When you hear the words Donkey Kong, what comes to your mind? Bananas? Maybe. A Kong’s gotta eat after all. Barrels? Of course, he sure does love smashing things with them. Billy Mitchell? No… We don’t talk about Billy Mitchell anymore. For shame.
There are many number of things that can come to mind when you think about the big ape, but depending on what year you came into this world, you could think of the character, himself, as any number of things. Your dad could think Kong is Mario’s rival, a climber of pie factories, and kidnapper of young damsels. Meanwhile, you boot up your new copy of Tropical Freeze for the Nintendo Switch, thinking he’s just a sharp dressed ape who only wants to protect his bananas and his family (And yes. I know what order I put those two words in). Donkey Kong, as a character, has grown and evolved with the times more than some of his fellow video game characters from the same arcade era. Whether you call the Italian plumber Mario or “Jump Man”, he still possesses the same basic characterization of the high jumping Italian stereotype that we know and love today.
In 1994, when Rare took control of the property of Donkey Kong, with it came some character changes. They decided that to make the transition from villain to hero smoother, history would change so that Donkey Kong’s grandfather, Cranky Kong, had wrought all of the havoc upon Jump Man and those closest to him in the 80’s.They achieved this, even though the DK in Donkey Kong Country never spoke a word of dialogue. The only ones to speak any meaningful dialogue in the original Donkey Kong Country included the side characters.
