The Persistence of Godzilla

Cafe Society
1

I admit to being a Godzilla lover. I grew up on the Big Whatsis, although I’m old enough for that to mean that I watch the original 1956 film in its American incarnation, with the added Raymond Burr scenes, as well as the rare showing of *Gigantis , the Fire Monster/The Volcano Monsters**I actually saw King Kong vs. Godzilla at a drive-in for the first time, and many of the subsequent films of the Big G at matinees and the like.

Anyway, I also loved flicks like the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Ray Harryhausen’s ground-breaking solo effort, which introduced his Dynamation/Dynarama/Reality Sandwich technique (which he used because he couldn’t afford the army of technicians his mentor Willis O’Brien used to create his glass paintings and forced perspective sets). TBf20kF is what Godzilla director Inoshiro Honda aspired to, but couldn’t, in his turn, afford. So instead we got Haruo Nakajima walking around in an ill-fitting rubber suit, interspersed with a few scenes using Eiji Tsuburaya’s puppet model. But mainly the guy in the suit. It was pretty skillfully set up in the first movie, with the monster shot mainly at night and dramatically silhouetted, moving with deliberate and ponderous slowness that was matched by the heavy bass soundtrack.

They kind of tried to keep it up in the second film (where Godzilla had a LOT more teeth. Pointier ones, too). But then along came King Kong vs. Godzilla, which had color (like that upstart, Rodan), and suddenly he could move faster and you could see him a lot more clearly, and they stopped trying to be so serious. And they made a gazillion sequels that over the next two decades declined into incredible silliness (I mean, Son of Godzilla? Seriously? )

But the damned things remained incredibly popular. A big reason for this was undoubtedly that they were cheap. Independent TV stations could buy the lot and show them over and over. Everybody knew them. It’s the same reason that everyone knows all the Bugs Bunny cartoons but few of the classic Mickey Mouse cartoons – Warner Brothers rented out their library of 1940s cartoons to everybody, while Disney kept theirs locked away in a vault. So Bugs Bunny became an icon. So did Godzilla, while The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is known to dinosaur and fantasy film aficionados.

It still boggles my mind that NBC could show a film as atrocious as Godzilla vs. Megalon on prime time TV, hosted by John Belushi in the Saturday Night Live Godzilla suit. Try doing that with the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms!

Then they rebooted the series. Three times. (not to mention the 1998 Roland Emmerich version with the Americanized CGI-generated monster) The damned films continue to play major movie theaters.

Here’s the thing, and my observation and question. I visited my mother last weekend. She told me about watching Godzilla movies, and she’d picked up a DVD of Godzilla films. Really. My mom, never a big fan of fantasy or science fiction, would watch Godzilla. So, I recall, would my grandmother, before she died.

Why?

Neither of them would sit down and watch your typical monster movie, or fantastic film. I had to drag her to see Star Wars when it first came out (although she ended up loving it. R2D2 won her over).

What’s the hold Godzilla has over them? Is it because it stayed around long enough to become part of the cultural landscape, a bit of comforting background noise that you could leave on to provide convenient and inoffensive filler? Or is there something more to it?

What is the mystical power that makes Godzilla acceptable TV watching?

*Which, when they issued it in VHS acquired the repulsive new title Godzilla Raids Again, may those responsible be afflicted with whale lice.

2

“It still boggles my mind that NBC could show a film as atrocious as Godzilla vs. Megalon on prime time TV, hosted by John Belushi in the Saturday Night Live Godzilla suit. Try doing that with the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms!”

Gotta tell you, the Saturday night showing of Godzilla v. Megalon was an event in the JohnT domicile. I hated the joke skits, but completely forgot (or didn’t care - I was 10 or so) that it was John Belushi doing that. I do recall I absolutely hated them as they weren’t giving Godzilla the respect he so clearly earned. :slight_smile:

3

…would be the coolest Salvador Dali painting, ever.

