- Published on
COVER ART BY CHEUNG CHUNG TAT
For the first time ever on vinyl the full score to the legendary monster movie that started it all GODZILLA by AKIRA IFUKUBE
Death Waltz Recording Company are proud to be unearthing the legendary monster of our time and bringing him to vinyl in the shape of Akira Ifukube’s score to GODZILLA. Starkly different to the usual view of The Big G as the ultimate monster wrestler, Ifukube’s music is intense, dark, and reflects Ishiro Honda’s film as a pure horror film. While the score opens with the jaunty riff that would eventually become Godzilla’s Theme, the majority of the music alternates between pounding brass and mournful strings as we witness the death and destruction that comes in Godzilla’s wake.
Ifukube uses low string notes as a sinister motif to herald the arrival of the creature, and then turns up the brass to eleven, creating an atmosphere of pure apocalypse. More horrifying still are the piercing strings that score the oxygen destroyer, the device that would destroy Godzilla. Big laments are used as the characters question the use of the machine as a weapon of mass destruction, and it’s this remarkable human quality that infuses the score with its unique feel. Help us celebrate the sixtieth birthday of the greatest monster to walk the earth, and the powerhouse musical experience that is Akira Ifukube’s GODZILLA.
DELUXE GATEFOLD EDITION LTD TO 400 WORLDWIDE (£22.00)
180g Atomic Breath vinyl, housed in a heavyweight tip-on, case-bound gatefold jacket printed on beautiful textured Galtex Prima card containing an exclusive full colour booklet with liner notes by Japanse cinema expert Jasper Sharpe & Film On Wax Editor Charlie Bridgen , with exclusive art by Cheung Chung Tat wrapped in an OBI strip.
STANDARD EDITION LTD TO 400 WORLDWIDE (£17.00)
180g Green vinyl housed inside a 350gsm single pocket jacket with a poster.
Check out Death Waltz's site here (Note: These are not available in the US.)
TRACKLISTING
SIDE 1
Godzilla Approaches
Godzilla Main Title
Medley/ Ship Music / Sinking Of Eikou – Maru
Sinking Of Bingou Maru
Anxieties On Ootojima Island
Ootojima Temple Festival
Stormy Ootojima Island
Theme For Ootojima Island
Japanese Army March I
Horror Of The Water Tank
Godzilla Comes Ashore
SIDE 2
Godzilla’s Rampage
Desperate Broadcast
Godzilla Comes To Tokyo Bay
Intercept Godzilla
Tragic Sight Of The Imperial Capital
Oxygen Destroyer
Prayer For Peace
Japanese Army March II
Godzilla At The Ocean Floor
Ending
Secret Hidden Track
Also check out Empire Magazine to listen to the full soundtrack here.
Death Waltz Recording Company are proud to be unearthing the legendary monster of our time and bringing him to vinyl in the shape of Akira Ifukube’s score to GODZILLA. Starkly different to the usual view of The Big G as the ultimate monster wrestler, Ifukube’s music is intense, dark, and reflects Ishiro Honda’s film as a pure horror film. While the score opens with the jaunty riff that would eventually become Godzilla’s Theme, the majority of the music alternates between pounding brass and mournful strings as we witness the death and destruction that comes in Godzilla’s wake.
Ifukube uses low string notes as a sinister motif to herald the arrival of the creature, and then turns up the brass to eleven, creating an atmosphere of pure apocalypse. More horrifying still are the piercing strings that score the oxygen destroyer, the device that would destroy Godzilla. Big laments are used as the characters question the use of the machine as a weapon of mass destruction, and it’s this remarkable human quality that infuses the score with its unique feel. Help us celebrate the sixtieth birthday of the greatest monster to walk the earth, and the powerhouse musical experience that is Akira Ifukube’s GODZILLA.
DELUXE GATEFOLD EDITION LTD TO 400 WORLDWIDE (£22.00)
180g Atomic Breath vinyl, housed in a heavyweight tip-on, case-bound gatefold jacket printed on beautiful textured Galtex Prima card containing an exclusive full colour booklet with liner notes by Japanse cinema expert Jasper Sharpe & Film On Wax Editor Charlie Bridgen , with exclusive art by Cheung Chung Tat wrapped in an OBI strip.
STANDARD EDITION LTD TO 400 WORLDWIDE (£17.00)
180g Green vinyl housed inside a 350gsm single pocket jacket with a poster.
Check out Death Waltz's site here (Note: These are not available in the US.)
TRACKLISTING
SIDE 1
Godzilla Approaches
Godzilla Main Title
Medley/ Ship Music / Sinking Of Eikou – Maru
Sinking Of Bingou Maru
Anxieties On Ootojima Island
Ootojima Temple Festival
Stormy Ootojima Island
Theme For Ootojima Island
Japanese Army March I
Horror Of The Water Tank
Godzilla Comes Ashore
SIDE 2
Godzilla’s Rampage
Desperate Broadcast
Godzilla Comes To Tokyo Bay
Intercept Godzilla
Tragic Sight Of The Imperial Capital
Oxygen Destroyer
Prayer For Peace
Japanese Army March II
Godzilla At The Ocean Floor
Ending
Secret Hidden Track
Also check out Empire Magazine to listen to the full soundtrack here.
