In Search of Godzilla

 

Where it all got started: Aurora's Glows in the Dark Godzilla kit

The longest running film franchise in history turns 70 this year. Last time, I looked at his great cinematic rival, King Kong, but this time it’s the turn of Godzilla.

Ever since the first movie makers weilded a hand-cranked camera in anger, the technology has been used to bring life to fantastic and nightmarish visions. Cinema as we know it was still in its infancy when Willis O’Brien began the experiments with stop motion animation that would lead to King Kong. The film was a huge hit on release in 1933, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that other studios started getting in on the act, spurred on by the surprise success of Kong’s 1952 re-release.

First off the starting grid was Warners with The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, released in June of 1953. Two aspects of the plot would prove hugely influential: the eponymous beast was released from his frozen slumber by an atomic bomb test; and having been restored to life, it made its way to New York to indulge in a spate of destruction. Over in Japan, Toho studios producer Tomoyoki Tanaka borrowed the plot as the basis for his own monster on the rampage production. Tanaka titled his outline The Giant Monster From 20,000 Miles Beneath the Sea, so it’s clear where his inspiration lay. By the time it went into production, the movie was codenamed Project G (for giant), but ultimately the world would know it as Godzilla.

The atom bomb had much greater resonance for Japan, where it had wrought death and destruction at the close of the Second World War. Early 1954 had brought another radiological disaster when the crew of the fishing boat Daigo Fukuryu Maru were irradiated by fallout from America’s catastrophic A-bomb test Castle Bravo. This incident is directly reflected in the opening scenes of Toho’s movie. Shot in a matter of months, Tanaka’s production was released in November of that same year, accompanied by a barrage of promotional activity. 

The original Godzilla is remarkably restrained and sober compared to the B-movie nonsense that the franchise would go on to spawn. The tone is dark, the cinematography noirish. The script is peppered with explicit references to the A-bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Much of the plot concerns the moral dilemma of a scientist who posseses the means to destroy Godzilla but is concerned that his invention will be turned into a weapon. Another key character, a palaentologist, argues that Godzilla should be studied rather than destroyed. At the end of the movie he warns that if atomic bomb tests continue, other Godzillas may be unleashed anywhere in the world. The movie’s message couldn’t have been clearer, but it was, nevertheless intended as entertainment. Godzilla’s trashing of Tokyo didn’t have the same narrative logic as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, but it carries considerably more weight in the light of the allied bombing of Japan. Spectacular scenes of destruction featured prominently in the trailer, which boasted of special effects better than any American movie: a form of cultural revenge, perhaps? 

Godzilla was a huge success in Japan, and in re-edited form went on release in the United States two years later, where atomic monster mutations were now coming thick and fast – Them! (1954); It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955); Tarantula (1955); and The Deadly Mantis (1957) to name but a few. But unlike Kong and Godzilla, none of these horrors would spawn a sequel. Godzilla Raids Again brought the ancient reptile back from the dead in 1955, but it would take a match-off with his simian rival before he saw action again – this time in colour and widescreen – in King Kong Versus Godzilla (1962). The sixties would become the decade of the giant monster picture, with no fewer than eight offerings from Toho studios, and other producers getting in on the act. Godzilla became a huge cultural icon, and was enormously popular with young cinemagoers. Over in the west, his influence was less noticeable. After the face-off with Kong, many of the subsequent entries in the franchise went straight to television or were given relatively low-key releases.

All of which goes some way to explaining why, when I first encountered Godzilla, I’d never heard of him before. I hadn’t realised that giant, rampaging movie monsters was even a ‘thing’, my awareness of horror films having been confined to the man-sized menace of Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Mummy et al. I’d been obsessively (but not academically) interested in dinosaurs since the age of seven, so the idea of giant reptilian monsters smashing up cities like some outsized tyrannosaurus on the loose was something I could get behind.

