A sound designer slows down recorded lion and tiger roars, plays them backward, and creates the most iconic monster bellow in film history. This episode explores how RKO Pictures, on the brink of bankruptcy during the Great Depression, gambled on Merian C. Cooper’s obsession with gorillas and the box office of a racist hoax documentary called Ingagi to produce King Kong, a film that essentially invented the modern special effects blockbuster.

The conversation follows the relay race of screenwriters from Edgar Wallace to Ruth Rose, whose fairy tale framing turned a monster fight into a tragic romance, then digs into Willis O’Brien’s 18-inch rabbit-fur armatures, the six-operator mechanical head, traveling mattes and rear projection, and Fay Wray’s 22 hours in a fake tree. It covers Murray Spivak’s invented Foley, Max Steiner’s 46-piece orchestra synced with holes punched in the film, the cut spider pit scene, the Hays Code edits, and the scholarly readings of race, gender and nature versus civilization.

• Why Cooper’s original pitch of a real gorilla fighting Komodo dragons was uninsurable
• How animators’ fingerprints in the rabbit fur accidentally made Kong’s muscles seem to twitch
• Fifty-five weeks of stop motion in a sealed studio where opening a door could ruin continuity
• Why 1933 audiences fled the theater at giant spiders but accepted Kong chewing on victims
• The direct line from O’Brien’s puppet to Godzilla, Ray Harryhausen and Jurassic Park