I’m sure if Osama bin Laden were 50 meters tall, we would have found him by now.
In the first movie, they dissolved the flesh right off his bones. Obviously, he got better.
I’m sure most posters know this but just for the record, the U.S. had the early lead in the monster race with King Kong (giant beast goes on rampage in nation’s biggest city - sound familiar?) and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (nuclear weapons testing unleashes a giant prehistoric reptile that goes on rampage in nation’s biggest city - sound very familiar?). And of course we dramatically escalated it with Cloverfield.
Different monster. Presumably Godzilla 1 was the female (and mother of Minya) and all subsequent Godzillas in the original TOHO series were the male mate.
I wouldn’t worry about a Godzilla corpse rotting in the streets of Tokyo. He may be an atom-age dinosaur, but he’s a marine-dwelling dino – hence, he’s seafood.
I’ve yet to hear of anything from the ocean that the Japanese can’t find a way to make terribly chic, healthy and appetizing to eat.
It goes back further than that – The Lost World from 1925, although set in London, was made here, and featured a brontosaur running amuch through London. But even before that, circa 1920, we had Windsor McKay’s The Giant Pet, which was the first cinemtaic depiction of the Giant Creature Running through the City, complete with biplanes attacking it (sound familiar?)
Even before the cinema, McKay was doing gian creatures in the city with his Little Nemo in Slumberland and Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend comic strips. And he, in turn, was influenced by the work of Gellett Burgess (who gave us the poem “The Purple Cow”, even though that’s not about giant things), who is arguably the inventor of the genre.
H.G. Wells was in a unique position to invent the genre, what with his Food of the Gods and War of the Worlds, but he didn’t. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels probably gives root inspiration, but it’s obvious to me that the Giant Creature Running Amuch Through the Big City is an American invention, and largely a cinematic one.
