Can there be King Kong?

This video is an honest and more or less scientific attempt to figure out, whether King Kong could theoretically exist in some corner of our world. Several other videos on such topic that can be found on KZbin focus mostly on Kong’s size, which is, I believe, only half of the story. The other important thing to consider is the ecosystem in which King Kong is supposed to live - and more often than not, that's an island, which play by their own set of quite specific rules.
So, to get a complete overview of the subject, I explored most of the known King Kong movies, starting with the original black and white 1933, and ending with CGI Monsterverse incarnations that team up with Godzilla and wander the Hollow Earth. Besides Kong, this video reviews some other fictional primates, such as Mighty Joe Young and George from Rampage. All of them were evaluated according to how well they do with Square Cube Law, as well as how they compare to the extinct giant primates such as Gigantopithecus and Archaeoindris. Various nuances of island biogeography and evolution get tackled along the way - such as extinction of giant tortoises, tiny mammoths and many other island species. There are lots of hand-made pixelart infographics to make the story more comprehensive, including many maps, charts and tier lists, and I rly tried to stick to real science in my research as close as possible. So… join me in this exploration of giant fictional apes, it’s gonna be curious!
Also, this video is just the first of many that I plan to do on various kaiju species, so keep subscribed if you don’t wanna miss them!
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:56 Square Cube Law issues
2:45 How tall was Kong
6:51 Kong ecology
10:45 True and false island gigantism
15:02 Island dwarfism
16:08 Archæoindris case
17:22 Kong vs. humans
17:45 Giant ape origin tierlist
20:52 Ultimate fictional primate plausibility tierlist & outro
Idea, research, script, pixelart, voice and editing by Surge
Music by Heepothesys
Inspiration by Paula
*a lot of the information given in the video is based on the knowledge of the author, who has no special education in most of the topics he speaks on, so please take it with a grain of salt and leave a comment if you disagree

[@jennyfeare1702]

Yay, more fun educational lessons with cool pixel-based artstyle from professor Bane! (love how that's who your voice reminds me of, lol)

[@HardCoreSciFi]

Thanks 😅 that is absolutely unintentional, but I agree there is some resemblance - especially with animated Harley Quinn series Bane. And I like the sound of “professor Bane” 😅

[@MonsterKidCory]

But what if Kong IS a dwarf version of an EVEN BIGGERER mainland ape that has since gone extinct? 😮

[@HardCoreSciFi]

That’s a good one 😅 but that continental supergorilla would break so many laws of physics, biology and geography that it would have to be called God Kong or something 😅

[@MonsterKidCory]

@@HardCoreSciFi we found our next movie, boys!

[@colonelhammerhead3025]

I'm glad to see more people talk about King Kong. I'm actually working on my own remake of King Kong called Legend of Kong;King of Skull Island. Where my Skull Island has a wide variety of dinosaurs alongside large bugs. prehistoric mammals brought over by the first generation of natives. And multiple reptiles from the mesozoic to cenozoic from land and sea, along with 6 species of pterosaurs. With it exploring more of the history and biology of Skull Island. I hope to make this project a visual novel first before making into a 2d animated film.

[@HardCoreSciFi]

Sounds like you have it all worked out! However, it doesn’t really sound like hard science fiction - I’d say, science fantasy tier at best. There are numerous issues with survival of the dinosaurs, large bugs are kinda impossible since the Carboniferous, and real life humans tend to exterminate, not spread megafauna 🤔

[@colonelhammerhead3025]

@HardCoreSciFi the dinosaurs and bugs, I haven't gotten an explanation of how they survived and gotten bigger. The human civilization, however, has tamed and formed a symbiotic relationship with the Kong's. They're a sophont species since they create tools, spread information through culture, and can recognize themselves in the mirror along with remembering individuals. The humans, Kong, and other animals they brought over were originally home to a land mass that became atlantis sinking into the ocean. It was through its destruction that they made a new home on Skull Island. With the Kongs helping build the wall and protect their people from the megafauna. Once the first walls and the cities built, they began to expand further in with constructing a second wall, but it would never be complete. The Tyrannosaurs who call Skull Island home are sophont at well, capable of cooperating with 4 to bring down a sauropod or a Kong. Traps set up by humans to combat them, tactics, and new weapons would work at first, but didn't for long. Though they did try to tame and domestiacte the dinosaurs as they did with other species on the original homeland. But most were abandoned when they retracted to the first wall.

