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Back in June 2006 I started a dumb little one-joke blog called Monkey Punch Dinosaur. I had been inspired by having seen Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong on a flight back from Thailand a month earlier.
It’s a dreadful film – the epitome of the kind of film that doesn’t need to be made because it adds nothing at all to its source or inspiration (and indeed sometimes cheapens that source/inspiration by virtue of its very existence) – but there’s a glorious sequence somewhere in the middle there where, instead of King Kong fighting a Tyrannosaurus Rex as he does in the original, Mr. Jackson decreed that Kong should fight THREE T-Rexes, and not just for the five minutes that the skirmish took in the original – it should be a 20-minute special effects extravafreakinganza of state-of-the-art computer animated monkey v. dino mayhem.
To which I could only say: F@#& yeah. Execrable the rest of the film may be, but 20 solid minutes of monkeys punching dinosaurs is the kind of thing I want more of.
And so, in search of more monkeypunch action, I started up the Monkey Punch Dinosaur blog and put the call out to the internets in the hope that they would provide me with what I needed to satisfy my cravings.
Three years and 100 monkeypunches later, I think I’m about as satisfied as anyone could be viz. simian-saurian pugilism. The variety of materials and the plethora of reimaginings that such a simple scenario has inspired has been breathtaking.
Monkeypunch #100 has been contributed by comics legend Mr. Matt Howarth, creator of Those Annoying Post Brothers and Savage Henry (among others), and it’s a pretty exciting note to finish on. I want to thank everyone who contributed their monkeypunch vision to this stupid little project. To be able to receive pictures of monkeys punching dinosaurs from total strangers from all over the world has been a special little bit of joy in my silly little life for the last three years.
All 100 monkeypunches are now preserved for posterity on their eponymous blog, and the above slideshow has been created to honour their creators. Take a moment, won’t you, and flip through the pages to revisit memories of monkeypunches past.
You know you want to.
The Other Adam Ford 