Mighty Joe Young (1949) on Netflix
NR19491h 34mActionAdventureDramaFantasy
On her father's ranch in Tanganyika, Jill Young raises an orphaned baby gorilla she calls Joe. Years later, a businessman promises her fame in Hollywood if she brings Joe along.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb7.0/106,313 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes91%
Trailer
Plot summary
Two men come to the Tanganyika ranch where Jill Young lives with her widowed father, carrying an orphaned baby mountain gorilla. Jill trades her toys, jewelry and money for the animal without telling her father, names him Joe, and keeps him. Twelve years later the showman Max O'Hara and a cowboy named Gregg arrive in Africa with lions they have captured for a Hollywood nightclub. Joe, now twelve feet tall, appears at their camp, and when a caged lion bites his fingers he throws the two men off their horses. The grown Jill calms him. Max promises her fame and riches if she brings Joe to Hollywood, and she agrees.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Mighty Joe Young (1949)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Ray Harryhausen ate mostly carrots and celery for a time while animating Mighty Joe Young, thinking it would help him feel like a gorilla so he could animate effectively, and he preferred animating by himself because it increased his concentration.
- Willis O'Brien had the fur on the Joe models rubberized so the hairs would not stick up when animators handled them, a problem never fixed on the King Kong model. George Lofgren combed the fur, sealed the hide with Dermestes larvae that ate the skin but not the hair, then applied rubber latex.
- Flannery O'Connor borrowed aspects of Mighty Joe Young's marketing campaign for her novel Wise Blood, basing the character Gonga the Gorilla on the campaign's men in gorilla suits. In the novel, Enoch Emery watches a film in which an orangutan rescues children from a burning orphanage.
- Mighty Joe Young won the 1950 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, beating Tulsa. Willis O'Brien nominated several people he believed should share the award, including Ray Harryhausen, but the Academy had made a rule that only one person could receive it.
- Ernest Schoedsack was nearly blind while directing the live-action footage of Mighty Joe Young, so assistant director Sam Ruman told him what was happening on set so he could direct more effectively.
- Willis O'Brien was given a 47-person special effects team for Mighty Joe Young. He felt he did not need a team that large, but Hollywood union rules required different jobs to be done by different people, making the film cost more than it would have otherwise.
- Merian C. Cooper wanted Mighty Joe Young shot in Technicolor, but getting the colors to appear correctly on the glass paintings took too much time and risked exceeding the budget, so the film was made in black and white instead.
- For the sequence in which the cowboys try to lasso Joe, the actors practiced by lassoing a tractor, and in the completed scene the tractor is hidden behind the stop-motion model of Joe.
