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In 1935 a joint expedition of several prominent universities
and organisations called Project Legacy was launched. Its
stated mission goal was to undertake the first of several
field guides to Skull Island, a land filled with creatures
existing outside of their time. Here for the first time is
the result of their work, collected in a comprehensive edition
of the natural history of this lost island...
A
Natural History of Skull Island is
a bit of a cheap shot really. I remember as a kid of the '70s
that I was a huge dinosaur fan (weren't we all?) There were
loads of books that charted the assumed history of the dinosaurs
- looking at sea life, flying creatures, dinosaurs, their
extinction and the eventual emergence of the caveman.
This
book follows a similar format to those old books, with the
same style of paintings and descriptions of the beasts. In
fact, to be quite honest, the publisher could just have easily
bought the rights to one of those books and reprinted it with
a Kong cover.
There
are plenty of hardback dinosaur books out there that are better
put together and cheaper. The World of Kong is a little
silly really. It's never really established whether all of
the descriptions are accurate, or fabricated for this book.
Did the majority of these creatures every really exist on
this planet? Are the creatures shown here exactly as they
were millions of years ago? Or have the authors given us representations
of how they would look today if they had survived?
Peter
Jackson's introduction hints that the creatures in this book
are all fabricated (which in actual fact probably means they
just altered some species very slightly to bring us "new"
creatures).
As
this is Kong's world I was really expecting to find quite
a lot more content on the large primate. In fact the only
thing that links this to the King Kong movie (apart
from the title) are the pages at the back of the book that
show illustrations and information about the big ape, as well
as some pages that show some of the Weta Workshop crew who
were responsible for bringing the monsters to life in the
movie.
While
it looks impressive, this book is nothing more than a shameless
cash-in that serves no real use to anyone other than the most
anal of fans of Peter Jackson's movie.
Darren
Rea
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