly (luckily, they were silent). I’m kind of glad that’s that way we watched it. It’s more or less how I would have watched it in 1988. I’ll check out the Japanese-language version at some point, which I’m sure will have fewer American actors showing up in shoehorned-in scenes. But it was fun to watch it the way nine-year-old me would have watched it with my 11-year-old.

I’m not going to give this a lot of critical thought. It was a big dumb monkey vs. rubber lizard movie. Instead, I’ll recount the connection of “King Kong vs. Godzilla” to one of the saddest stories in Hollywood history.

The film’s origin can trace its way back to an idea “King Kong” (1933) stop-motion animator Willis O’Brien had for a King Kong vs. Frankenstein’s Monster movie. Producer John Beck used the idea to pitch a King Kong vs. Godzilla movie to Toho. O’Brien died a few months after “King Kong vs. Godzilla” was released. He had no part in its production and received no credit for his part in the story that inspired it.

O’Brien was one of the pioneers of cinematic special effects. In addition to “King Kong,” he also did the stop motion work on “The Lost World” and “Mighty Joe Young.” The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences wanted to give O’Brien a special Oscar for “King Kong,” but he refused to accept unless everyone on his crew was also recognized.

O’Brien had two sons, one of whom, Willis O’Brien Jr., was completely blind. The younger O’Brien couldn’t see his dad’s work on the big screen, but because he worked with miniatures, he could let his son handle those to get an idea of the work he was doing.

A few weeks after bringing his sons to see and feel his work, O’Brien’s ex-wife, shot and killed both sons, and tried to take her own life. She was dying from tuberculosis, and shot herself in the chest. The bullet hit and drained her tubercular lung, extending her life by about a year.

A publicity photo taken around that time shows the anguish in O’Brien’s face. Supposedly, when he saw the photo he tore it up, though other copies survived in the studio archives.

Sorry to turn a blog about a happy story between a father and son into a tragic one.

Movies it inspired me to check out: Jonas and I will keep working our way through classic Toho Godzilla movies. “Godzilla vs. Megalon” will probably be next. I love Jet Jaguar. We’ll probably check out some Gamera films as well. I might even finish watching “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” a film I started on a plane, but watched with no sound and didn’t finish due to the plane landing.

Maybe I just have bad luck with Godzilla/Kong Kong movies.