I thought I'd give a little more explanation about "jumping on Kong's foot" in the left side of his cage to gain extra points. My apologies for the lousy quality of this video I made, but it gets the point across.
I started by trying to get in the 7,000-8,000 point range on the barrels (1st screen). I wound up with 7,800. On the rivet level, as they often do, the fireballs were lazy with most in the lower part of the screen. You'll see that as I headed up the left side and jumped on Kong's foot in that side of his cage. I was waiting for the fireballs to come up and get more aggressive. I've learned that you need to lure them down before you grab the left hammer to get more points.
I wound up with 18,200 (7,800 + 10,400 on the rivets) and could have had about 300 more points with the bonus timer at zero, but I've also died that way. So I just ended the screen.
(click the video title or click twice on the image below to goto YouTube to view full screen)
The previously listed pace for getting 1M+ has 9000 on the first screen which isn't easy, but a total of only 17,500 by the end of the rivet level (8,500 points). I recall having well over 11,000 points on the rivets when the fireballs and hammered fireball points went my way.
1.05M-1.1M Pace
I really think there are a lot more points to be had on the rivets via left cage jumping. It takes a number of tries (and deaths) to figure out when you should and shouldn't do this and to get the fireball timing/position right.
Hank Chien got 10,300 (!!!) on his first screen during his successful world's record attempt. That's 2500 points more than I had in the video above. Even giving up the extra 300 points or so as I did, he'd have wound up with a whopping 21,500 points after the first two screens--well ahead of the 17,500 pace listed above.
Surely this is nothing new--there are so many great DK players who've studied the game for decades. But left AND right cage jumping have helped my scores by a few thousand points.