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...

Big Bad Monkeys

As children, my brother and myself would dare each other to go upstairs in the dark. Going upstairs in the dark was scary. We would say to each other ‘there’s a wolf and a monkey upstairs’. These were the two scariest things we could think of. The wolf is easily explained. As the bad guys from fairytales, wolves were familiar from stories like Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs. I owned a ‘Little Golden Book’ of childrens’ stories illustrated by the legendary Garth Williams, whose depiction of the Big Bad Wolf still gives me goosebumps. As to the monkey, I think I know the answer…

It was, I think 1964 or 65. At this time, ITV tended to show movies on Sunday afternoons, many of them receiving their British TV premieres. None was particularly recent: most hailed from the late 40s or early 50s. In one of these movies, an outsized gorilla was perched atop a rocky bluff, taking swings at a bunch of cowboys who were trying to lasso him. Someone told me the monkey was called King Kong. As it turned out, they were wrong – but to my parents’ and grandparents’ generation, any big animated ape was by default King Kong. Either way, it didn’t really matter. I was now equipped with the knowledge that King Kong was a giant monkey, and that monkeys were, by extension, scary. From there it took but a short leap of the imagination to have them lurking upstairs in the dark...

The monkey I’d seen on that Sunday afternoon in the mid 60s was really a good guy. Mighty Joe Young (1949) was essentially a reminagining of Kong, by his creators Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoedsack. The story was slicker, more modern and more logical than the original, and whilst it retained the same basic premise of an oversized ape on the rampage (in this case, he wrecks a Hollywood night club), it was less of a horror movie and more of a heartwarming family film. Mighty Joe Young turned up again a couple of years later, on a Saturday evening, a broadcast of which I have clearer recollections. At the climax, the big monkey climbed up a tree to rescue a child trapped at the top of a burning orphanage, earning himself a reprieve after the nightclub escapade. As David Attenborough would later take pains to point out, gorillas aren’t really scary. They just look that way. And they’re handy to have around if you’re trapped in a burning building.

Creator Merian C. Cooper reputedly came up with the idea of King Kong after dreaming about a giant gorilla terrorising New York, a piece of blatant symbolism that any Freudian would relish. It was such a potent image and a memorable name that the movie became an instant hit. Mighty Joe Young, by contrast, was a box office flop, and plans for a sequel in which he was to have starred alongside Tarzan were quickly dropped.

The original King Kong didn’t get many outings on TV in my childhood. It wasn’t shown on British television at all until Boxing Day 1965. It turned up again as the big movie on a Sunday evening in 1971, but by an unfortunate coincidence, we were away on holiday that weekend, in a different ITV region. That same summer, however, saw the first piece of Kong memorabilia enter our household, in the shape of a plastic model kit. Created by the Aurora Plastics Corporation – based, appropriately enough in New York – the Kong kit was one of a series of models of iconic horror film monsters, featuring components which glowed in the dark. The kits weren’t very easy to come by, but it happened that, on our summer holiday that year, we stayed in a flat on Brixham high street, a few doors up from a model shop whose window was chock-full of them. As well as the hollywood monsters, there were several based on TV shows like Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

The Kong kit was bought for my brother, while I chose a cool new monster that I’d never heard of before: Godzilla. None of the adults with us on that holiday had heard of Godzilla, which seems interesting in retrospect. Today, he’s as well known as Kong, if not more so, but back in 1971, in Britain at any rate, he had yet to acquire iconic status. Clearly, the stage was set for a face-off between my Godzilla kit and my brother’s Kong – if we’d only known at the time that there had been such a movie. Ironically, it would be Godzilla rather than Kong whom I first encountered on celluloid. The occasion was also my one and only experience of a Saturday morning picture show. It was forty years ago this week, in fact, that I prevailed upon our dad to take my brother and myself to see Son of Godzilla at the Odeon New Street, where it was presented in a decidedly juvenile programme of cartoons and sundry nonsense which all felt a bit childish to me (then aged thirteen). By this time, I was fully clued up as to the origins of Godzilla, courtesy of Denis Gifford’s essential coffee table book A Pictorial History of Horror Movies. Gifford’s book also included a fair few images of King Kong, and its lesser-known sequel Son of Kong, but had nothing to say about Mighty Joe Young.