I stumbled upon Godzilla in the unlikely surroundings of Brixham, north Devon, where our dad was stationed for the summer with the resident band at the nearby Pontins holiday camp, and the mighty monster took the form of a plastic model kit. The box artwork was all I needed to see, an atmospheric painting depicting a glowing Godzilla against a stormy sky, trampling Tokyo underfoot. The model – simply assembled from about a dozen pieces – even came with a display stand depicting a section of the trashed metropolis. I didn’t know it was meant to be Tokyo, it could have been just about anywhere, but that didn’t matter. As well as dinosaurs, I had a childish appetite for acts of destruction, engendered by watching too many explosions courtesy of Gerry Anderson. I would build lego machines simply to throw them downstairs and witness them flying into pieces. In Godzilla, I’d found a character and a genre that had guaranteed appeal. I knew the character had come from a film, as did most of the other monsters in the same series of kits, and the box artwork included an RKO copyright credit, which appeared to confirm the fact.

I asked my parents and my dad’s musician colleagues if any of them knew about Godzilla. None of them did, despite one of them being a fan of science fiction. It seems that Toho’s iconic monster hadn’t yet seeped into the collective unconscious of the British middle classes. Someone probably mentioned The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, which I duly noted, but didn’t get to see until much later. I’d made a discovery and I needed to know more.

Back in the 1970s, information about horror films of twenty years’ vintage wasn’t that easy to come by. You couldn’t go to the library and look it up in a book, as there were few if any publications on the subject. One of the first that came my way was a lavishly illustrated tome from the publishers Hamlyn, who specialised in pictorial coffee table books. Titled ‘A Pictorial History of Horror Movies’, the book was compiled by Denis Gifford, a gentleman who at the time occupied a unique niche in popular culture, that of the collector/fan/academic/pundit. These days, you can’t move for them on Channel 5 and BBC4 documentaries, but back in the 70s, and with the possible exception of Bob Monkhouse, Gifford was the only man in his field.

The book’s dust jacket described him as ‘a benign, bespectacled Dr Jeckyll who draws comics for kiddies [and] is by night a Mr Hyde of the horror movie.’ The blurb went on: ‘since bitten by the horror bug… at the impressionable age of six, Denis Gifford has lovingly hoarded the ephemera of horror film.’ Said ephemera formed the core of the book, including, on page 180, my first photographic sighting of Godzilla, caught in the act of chomping a railway train. The text included a rundown of the monster’s many cinematic outings to date, while the same pictorial spread offered tantalising glimpses of other entries in the genre including the aforementioned Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Denmark’s Reptilicus, and Britain’s imitative effort, Gorgo. I took careful note of all these films, and within a decade would get to see most of them on television.

Godzilla's spread in Denis Gifford's Pictorial History of Horror Movies' and a couple of other handy publications

Meanwhile, I gleaned what I could from other publications. The early 70s saw the dawn of an era in which film historians began to delve into the murkier depths of horror and science fiction, with a number of commentators focusing on the production technqiues of such movies. Australian writer John Brosnan produced one of the best entries in this field with Movie Magic: The Story of Special Effects in the Cinema (1974). Such accounts tended to focus on those practictioners who’d done it ‘the hard way’, employing the stop-motion animation technique pioneered by Willis O’Brien, and best exemplified by the ‘daddy’ of the genre, Ray Harryhausen. Godzilla, on the other hand, had been realised using men in monster suits, and tended to be overlooked in such accounts. He got his face on the cover of another pictorial effort, Cinefantastic, also published in 1974, but on the whole got short shrift from writers whose mission it was to explain the painstaking techniques of cinema special effects.

These and other publications soon equipped me with a list of films to look out for on television (there was scant likelihood of seeing any of them in a movie theatre). Outside of Japan, giant monsters as a genre had fizzled out in the early 60s, but most of the films from that era found their way to the small screen during the coming decade. 

As a British movie, Gorgo turned up relatively frequently on the small screen, getting its first airing on BBC1 at 6.55pm on Wednesday July 26 1978. My diary entry described it as ‘pretty daft’. BBC also occasionally showed The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, but on the whole, such fare was hard to find in the days when British television comprised a mere three channels.