[@HardCoreSciFi]

@@colonelhammerhead3025 It sounds like a coherent narrative, but again, I concentrate on hard vs. weak science fiction on this channel, and that does not look very hard to me. If you study the timeline of animal domestication, you might notice that for the most part it was either animals that humans either hunted (like sheep, goats, pigs or cows), or hunted the same prey with (like dogs), and gorillas don't really fall into any of these categories. Kong can be hunted, sure, but he is too big to be manageable in captivity - humans tended to exterminate megafauna completely, rather than domesticate it.

[@The.Heart.Unceasing]

I went to subscribe and I was very surprised that you weren't a 10K+ subs channel ! you do quality content here mate !

[@HardCoreSciFi]

Well thank you for subscribing 😀 the channel grows slower than I’d like it too, but hopefully someday soon it will indeed become 10K+

[@jennyfeare1702]

I'm *SO* hyped for the eventual Godzilla video, hope to see a pixel of what a fully aquatic goji would look like~! Also thoughts on Kaiju that're not organisms, but machines like mechagodzilla and Jagers, those wouldn't suffer from the square cube law given they're not of neurons, bones, or flesh right (tho still have limitations ofc)?

[@HardCoreSciFi]

I’m not getting to Godzilla just straight away, actually - the next video I think I’ll make will be on hollow and other types of unconventional earths 🤔 but when I get to Goji, I’ll make sure to explore all the options! As for mecha and robot kaiju - the square cube law very much applies to them in the same way as it does to organisms, which is why we don’t see many of them around. They will have metal instead of bones, but that metal will still face the same volume/surface ratio issues.

[@valgorie1811]

@@HardCoreSciFi If your next video is on unconventional earths, I wonder what you would cover. Young Earth? Hollow Earth? Flat Earth? Those are my guesses.

[@HardCoreSciFi]

@@valgorie1811 You got me with flat and hollow, but the third type I gonna do is something lesser known and much more curious.

[@valgorie1811]

@@HardCoreSciFi So you are saying you are or aren't going over young earth creationism?

[@ShinKaijuPrince]

Actually, the kaiju Frankenstein didn't have a mechanical heart ( or get implanted into a boy for that matter) He just had super regenerative healing and grew from the heart of the original Frankenstein monster and in turn, Sanda and Gaira grew out of parts of the kaiju Frankenstein.

[@HardCoreSciFi]

My bad, I guess I didn't do thorough research for this one. But for the purposes of this video, to rate sci-fi hardness, it doesn't really change much. Even species as primitive as worms cannot regenerate from just their heart, which still leaves it in cake tier.

[@ShinKaijuPrince]

@HardCoreSciFi No harm done it's a hard movie to get a hold of legally. Also, you referred to Godzilla as a 'she' when he is male in all but one depiction.. It's not a big deal, but it was going to bother me if I didn't mention it.

[@HardCoreSciFi]

@@ShinKaijuPrince thanks for the comment 😀 I’m all for more precision in my research. When I’ll get to my video on Godzilla, I will certainly pay attention to its gender issues as well.

[@ShinKaijuPrince]

@HardCoreSciFi just to clarify further, the one female Godzilla(1998) is still referred to as he in the film and is only female on the basis that it can reproduce through parthenogenesis and to do that it needs to be female.

[@HardCoreSciFi]

@@ShinKaijuPrince yeah, well, that was actually the very first Godzilla movie I saw, and for sentimental reasons it's still my favorite (I'm aware that it's not a very popular opinion 😅) so that's probably why I used to think of Godzilla as a "she".

