I am talking about such gems as Rodan, Godzilla, Mothra…etc.
The question is: it seems these films very very popular in Japan-as they cranked them out steadily.
Were they big export items? I recall seeing them as a kid…even as a child they were pretty laughable.
Did the Japanese take them serosly?
Anyone know a good book on the subject?
Dunno about the Japanese, but l loved them as a kid, own all of them on DVD as an adult.
Of the ones you mentioned, I would have to say that Godzilla probably has the most resonance for the Japanese. And I’m speaking about Gojira, the original version of Godzilla, not the Americanized imported version that has the Raymond Burr inserts.
Regardless of anyone’s personal opinions of why we did what we did (SO not going there. Not the forum for that.), without the rather annoying Burr and English language intrusion, Gojira is a remarkable exploration of the aftermath of the social, political and economic aftereffects the A-bombing of Japan brought about.
It’s a film well worth having in any collection. Gojira is definitely more than a cut above the others.
On a lighter note, I have no idea why I love Mothra and Ghidorah and Rodan. I just do. 
I expect the Japanese probably feel pretty much the same way about their monsters.
They were popular in Japan; many of them never made it to the US until years after they were released, and it didn’t make much sense to make one and not have a known market for it. Plus the early films were pretty good movies – entertaining adventure films.
It’s also clear that some of the later ones were intended a kid’s films (e.g., Gamera).
The reason they were shown a lot over here was because they were cheap, and America had two vast new markets for cheap movies in the 1950’s:
A) Television stations that were looking for cheap programming
B) Drive-ins and neighborhood movie houses that were looking for cheap movies to fill out the bill while the traditional B-movie studios were getting out.
Don’t forget Saturday matinees!
As said earlier, the original Gozilla movie was heavily edited for US distribution. I understand that the original Japanese version is still considered a classic. (I’ve seen both: the latter was ok IMHO, though certainly not unflawed.)
Then again, I loved the Japanese monster movies as a kid.
I’m sure the reason they were popular is that they were cheap, and they had decent production values.
All of the earliest films were edited. They thought US audiences wouldn’t respond well to an all-Japanese cast in Gojira, so they shot new scenes with Raymond Burr (he interacted with the Japanese cast members by talking to people the audience could only see the back of). They re-arranged the scenes and changed the dialogue and, Voila, a “watchable” film.
They were going to do the same to the sequel, but it would’ve required too much extra footage, so they just dubbed it and called it Gigantis, the Fire Monster. For whatever reason – they didn’t think audiences wouldn’t like it, or because audiences really didn’t like it, it got shown a lot less than Godzilla.
For Rodan they just dubbed it over, edited out some scenes, and added sappy music (I’ve watched the original Japanese version and the American version side by side. The Japanese version is better – the music isn’t as bad, and Paul Frees’ awful Japanese accent is gone. Also the long “bushido” speech at the very end isn’t in the Japanese version.) Then they added a prologue using atomic bomb footage to forge a link to nuclear testing that isn’t in the original.
But Rodan got shown on TV a lot, I’m convinced, because it was in color. That was a big thing in the early 1960s. I know that I saw Godzilla and Rodan a lot.
I don’t know how it did in theatrical release, but they certainly got their money’s worth on TV sales to the small independent TV stations, which were desperate from broadcast fodder and could count on the advertising revenue.
(Also home movie sales. I don’t recall Godzilla being available, but Rodan was certainly sold for home 8 mm and 16 mm projectors)
Gojira was inspired more by the widespread Japanese fears that environmental contamination was being caused by US atomic testing in the Pacific that resulted from the Fukuryu Maru incident than from the wartime A-bombings themselves.