Kong himself turned up in the form of a statue, inexplicably erected in the Birmingham Bull Ring in 1972, an apparition which we were taken to see and which sticks in the mind to this day, but the original 1933 movie remained elusive. The TV broadcast rights were held by ITV up to 1976, but screenings were rare. ITV gave us King Kong Vs Godzilla as the Sunday Star Movie on 19 January 1975, a piece of scheduling which seems laughable in retrospect, but I would have to wait another sixteen months to see the original.

Despite not having seen the movie, Kong continued to exercise a hold on my imagination. At my birthday in 1976, I was bought a book, The Making of King Kong, which went into the movie’s production in detail, including working drawings and rare photographs. The same year saw the character’s return to the cinema in Dino De Laurentis’ remake, but I gave this one the cold shoulder. Fortunately, the original was waiting just around the corner.

It was, in fact, forty-eight years ago today, Friday 14 May 1976, that I finally got to see Kong in all his 1933, black and white, censor-edited glory, courtesy of ATV’s regular Friday night horror slot, Appointment With Fear. But the big monkey proved to be like the proverbial double decker bus: after waiting so long to see the film, it was broadcast again, a mere seven months later on BBC1, who chose to place it in an early evening slot of 6.50 pm. Needless to say I sat through it all a second time (this time without commercial breaks), but it made less of a splash in my diary, where the May broadcast had been accompanied by a cartoon Kong and ludicrous graphics.

Despite being Kong’s poor relation, Mighty Joe Young kept pace with his more illustrious predecessor via screenings on BBC television, who owned the broadcast rights from 1981 onwards. Between 10 December 1981 and 31 August 1994, Joe was rolled out on no fewer than six occasions, two of them on BBC1. Kong, meantime, scored seven BBC hits between his debut on the network in 1976 and August 1995. A restored version, reinstating the 1933 censors’ cuts, was presented for the first time on 8 December 1992. Rarer by far was Son of Kong, which managed a mere three broadcasts in the same time frame.

One final oddity as a coda to this piece: while watching the blu-ray release of Mighty Joe Young, I was surprised to see the climatic orphanage scene presented in tinted red. This, apparently, is how the film was seen by audiences on release in 1949. Those big monkeys may have been with us for almost a century, but they can still spring the occasional surprise. Now, dare I venture upstairs…?

Fifty Years With the Beatles

 

The album that started it all...

Saturday May 4, 1974. The record department of WH Smith, Birmingham. I’d been angling to get a Beatles record for some time and our dad had finally caved in. The Beatles had been history for almost four years, but their records were still readily available: they had a whole section to themselves in Smiths’ record department. If WH Smith sounds like an odd choice to go shopping for records, it’s probably worth mentioning that, at the time, theirs was the best stocked record department in any Birmingham store. HMV’s shop was tiny and still specialised in classical music. I’m not sure that Virgin had even got going, and if they had, it was still a very minor player. In 1970s Birmingham, when you went shopping for LPs, WH Smith was the place to go.

Faced with a choice of Beatle product, I had to decide which album to get. We already owned A Hard Day’s Night, but this belonged to my brother. Now, as I flipped through the empty sleeves, it was my turn to take the plunge. The obvious place to start would have been the classic ‘red’ album, compiling the band’s key songs from the period 1962-66, but being a double this was beyond our budget. What I wanted was a collection of hit singles, focusing on the early years which I preferred. The obvious candidate was 1966’s compilation LP A Collection of Beatles Oldies. 

The sleeve wasn’t exactly an enticement to purchase, with its generic Carnaby Street graphics, all the rage in December 1966 when the album came out, but now really showing its age in a way the other album sleeves did not. The Beatles reportedly hated it, and I can see why. The back cover photograph saw them surrounded by oriental objets d’art, and framed in a haze of cigarette smoke. Pot? I was too young to spot the significance. Either way, it would have made a better cover.

There wasn’t a lot on TV that evening. Jon Pertwee’s Doctor was just setting out on his final adventure, while Mike Yarwood offered forty minutes of impressions and a special guest in the form of Cliff Richard at 8.20. Between them, we got The Wonderful World of Disney, which I always avoided, and a romantic adventure film, Saadia, starring Cornel Wilde. Time to leave the TV set and turn on the record player. It was sometime during that interregnum that I got to play my very first Beatles LP.

