In the entirely true and entirely unflattering words of the poster for Dino De Laurentiis’s 1976 remake, there is indeed “still only one King Kong” — but it’s not his. In honor of the 75th anniversary of the New York premiere of “the eighth wonder of the world,” Film Forum will screen the original 1933 “King Kong” this Sunday.

Had Mr. De Laurentiis’s beast, or even Peter Jackson’s digitally enhanced 2005 version, been the world’s introduction to the story, would movie houses around the world plan anniversary screenings 75 years in the future? Unlikely. How, then, does a puppet made from rabbit fur, a rubber ball, and some socket joints, painstakingly animated frame-by-frame during the depths of the Great Depression, ably kick the motion-capture behemoth of Mr. Jackson’s modern edition to film history’s curb? The reasons for the enduring resonance of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 “King Kong” remain a critical ball that has been kept in play since the film made its debut.

Was the runaway success of “Kong” — a film that not only brought RKO Studios back (temporarily) from the brink of bankruptcy during its first release, but spawned sequels, rip-offs, and remakes in every decade since — a by-product of a profound Jungian connection between the audience and its inner ape? Was it due to a Freudian frisson in which unbound (and in several scenes, bound), rampant, dark, and primitive masculinity relentlessly courted blond innocence and then scaled the world’s tallest phallic symbol (which was brand new at the time)? Did Kong represent manifest destiny and colonialism come home not just to haunt but to stomp, chew, and fling to their deaths complacent urban dwellers?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and theory is in the mind of the conjecturer. “King Kong” wasn’t created by satirists, psychologists, or critics; he was created by showmen. Prior to embarking on RKO production 601, whose working title, “Kong,” was given its titular crown by outgoing RKO production executive David O. Selznick, the film’s co-directors and scenarists, Cooper and Schoedsack, had made a string of exotically set dramas built around footage of jungle predators and their prey. That, of course, was before the era of green screens, when capturing these creatures came at the risk of bodily harm to the filmmakers.

For Cooper and Schoedsack, hardship in the form of animal attacks, shipwrecks, monsoons, malaria, and near starvation surrounding the production of 1925’s “Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life” (in distant Persia) and 1927’s “Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness” (in far-off Siam) were synonymous with adventure.

“The secret of our success with animals in those pictures,” Schoedsack told an interviewer in the 1970s, “was that we found out what that animal would do, then incorporated this into the action of the story.”

“Kong” broke new ground for the duo because, in creating their scenario, they were scrutinizing a species of animal with which they were all too familiar, but had never before put in a picture — themselves. “I would have a crazy motion-picture producer go in search of this monster,” Cooper, who died in 1973, recalled of the germ of an idea behind his biggest success. “He would take with him a motion-picture company which would include only one girl.”

The girl in question, Ann Darrow, played by Fay Wray with a deft balance of fragility and grit that neither Jessica Lange nor Naomi Watts proved equipped to channel in her respective remake, was depression-era innocence personified. (Attendees at Film Forum’s 1 p.m. screening of “King Kong” can enter themselves in the theater’s Fay Wray scream-alike competition.) In the film, Darrow’s big break into the adventure of show business takes place not at Schwab’s Drugstore (the popular meeting place of movie actors and deal makers between the 1930s and the 1950s), but while attempting to steal a piece of fruit from a street vendor along the Hoboken waterfront. But if any one character in “King Kong” cornered the market on innocence, it was the big ape himself. Wantonly, brutally destructive when crossed, but unconscious enough of his own colossal strength that he tosses around the head of a dinosaur he’s battled to the death, seemingly not fully cognizant of why it has stopped moving, Kong united pre-adolescent behavior with prehistoric might. Worshipped and placated by the natives of Skull Island, yet helpless in the face of a (nearly literal) crush that flares when he gets his paws on Ann, the big guy arrives in Manhattan as the ultimate country bumpkin having a rotten weekend in the big city.

The production DNA of “King Kong” spirals in both directions throughout Hollywood lore. The Skull Island gate that Kong crashes in pursuit of a second date with Ann was part of the enormous centerpiece palace set of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 “The King of Kings” and, a few years later, the fuel for the “burning of Atlanta” sequence in Selznick’s “Gone With the Wind.” Jungle scenes from the film turn up in a subsequent RKO production of some repute, “Citizen Kane.”

“King Kong” also proved to be a springboard for many artists involved in its creation. Animator Willis O’Brien, a man who endured his family’s destruction via a double filicide perpetrated by his unbalanced wife, achieved geek immortality through his own work and that of his future protégé, Ray Harryhausen. Optical effects ace Linwood Dunn, the man who supervised many of the film’s layered combinations of separately photographed life-action and animated footage, would receive the job of optically re-toning the gory climax of another New York rampage movie, 1976’s “Taxi Driver,” when director Martin Scorsese was threatened with an X rating for violence by the MPAA. Composer Max Steiner’s score not only was the single most compelling use of operatic motifs for characters up to that time (a common conceit in film scores ever since), but was harmoniously combined with a meticulously crafted sound-effects track that sounds modern to this day.

Kong’s legacy is the result of Cooper and Schoedsack’s unabashed desire to show their audience a good time. The film’s immortal last words — “Oh no, it wasn’t the planes, it was beauty killed the beast” — may be delivered in the extinct 1930s Hollywood male tenor tones of Robert Armstrong, as leading man and on-screen alter-ego Carl Denham, but in truth, the duo who gave life to “King Kong” ultimately destroyed it. The lead pilot and gunner who fell the great beast in the film’s climactic biplane attack were played, uncredited, by the directors. “We should kill the sonofabitch ourselves,” Cooper reasoned as their labor of love neared completion. It wasn’t the planes or beauty; it was showmanship killed the beast.

“King Kong” screens Sunday at 1 and 4 p.m. at Film Forum (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).