4

The nuclear detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a horrific and real life nightmare in and of themselves and grievously scarred the psyche of the Japanese people. I believe Godzilla was the personification of that horror because, according to the original plot, he arose because of nuclear testing. I view his inevitable destructive returns to Japan as symbolic of the fear that the nuclear nightmare could reoccur and couldn’t be stopped.

I believe, to a lesser extent perhaps, that the same fascination held true for us as well. During the fifties, there were numerous “monster movies” whose plots were connected to nuclear testing. Creatures such as giant ants or giant spiders were the embodiment of an unleashed power that everyone feared.

5

Nothing much to add other than that as I was setting a recording over this past weekend, I happened across “Godzilla vs Monster X” on Son of Svengoolie. It was so deliciously horrible I couldn’t turn it off!

For me, I think Godzilla typifies a certain type of the “Creature Features” I grew up with - the giant monster and the poorly dubbed Japanese.

Not sure I have any more or less affinity for such films than - say - the B&W werewolf films…

Back then, horror films were so “innocent,” compared to more recent grossout bloodbaths.

6

The above is undoubtedly true – The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was, after all, awakened by atomic testing in the Arctic (long before they actually did do that). Although I’ve never seen an acknowledgment by anyone involved in the film, I don’t think anyone doubts that the original Gojira was inspired by the affair of the Fukuryu Maru, a fishing ship that got trapped within the unexpectedly large fallout zone of the Castle Bravo test. The crewmembers ended up with massive radiation exposure. One died of pneumonia brought on by his weakened state (he thus died, indirectly, from radiation exposure). But, unbelievably, their fish catch was actually sold in Japan, and people freaked out, not knowing if their food was irradiate or not. Teams went out across Japan, checking fish with Geiger counters. There were mass buryings of questionable fish.
For an equivalent, imagine if, in the US, some – but only some – of the ground beef distributed to McDonald’s and other rsstaurants was tainted. Only you didn’t know which ones. To the Japanese, nuvlear weapons were a very real phenomenon, directly affecting them. As someone has stated, Japan was the first major nation affected by fission weapons, and it was the first affected by thermonuclear weapns, as well.

It resonates, in a way, in my own personal life. My grandmolther (not the same one who watched Godzilla) had a picture up in her living room showing “The Ruins of Warsaw” - a collection of crumnbled and destroyed buildings, all shattered brick walls. I wondered, as a kid, wh my grandmother had a picture from the beginning of Godzila – the opening scene of the American re-cut of the movie is in Tokyo after Godzilla’s raid, and it looks just the same – all rubble.
Of course, in both cases it’s the ruins of war. Godzilla was the personification of war as much as of Nuclear Weapons (as mythical monsters, it has been argued, frequently were. Godzilla and TBf20kF just carried on the tradition into the age of Film) .

But this doesn’t have a lot of bearing on my question, which is why people you wouldn’t associate with Monster Film Fandom will sit still and watch a guy in a rubber suit imitating a giant monster galumphing through a city. I don’t seriously think it’s because they associate it with sublimated War or The Symbol of Nuclear Weapons, or anything like that. There’s some other reason for it. Maybe it’s cathartic, watching the big lunk take it out on the City, they way they sometimes want to just destroy things themselves.

But that’s the question – not Why Do These Movies Exist? But Why do they continue to be made? And Why do “ordinary” people (not the terminally nerdy, like myself) watch them?

7

I think there are two reasons why Godzilla might be a source of fond memories, even for those who generally don’t like horror or science fiction. One is that there were just so many of them, that they were on almost constantly in the background. In that sense, they did become part of the “cultural landscape,” as CalMeacham suggests. I think it’s telling that people tend to talk generically about watching “Godzilla movies,” and only relatively rarely will they name a specific film. It’s as though they’ve all blended together into a background melange that you fondly remember watching, without recalling the specifics.

