“You’re not a patch on your old man,” explorer-impresario Carl Denham tells the soon martyred “Son of Kong,” in a botched sequel rushed to theaters the same year, 1933, that “King Kong” electrified audiences. The old man’s tragedy has been replayed as farce ever since, bottoming out in the 1976 remake. The new version, directed by Peter Jackson and due in December, is pantingly awaited as an escapist oasis (we have such little escape in this country), yet though it may fulfill every desire, can it be much more than a patch on the original, now splendidly restored by Warner Bros. as a DVD essential?

The miracle of “King Kong” is that, after three-quarters of a century, it survives so well. An oneiric myth that has printed indelible images in the mind and on the culture, it continues to elicit an emotional involvement when all we expect is to rekindle a childhood frisson. Why do we care about this giant ape, this animated puppet with monstrous nostrils and googly eyes? Why do we read so much into a transparently simple monkey-out-of-jungle fable, feeding on unstated fears of imperialism, racism, sexual repression, rape, wanton violence, civilization’s discontents, Darwinian mazes – and any other theme you care to throw into the mix, with the possible exception of all that nonsense about beauty and the beast?

It wasn’t beauty killed the beast. It was Denham (played by Robert Armstrong, a double for the film’s producer Merian C. Cooper) and his gas bombs, kidnapping Kong – “We’re millionaires, boys, I’ll share it with all of you,” he says.

“King Kong” could only have been made in the era before the Production Code had teeth. A manifestly adult film, with images of wounding violence and sensual curiosity, it employed the primary techniques of children’s entertainment – puppets and animation – with a commitment that disarmed skepticism. After the original, Kong’s creators reverted to children’s entertainment for follow-ups: the cooing monkeyshines of “Son of Kong”; the sentimental comedy of “Mighty Joe Young,” the latter combining “Beautiful Dreamer” and a burning orphanage. In the meantime, the king suffered the diminishment of a thousand (actually 29) cuts by censors who, in 1938, sniffed at RKO’s triumph with far more distaste than Kong sniffed at Ann Darrow’s (Fay Wray) white veils.

I’m of the generation that discovered “King Kong” through Channel 9’s “Million Dollar Movie,” watching it a dozen times in a week. My parents, recalling it from childhood with what seemed like a subversive pleasure and hesitating between nostalgia and concern that it might not be appropriate for a 9-year-old, were relieved to find that it wasn’t that frightening after all. No kidding! Not until the restoration two decades later (shown, fittingly, at the D.W. Griffith Theater) did we finally get to see Kong chomp – but, significantly, never swallow – natives and New Yorkers; disrobe and ogle Ann; and toss a woman out the window because she was a brunette; nor had we seen Denham force Ann – wearing a diaphanous dress outfitted with a belt folding into her groin like a chastity lock – to scream for her life.

Without those scenes, “King Kong” is perfect children’s fare, the big lug dragged into the mean streets, attacked by fighter pilots, when all he wants to do is play with his little blond doll. The phenomenal thing about the uncut “Kong,” establishing it as a benchmark in cinematic manipulation, is the abrupt change it demands of the audience, from fear and horror at his brutal marauding to sorrow and anger at his demise. Oh, we bleeding hearts!

That this was achieved with a gorilla puppet no taller than 2 feet is another reason that a computer-graphics remake, even one managed by Kongophiliac Peter Jackson, who had the good sense to set his version in the 1930s, is unlikely to press the same buttons. Willis O’Brien’s ingenious, painstaking stop-animation process, requiring 24 hand-manipulated movements and shots per second, invites a measure of identification due to its very crudity. The fakery inspires subliminal wonder that magnifies the wonder of the story it tells.

But O’Brien’s achievement goes beyond technique. The DVD release, which has a commentary track and a surprisingly inept gloss on producer Merian C. Cooper, boasts an excellent two and a half hour documentary on the making of “King Kong” that, along with the midrash accompanying “Mighty Joe Young” (included in “The King Kong Collection,” as is “Son of Kong”), harps on O’Brien’s influence, especially as extended by the sainted Ray Harryhausen, who assisted him in animating “Mighty Joe.” Yet no one else has succeeded in making a puppet so anthropomorphically appealing. Mr. Harryhausen’s figurines, mind-boggling as they are, are usually senseless killing machines, comic relief, or mythological monsters brought to life for the purpose of bringing them to life. He may have exceeded the master in technique, but not in empathy.