[@colonelhammerhead3025]

Also i must explain the origin of King Kong 2005 and it’s Skull Island. Megaprimatus Kong ancestors originally lived on the mainland of asia, however, whether through humans bringing them to the island or a land bridge was how they arrived. Quickly, they grew in size as a defense machanism against the V-rex and other predators. Skull Island was far larger in the past, even larger than texas, which with the constant volcanic activity was what allowed the dinosaurs to survive the mass extinction event. However, as time passed, the island began to shrink due to being on the indian, australian continental plate, which with the movement of the continents rapidly sank the island. As more land was lost to the sea, multiple species began to go extinct due to competition with others. Thus put a lot of strain on the kong population. Multiple species began to interbreed and lose their genetic diversity. When the crew of the s.s. venture arrived on the island it was alreqdy a fraction of its former size.

[@HardCoreSciFi]

Well, if we speak serious science, that story is kinda inconsistent with what we know about geography and tectonics of the Indian ocean and would require some alternate Earth. Also, if you have a look at the distribution of gorillas (which Kong supposedly came from), you will need to either move the island to Atlantic, or make Kong orangutan-looking, which are actually distributed as far as Asia.

[@dubuyajay9964]

01:20. What about the hollowing out of bones and compression of more cells into muscles that rl giant animals have, past and present?

[@HardCoreSciFi]

I kinda spoke on that in my video on kaiju - if a creature wants to be really big in terrestrial setting, it kinda needs to be bird or dinosaur

[@LuluBagel-xe4gk]

Im so glad to hear you talk bout kong. Love your chanel!

[@HardCoreSciFi]

Thanks! I keep trying to do my best 😊

[@spiderlime]

a kong 5.3 meters tall may be reasonable, but it would make even more sense to give kong the measurments of the 1933 allosaurus, or the 3 meters of a gigantopithecus.

[@HardCoreSciFi]

Yeah, 3 meters would be totally diamond-tier. That, and also he can't come from an island - I guess Kong would make much more sense in continental Africa.

[@death2mylover]

amazing content bro

[@HardCoreSciFi]

Thanks! I’m trying to do my best 😀

[@dubuyajay9964]

09:20. Why don't we see rainforest trees the height of redwoods? The rainforest forces trees to grow tall to survive against its competition.

[@HardCoreSciFi]

Rainforest soils are continually washed out by rains, and are actually very poor in nutrients. I guess 30 meters is as high as they can go 🤷🏻 redwood, on the other hand, provides much less berries, fruits and nuts than rainforest, so a giant local primate wouldn’t be interested in bending them down so much and would look for an easier source of food 🤔

[@valgorie1811]

To ask a question, do you watch Biblaridion and his Alien Biospheres series, or any other alien biospheres KZbinrs since him?

[@HardCoreSciFi]

Not really. I am more into speculative evolution on Earth, generally.

[@valgorie1811]

@@HardCoreSciFi But have you seen at least one video of Biblaridion's 15 part series Alien Biospheres? His 15th and final episode came out like yesterday, completing his entire 15 part series. It is really good and one could learn a lot about biology from it. For example, in his 11th episode, he brings up both island dwarfism and island gigantism.

[@HardCoreSciFi]

@@valgorie1811 I’ll give it a try for sure 👍🏻

[@valgorie1811]

@@HardCoreSciFi So, what did you think of Alien Biospheres by Biblaridion?

[@dubuyajay9964]

Worshipping quarry animals is not a mutually exclusive thing. Look at the religious reverence people have in shamanstic cultures around the world for various animals. Even the ones they eat. Sometimes even more so since without those animals, they'd starve. Ex: Plains Tribes of North America and their reverence for the American Bison.

[@HardCoreSciFi]

That is very fair. However there are no more tribes that worship giant sloths, mammoths, woolly rhinoceros, sivatheriums, diprotodons etc. I guess bison was just lucky in being not so big 🤔