Why Godzilla, and not any other type of fantastic film? Because, I suspect, their Japanese origin makes them just different enough from the type of movies we’re used to in the U.S., that they’re a thing of their own, quite apart from the Harryhausen films or the slick Universal SF movies or the cheapo schlock from AIP. They are their own genre. If you’re somewhat more educated in film criticism, you use terms like kaiju and tokusatsu to describe them. But if you’re a more casual viewer, you just call them “Godzilla movies.” But whatever you call them, in a very real way they are distinct from movies like Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. They have a look, a style, a conceptual framework that is all their own.

For example, tons of American film-makers did movies about giant insects. But could you ever imagine an American studio coming up with something like Mothra? The fundamental storytelling assumptions that lead to a movie like that are just completely different from anything going on in the U.S. at that time.

And because “Godzilla movies” are a distinct genre of their own, enjoying them doesn’t really require enjoying any other type of fantasy or SF. They’re their own thing, and you can love them on their own terms even if SF is not normally your bag.

8

à la recherche de Godzilla

9

The persistence of Godzilla might be due to a storyline that most everyone can relate to…how nature points out the folly of man.

10

臨時ニュースを申し上げます
臨時ニュースを申し上げます
ゴジラが銀座方面に向かっています
大至急避難してください
大至急避難してください

Oh, no, there goes Tokyo!

11

Kind of like Elvis movies.

Which makes you wonder, where the hell is the Elvis vs Godzilla movie?

12

I think it would have to be MechaElvis. 50 feet tall, hip swayin’ guitar playin’ hunka hunka burnin’ destruction!

13

Godzilla is a perfect TV monster: at the midpoint between scary and silly. He’s a giant monster, but on the small screen, the model cities he’s destroying are just that: models.

So if you like monsters (and are younger), you can get the thrill of a monster attacking. If you don’t buy into monsters, the oddness of the Japanese milieu and the silly stories (oxygen destroyer?) are entertaining.

It’s possible he was more frightening in a theater if you lived in Japan, where the characters were more familiar than odd, and the monster looked huge. But Godzilla (and other Japanese monster movies) were appealing in their silliness. They were fun, so people grew to like them.

14

A giant turtle who can fly through the air by shooting flames out of his shellholes is not silly - he’s really neat! He is filled with turtle meat.

15

I think you’ve got cause and effect backwards on this. The number is a consequence, not a cause, of the fondness.

The longevity, more than the pace (which is impressive, but not overly unusual for toku), leads to the bulk of the series (30 films*, over 63 years - with 2 more announced (both this year), and another assumed to come in the not-too-distant future (next Sunday, AD…sorry, wrong franchise)**)…it had already become what it is by the mid-60s, when there were only half a dozen out.

  • From Toho…but adding the American movies in only adds 2 out and 2 announced. Either way, it’s about 1 movie every one-to-two years, depending on which era.

** A sequel to Shin Godzilla is almost certainly going to happen, but since Anno is busy working on the last Evangelion movie (which doesn’t have a release date set, yet, itself), who knows when. They’re doing the anime trilogy in the meantime.

16

And let’s not overlook his purposeful grimace.

17

[Moderating]

A reminder: Posts on this message board should be in English.

18

Elvis movies don’t make me wonder, that’s for Led Zeppelin movies :slight_smile:

19

No rule about having to match up the lip flaps, however.

(… mouth continues to move enthusiastically in complete silence)

20

it got held up by Willis O’Brien’s pursuit of the Elvis vs. King Kong movie:


Of course, he said it was Frankenstein vs. King Kong, but we all knew he could foresee the future and how Elvis would put on weight.

Of course, there was THIS abortive Japanese attempt, but it didn’t look much like Elvis. Or Godzilla, for that matter:

and here’s always this teaser:

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Elvis+vs.+Godzilla&view=detail&mid=83D53887349D97A04AE283D53887349D97A04AE2&FORM=VIRE

or this

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Elvis+vs.+Godzilla&view=detail&mid=3A6A477454BD2A140DF93A6A477454BD2A140DF9&FORM=VIRE

or this