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Photography Culture

A Giant Inflatable King Kong Scaled the Empire State Building 30 Years Ago This Week

Chris Gampat
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04/10/2013
1 Min read

Last Updated on 04/10/2013 by Chris Gampat

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Left image from Lime Contracting. Right image from TheMechanism

Mostly everyone has seen King Kong (and we’re not talking about that stupid remake done a couple of years ago). But 30 years ago, people apparently saw him in real life. The Lime Contracting Company was doing renovations on the Empire State Building in 1983 when they were asked to take part in the 50th anniversary of the great movie. It was obviously a publicity stunt, and the image made newspapers and most likely another marketing campaign to milk some extra revenue from the film. And like that, Kong rose again to an staggering 82 feet high–and probably scared the bejesus out of some kids down below.

When the remake hit theaters in 2005, it was all CGI instead of the real thing. Corbis has an image of the 1983 scaling in color on their website.

Via Gothamist

empire state building king kong
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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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