A Collection of Beatles Oldies was a somewhat skewed introduction to the band’s output. Having been released for the Christmas market in 1966, it contained no material later than that year, and omitted the singles ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Please Please Me’. It contained a few songs I’d never heard before, notably ‘Day Tripper’ and its double A-side ‘We Can Work it Out’ which had escaped my notice on release in 1965. Of the album’s other selections, I was hearing most of them for the first time since they’d been in the charts in the 1960s. It was a modest beginning, but I was on my way. Within a year I would own five more of the Beatles’ LPs, plus a selection of singles and EPs. But the Beatles and I go back further than that...

Growing up in Britain in the 1960s, one could hardly fail to be aware of The Beatles. Looking back, I’m fairly sure that the very first Beatle record I heard that left an impression was ‘Twist and Shout’. They were all over the airwaves by the time I was old enough to take any notice, and I can clearly recall hearing ‘She Loves You’, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and ‘All My Loving’ played on the BBC Light Programme around the tail end of 1963 and into early 1964. I was just two and a half years old at the time, but nevertheless well aware that all these songs hailed from the same artist. 

Moreover, I knew the band’s name well enough to understand our mum’s wisecrack when, one morning, aged around three, I came in from the garden and told her I’d seen a beetle: ‘Which one?’ she replied: ‘John, Paul, George or Ringo?’ They were public property already: everyone knew their names. Their image was epitomised for me by seeing them perform on TV sometime in 1964. I think it was the single 'I Feel Fine', performed on a Thank Your Lucky Stars special. The mop tops had now acquired the proportions of German army helmets, John's especially, and this image of them became etched into my imagination.

In spite of the Beatles’ all-conquering status and popularity, I didn’t have any of their records bought for me during their time in the charts. Even Beatle merchandising passed me by, with the sole exception of a Yellow Submarine picture card that came out of a packet of sweet cigarettes. When I was bought a toy electric guitar, at Christmas 1965, it was adorned with images of The Rolling Stones (but I was more interested in its array of plastic knobs and switches). 

By the end of the sixties, there were still huge gaps in my knowledge of The Beatles’ career. ‘Norwegian Wood’ I knew only as a jazzed-up cover by the Buddy Rich Big Band, whose albums our dad would regale us with on his swish new Bang & Olufsen hi-fi. ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club’ band first came to my attention being covered by Petula Clarke on an early 70s TV special. I didn’t remember The Beatles doing a song like that! I’d missed out on the whole critical debacle that was ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, and had somehow got through 1967 without hearing either ‘I Am the Walrus’ or its double A-side ‘Hello Goodbye’. As for ‘All You Need is Love’, it might never have happened. My attentions were clearly elsewhere. 

Having started the ball rolling with A Collection of Beatles Oldies, I was ready for more. Christmas 1974 brought the albums Help! and Rubber Soul. Revolver I bought with a record token and some trepidation around my birthday in 1975 – I’d been warned that this was where the Beatles started getting ‘weird’. It was soon joined by With the Beatles (much more my kind of thing) and the Long Tall Sally EP, notable in that its four tracks were unavailable anywhere else (most Beatles EPs were still on catalogue well into the 1970s). With the addition of Sgt Pepper shortly afterwards, I now owned what I felt were the essential Beatle albums (for the record, my brother had nabbed Please Please Me and we didn’t need two copies of it in the house). In the space of a year, I’d fixed the Beatle-shaped hole in my record collection, and would spend the rest of the decade listening to their music in preference to anything else the contemporary scene had to offer.

To date, A Collection of Beatles Oldies is unique amongst the original EMI albums in never having been released on compact disc. At sixteen tracks, it was also, on release, the longest Beatles album, and the sound quality suffered somewhat from ‘groove cramming’. It contained one unique item in the form of ‘Bad Boy’, a leftover from the Help! album sessions that had previously been released in the USA but not here in Britain and would remain unavailable elsewhere until the 1988 CD compilation Past Masters. One other minor oddity concerned the song ‘From Me to You’ which had been remixed for stereo omitting John Lennon’s harmonica part; and a couple of the other tracks, originally released in mono, had been ‘electronically enhanced for stereo’ by George Martin.

These days, the album is largely superflous, all the material being available elsewhere, most notably the classic ‘red’ and ‘blue’ albums, reissued last year on CD. But I still own that original copy of Oldies... with its mid-70s black Parlophone label, and will give it a spin tonight, fifty years to the day if not the exact minute: because it’s where the Beatles story really got started for me.