The OtherArena

[Ken Viewer]

For all the millions of original "King Kong" fans out there, alive, dead and uncertain, a non-fiction book about The Flying Tigers was published during World War II, and film rights were purchased by Warner Bros.

The screenplay reasonably includes many facts, and the film therefore features a character actor named Stanley Ridges, a middle-aged man, playing Col. Merian Cooper to Raymond Massey playing Maj. Gen. Claire L. Chennault.

That is accurate as far as history goes. Cooper is given the nickname of "Steve" -- I kid you not -- and billed in the credits as Col. Merian 'Steve' Cooper. Whether that was his nickname in the real Flying Tigers or not, I don't have a clue.

The movie was played yesterday on Turner Classic Movies but had already started by the time I found it. It's not a film I'd purchase or rent, but it may be interesting to some fans of Cooper.

Meanwhile, the Mad Maw of Disney is launching a streaming video service featuring their entire library, including the first three-strip Technicolor films made under a deal by which Cooper licensed Disney because Walt would spend the extra money to use the process and RKO, for its own films, wouldn't.

RKO, however, did have exclusive distribution rights to Disney product in the 1930s. Cooper and one-or-more of the Whitney cousins had invested a pile of cash in the financially ailing Technicolor where Herbert Kalmus had struggled for over a decade to get color movie-film to look real. Cooper, all his life, had the magic touch.

Ken