2 / 7 (#14) KITTEN KONG (Original Version)
This original 25 minute recording of Kitten Kong from 1971 unfortunately appears to no longer exist; certainly not in colour footage, and to date no black and white version has been located in England or Australia.
The original episode was expanded with additional footage and entered by the BBC into the 1972 Montreux Film Festival. This is the version that has been shown on television and released on video and DVD ever since and the master tape of the original screening was apparently wiped by the BBC in the early 1970s
The "Montreux 72 - Kitten Kong" special was put together at the conclusion of the second season; therefore a full description of this version of Kitten Kong appears in a special summary at the end of Series 2.
However a script of the original version is still in existence at the BBC, which indicates that the 1971 version was almost identical for the first half of the show apart from a few minor dialogue changes and a couple of different animals for the Goodies to treat – namely a broken rattlesnake and a depressed budgie which were replaced in the 1972 version by the mongoose.
The two film sequences of the pets being collected and the pets being exercised were reused exactly in the re-make, but some short jokes with pets in the office were changed, e.g. a sheep singing 'Baby Face' ("BAAA...by face, you've got the cutest little BAAA...by face") was replaced by the film clip of the two dogs singing 'Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better'. There is also the introduction of a "not terribly butch" Great Dane which is omitted from the 1972 version, though Bill can be seen walking the dog in the film clip of the pets being exercised.
The last 10 minutes of the episode was less elaborate than the Montreux version, and consisted of the Goodies riding the trandem while calling out to the cat only to find that it had already upended a milk truck and terrorised the milkman and then emptied out a fish shop of its stock as well. As with the Montreux version, the Goodies change into mouse costumes, but this time tried to use a massive bowl of milk to tempt the cat. When this went wrong, the Goodies had to flee from the milk bowl and Graeme almost got sacrificed so that the other two could get away (it was only a coating of salt and pepper on him that made Twinkle spit him out!), but then they took to the air on the trandem, much as in the final version. The footage of Michael Aspel - as with nearly all the film towards the end of the show - was specially shot for the Montreux version, and the 1971 version was more studio-bound.
Twinkle was finally sedated with the giant syringe as in the Montreux version, though it happened much more quickly and less dramatically in the original episode, and much of the dialogue in the office towards the end is a little different, though the closing sequence of the super-sized mice bursting through the walls is the same in both versions.
Despite the many changes made between this version and the remake for Montreux, it seems as though the original episode still had plenty of classic Goodies material to offer and it's rather a pity that it no longer seems to exist, even in black and white format.