Also unsurpassed is Max Steiner’s justly admired and much-analyzed score, a contender for the best movie music ever. Rachmaninoff ranks second best in manipulating three descending chords: Kong’s heavy-treading theme freezes the audience before it sees a thing. This is a film with a perfect three act structure – the voyage out; the jungle; the city – and one of Steiner’s masterstrokes is to withhold music from the first section, following the credits. Once the crew reaches Skull Island, Steiner is unleashed, offering not conventional cues but a constant storytelling parallel in music, as though it were a silent film – which, much of the time, it is. (Too bad Warner doesn’t provide a separate music and effects track.) Alternating Kong’s theme, Ann Darrow’s signature waltz, and intermediary observations, he comments on every action. Used to excess, this approach is derisively known as Mickey Mousing – as, for example, in a comedy when a bassoon mimics an on-screen drunk. Steiner, however, is so omnipresent that he doubles the action and anticipates the responses of the audience.

Mr. Jackson will undoubtedly be given a lot of slack by Kong fans for his contribution to this reissue, especially his re-creation, using footage from the movie and new stop-time animation, of the lost spider pit sequence. But Mr. Jackson faces a more difficult hurdle in re-creating another quality that made “King Kong” a credible entertainment in its day. The generation of Merian C. Cooper and his director-cameraman, Ernest B. Schoedsack, grew up during the last throes of terrestrial exploration; when everyone knew of Stanley and Livingston, of Burton, Scott, Shackleton, Peary, and Byrd; when earth was so large it might yet harbor unknown peoples and lands forgotten by time. Skull Island enlarged on that dream, which earlier had motivated its makers actually to take pith helmets, rifles, and a camera into the brush.

If Cooper and Schoedsack subsequently decided that the best fantasies could be secured on soundstages, they initially made their way with dramatized documentaries in the mold of Flaherty, filmed in the silent era. Little seen for decades, “Grass” (1924) and “Chang” (1927) are now available from Milestone, and they stand on their own as fascinating documents as well as prototypes for Denham and company. The DVD prints look surprisingly fresh, and the new scores, played on locally authentic instruments and combining steady rhythms with scalar melodies, enliven the action. “Cute” title cards, attributing dialogue to animals (the first talking camel appeared in “Grass,” not in “Road to Morocco”), mar both films; it was once assumed that the studio added them, but Cooper was apparently responsible. Indeed, he dismissed “Grass,” because he did not get to personalize the story by focusing on a family.

In “Grass,” he and Schoedsack and a mysterious benefactress named Marguerite Harrison (whom Schoedsack despised, and referred to much as the Bruce Cabot character does to Fay Wray) followed the Bakhtiari tribe, reportedly more than 50,000 strong, on a grueling annual trek for grazing land through places that no longer exist on the map – Persia and Arabia. The 14-minute sequence documenting a weeklong crossing of a raging river on rafts floated by inflated goatskins is as astonishing as anything in “King Kong” – and more horrific in that the drowning of animals and possibly people (the editing is timid on this point) are real. This is followed by an ascent up 12,000 feet of iced mountain, in all a journey of 48 days. If only we could see how the filmmakers got their footage and handled the hardships.

Much of the power of “Grass” resides in its distance from the people and their massive plight. “Chang,” by contrast, focuses on a family in what used to be called Siam, and qualifies by any definition as great filmmaking, though anthropologically suspect. A leopard racing through the jungle comes within spitting range of Schoedsack’s camera, a tiger almost licks the lens, a herd of elephants (“chang” means “elephant” in Siamese) destroys a settlement – and the people seem caught between the terror of the moment and the reassurances of the unseen filmmakers. A rapid chase, cutting between close-ups of a fleeing monkey (shouting for help, unfortunately) and a charging leopard, prefigures episodes in “The Most Dangerous Game,” the film Cooper and Schoedsack made on the “Kong” sets. This is action in the absence of a script, stark and unfettered, though not as gripping as a giant ape defying planes atop the Empire State Building. Over the long haul, life simply can’t compete with imagination.

Mr. Giddins’s column appears alternate Tuesdays in The New York Sun.