It was talked about in the chat during the VGX but is Cranky Kong really the OG DK? I gotta know what hints suggests him to be Donkey Kong.

I don't know how many hints there are in the greater DK 'fiction' but the Donkey Kong in Country is supposedly Donkey Kong Jr.

Read the page description for his page on the site.

@i_stay_puft: That was sort of his thing in the original Donkey Kong Country games. You visit him and he starts yammering in bitter old man style about the old days of ancient game hardware while brandishing his cane at Donkey Kong. I don't know if Retro is taking that angle with him or not.

Here, watch this. No, seriously.

If Cranky Kong is the original Donkey Kong, wouldn't Mario and Pauline be in their 50s and 60s? They don't look like they aged in the Mario vs. Donkey Kong games, so maybe Cranky Kong is a dirty liar.

Or maybe video game apes just age differently than video game people.

@hailinel: Maybe, guess video game apes age like dogs.

If Otacon said it, it must be true.

@toowalrus: I never realized the fiction of Donkey Kong went so deep.

He sure did lose a lot of weight/muscle-mass - and Mario is apparently immortal, since he hasn't aged one bit.

Well, the thing they don't explicitly state is that every time Mario dies in a game, he actually dies, and then you just play as (another) clone of him, and thus he never ages.

that's his gimmick, he jokes about how the game stinks and how great older games were.

This kinda explains the theory some more. Found this from a site that had images from official Nintendo magazine.

The DK lore thickens! What happenend to Donkey Kong Jr.???

@i_stay_puft said:

This kinda explains the theory some more. Found this from a site that had images from official Nintendo magazine.

The DK lore thickens! What happenend to Donkey Kong Jr.???

Dark times. He's rarely been in public since Super Mario Kart.

@hailinel: I get the feeling something like this was discovered and he was getting the heat from all the kong's mothers. You gotta remember the family was wealthy in bananas and all the apes share the last name.

@i_stay_puft: Lanky is one old motherfucker.

BIG LANK!

Gets better like a glass of fine wine.

BIG LANK!

So the Kong family are mostly a bunch of bastards. Or Funky is the father of the Kong children. This is like making sense of the Zelda timeline.

Dk jr. really got around if he's the father of all those kong children. Also, Kong sort of sounds like a racist epthet.

Yep

That family tree looks really effed up. Like some Hapsburg style inbreeding going on there.

Cranky Kong is Donkey Kong Sr. That is indisputable. He's a grumpy old man who clung to the days of the early NES era and did not see why the days of the last SNES era were so damn cool. That's his character, that's what the manual says, that's what everything he does says.

The identity of the current DK however is disputable. Rare eventually decided that the current Donkey Kong was Donkey Kong Jr after having some lines that suggested he was Cranky's son and others that suggested he was Cranky's grandson. However in DKCR Retro decided to go with the later interpretation. I personally would prefer to leave Leigh Loveday's word as law and say DK is still DK Jr though I also like the idea that both are true and the Donkey Kong of the Retro games is himself the son of DK Jr. Like that funny comic suggested. That said that's a hard sell and it's simpler to just go with Rare's words. I mean in DKC's manual it said Donkey Kong was "returning." If Donkey Kong was a new character and not DK Jr he could not be returning could he??

The games are a never-ending hell for Mario and the gang. It's like Sisyphus and the boulder. Only the hill changes from adventure to adventure and provides new challenges in a familiar format. We play and they suffer.

Maybe Jr. = Funky. Would answer the question of who the fuck is the Kong behind the sunglasses. The resemblance is uncanny.

@i_stay_puft: That's because Funky Kong reused a lot of DK's models originally. If he's anything he's Pink DK Jr from DK Jr Math.

Old, deep lore.