Godzilla was a different kettle of (radioactive) fish. The original being in Japanese, it was unlikely to get a UK broadcast, although there had been a dubbed and expanded version prepared for the American market. Similarly, King Kong Versus Godzilla (1963) came in two flavours, Japanese and American, and afforded what may well have been the first UK televison outing for Toho’s creation when ITV aired it as their big Sunday night feature film in January 1975. Godzilla didn’t appear at all on the BBC until a cartoon series launched in 1980, whose synopsis described him as ‘the legendary prehistoric monster’. He was assisted in these animated endeavours by ‘Godzooky’, a baby monster modelled on the ‘Minilla’ of the movies.

It was, indeed, Son of Godzilla that introduced me to the genre, when the movie got a one-off Saturday morning run at the Odeon New Street, Birmingham, forty years ago today, on Saturday 18 May 1974. I was impressed with the special effects, noting a similarity in some of the model shots to the work of Derek Meddings. The ‘plot’, such as it was, concerned a weather experiment on a remote island, where an egg is accidentally unearthed, later to hatch into the offspring of Godzilla, who soon arrives to claim the baby and tutor it in the ways of breathing radioactive fire. Baby ‘Minilla’ can only manage blue smoke rings, until he gets to grips with a giant preying mantis. The film turned up not long afterwards on ITV, who acquired a batch of Japanese monster movies in the mid-70s. I saw a couple, but my interest in them was waning. You see one monster smashing up Tokyo, you’ve seen them all.

Over on the BBC, it took until 1998 for a bona fide Godzilla film to find its way into the schedules, courtesy of a themed night of monster movies, timed to coincide with the release of the new American Godzilla movie. A documentary told the story of Toho’s creation, and the evening’s line-up included the 1976 revamp of King Kong, along with 1991’s Godzilla vs King Ghidora. I sat up until 2.30 am watching this face-off between the king of the monsters and his three-headed nemesis. Much of it involved smashing up skyscrapers, which was done with remarkable realism and without so much as a single frame of computer animation.

By this time, Channel 4 had become the natural home of cranky Japanese monster movies, usually scheduled late at night and often introduced by the likes of Jonathan Ross; and it was on this network that I finally had sighting of the original, 1954 Godzilla, in subtitled form, along with its sequel, Godzilla Raids Again. It had taken a couple of decades, but that Godzilla-shaped box could finally be ticked off.

Of the other monster movies namechecked in Denis Gifford’s Pictorial History, a number continued to elude me. The Giant Behemoth I knew only by its title, whilst of Reptilicus (1961) I had seen but a couple of stills. This Danish-American production finally came my way courtesy of a copy uploaded to YouTube: I approached it in full expectation of the usual farrago of nonsense (making an honourable exception for the original Godzilla), but was surprised at the plot’s restraint and, dare I say it, scientific credibility. It still all came down to a big dinosaur smashing up a capital city in the final reel, but the journey there was more engaging than others.

Behemoth finally lumbered onto the screen courtesy of Talking Pictures TV, though I’m not sure it was entirely worth the wait. Of the others illustrated in Gifford’s book, I have still to make my acquiantance with Gamera Vs Jiger, Gappa the Triphibian Monster, Destroy All Monsters and the intriguingly bonkers Space Amoeba, although titles can often be found on the various online video platforms.

While postwar nuclear paranoia formed the subtext of the many radioactive mutant monster movies, it’s unlikely that this would have filtered through to the genre’s primaily juvenile audience. Denis Gifford, writing in 1973, commented on the endless cycle of outsized monsters trashing cities, offering the observation that ‘as long as it continues, vicariously satisfying a human urge to destroy, it may keep real-life destruction at bay.’ Looking back from 50 years on, it’s hard to know if he was right or wrong, but I suspect that right now, the world could use a few more epic monster movies...