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How I felt about it. If Mighty Joe Young bears more than a passing resemblance to King Kong, there's good reason for it. Both films co-star Robert Armstrong as the huckster who finds a gimmick: a stop-motion animated giant gorilla, taken from Africa where he belongs and brought to the big city, where he (predictably) goes ape.
More importantly, both films share the same producer/director tandem, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. Both also feature scripts credited to Ruth Rose, the wife of Schoedsack. Rose's dialogue is strictly pedestrian, but this weakness is partly overcome by the energy of the film's production.
The two films are different in spirit, however. King Kong is a monster, therefore, King Kong is a thriller with horror aspects. Mighty Joe Young is a comedy with several good action sequences.
We know it's a comedy because fourth billed is Frank McHugh, the comic sidekick in countless Hollywood films. Mighty Joe Young also has a too-long opening involving a precocious little girl who trades daddy's big flashlight for a baby gorilla, who hides under the sheets for daddy to find before he puts her in a cradle with a baby bottle. Ah, ain't he cute! The gorilla and her adopted mother are thus stamped as positive characters with a bond between them. The only screaming she'll do is when the gorilla is endangered.
As a comedy and thriller, Mighty Joe Young is a guilty pleasure. We can laugh when manly-man rodeo star Ben Johnson is greeted at the gates of the jungle plantation by a freakish branch-bearing African native woman. (Johnson, of course, would later become a respected supporting actor under the tutelage of director John Ford). We can yuck it up when gargantuan heavyweight champ Primo Carnera has a boxing match with his heavily favored simian opponent. We roll our eyes when Kong, er, Joe climbs a tree to rescue a screaming little girl threatened by a spectacular fire. As if there's any doubt that the girl will get out of it unscathed.
What we can't do is take it seriously. Terry Moore, Joe's hottie handler, may have spent her entire life on a remote African plantation, but the milk-skinned beauty looks more like Kansas farmgirl Judy Garland, a la The Wizard of Oz. Joe is so dumb that he lets ferocious lions out of a glass cage, but he's smart enough to understand all of Moore's instructions. In the end, Mighty Joe Young is an entertaining escape, better than expected but hardly a classic.