The original black-and-white "King Kong," a mix of live action and stop-motion animation, still maintains remarkable power and emotion after more than 70 years.

Sure, the gigantic Kong has an outrageous affection for a tiny female human, and he does destroy half of Manhattan while trying to get her back in his grip. But in the end — especially when those planes shoot him down from the top of the Empire State Building — your heart goes out to the big ape.

When a film can make you care as much — or more — about an overgrown monkey as its human characters, well, that's moviemaking at its best.

And for "King Kong's" DVD debut, those responsible for restoring both the film and soundtrack to their former glory have pulled out all the stops.

Most of the time, it's nice to just see older movies come to DVD with half-decent prints. But every so often, the studios go nuts in giving a masterpiece the respect it deserves. Film restoration requires a tremendous amount of research and meticulous, time-consuming work.

In the case of "King Kong," the result is glorious.

That's also thanks in no small part to James V. D'Arc at Brigham Young University. Among BYU's famed film-and-music archives is the Merian C. Cooper collection, which provided quite a bit of material to this double-disc set.

The supplementary materials are fabulous, and BYU also helped with a first-rate pair of documentaries — including one that was produced by the Turner Classic Movies, which has been airing on the cable channel this week.

There's also an excellent, newly published biography, "Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, Creator of King Kong," by Mark Cotta Vaz, which allowed the author archival access for his research. (The book is dedicated to D'Arc, and he's onscreen during both DVD documentaries.)

All of this would be grand enough, but "The King Kong Collection" box set (Warner, not rated, b/w, $39.98, four discs) also includes the sequel "Son of Kong" and Cooper's later ape picture "Mighty Joe Young."

(Each film is also available separately: "Son of Kong" and "Mighty Joe Young," $19.97 each; "King Kong" in the same two-disc set, $26.99, or in a "Collector's Edition" metal box with a 20-page copy of the original 1933 souvenir program and postcard-size posters, $39.98.)