- Published on
From The Japan Times
“Godzilla” was the first Japanese movie I saw. It was also the first for many other American baby boomers, though we did not view Ishiro Honda’s 1954 original, but a version that had been heavily edited and dubbed for the U.S. market, with additional footage featuring Raymond Burr as an intrepid American reporter in Tokyo. This version was released in the U.S. in 1956 as “Godzilla, King of the Monsters!” and it became a big hit, opening the floodgates for other Japanese films starring various kaijū (giant monsters).
A little over a year later, this Americanized version was then imported back to Japan as “Kaiju o Gojira” (literally, “Monster King Godzilla”) and was received enthusiastically by local fans.
Since 1954, the”King of the Monsters” has appeared in 28 Toho films (and two big-budget Hollywood films, including Gareth Edwards’ new one, which opens in Tokyo on July 25), but has the old thrill gone?
Though crude by today’s CGI standards, the original Godzilla has retained his primitive power — he represents powerful forces, from the natural to the manmade, that humans struggle to control or understand.
In the 1954 film, the only effective weapon against Godzilla is the Oxygen Destroyer — itself so fearsome (it transforms living creatures into lifeless skeletons in seconds) that Dr. Serizawa, its conflicted creator, finally burns his research papers and ends his own life. He tries to put the dangerous genie back into the bottle, something the inventors and users of the atomic bomb knew was impossible.
I saw “Godzilla, King of the Monsters!” on television sometime during the late 1950′s and, though its anti-nuclear message flew over my 9-year-old head (as was intended by the U.S. producers, who had excised most of it from the film), it left a huge impression on me. Instead of beating my chest like King Kong, the other influential creature of my childhood, I took to terrorizing the ant colonies around our house with Godzilla-like stomps.
I wanted to be Godzilla, with all that destructive power at my command and the license to use it anyway I wanted, smashing Tokyo for the sheer naughty thrill of it.
Or at least that’s the way it seemed to me then. Seeing the original again recently as a digitally remastered version (that Toho will release locally on June 7), I found a film which was serious and sad — utterly unlike the cheesy, campy reputation the series acquired in its other Toho entries. (The last, Ryuhei Kitamura’s “Godzilla: Final Wars,” was released to a lukewarm box office reception in 2004.)
As has often been noted, “Godzilla” references the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with its stark scenes of destroyed cityscapes and radiated victims, as well as the tragic March 1954 encounter of a Japanese fishing boat, the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon 5), with fallout from a U.S. hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll. In the film, the radiation that sickens the sailors comes not from a bomb but a nuclear-radiated monster: Godzilla.
Though it’s obvious from the beginning that Godzilla is a stand-in for nuclear destruction, to a Japanese audience in ’54 — with World War II ending less than a decade earlier — his epic tromps through Tokyo, leaving flaming ruins in his path, would have reminded many of the fire-bombings unleashed by allied warplanes on major cities throughout the country. And older viewers may have associated his ground-rattling stomps with the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake that leveled much of Japan’s capital and caused an estimated 142,800 deaths.
That is, as a metaphor, Godzilla is somewhat mixed, but not one to be treated lightly, as every note of Akira Ifukube’s famous slashing score makes clear.
What is also apparent from the new, meticulously restored version, is that, far from being a B-grade cheapie, “Godzilla” was intended as a head-to-head challenge by Toho to Hollywood’s science fiction films, then popular with young fans. At the time, Toho was one of Japan’s leading studios in terms of talent (director Ishiro Honda’s mentor and friend Akira Kurosawa was on the payroll) and resources — both financial and technical.
At the same time, Toho effects wizard Eiji Tsuburaya and his staff did not have the sort of lengthy production schedule accorded to the makers of the 1953 Warner Brothers hit “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” which was a “Godzilla” inspiration that featured a stop-motion dinosaur awakened from its 100-million-year sleep by atomic explosions. Their solution — an actor in a Godzilla suit, trashing miniature cityscapes — became a series signature, if one that grew dated over the decades, as CGI technology made its relentless advance. Nonetheless, Toho effects technicians made doing more with less a sophisticated craft.
“The work that went into making Godzilla films astounded me,” comments Norman England, a lifelong Godzilla fan who worked on the six Godzilla films of the so-called Heisei era series, which streched from 1999 to 2004.
“You’d have dozens of people laboring for days on end just to make one brief shot of Godzilla’s foot smashing into a country hotel,” says England.
Also, though big, scaly and fire-breathing, the first Godzilla looks little like his latter incarnations, which have ranged from the grotesquely cute (including Godzilla’s bumpy-headed son, Minilla) to the atomically glowing and ferocious.
“A new suit is built for almost every film, with each somewhat different from the last.” England notes — which makes snarky fan nit-picking over the look of the title monster in Gareth Edwards’ new “Godzilla” seem beside the point. Yes, he’s bigger and bulkier than the original, but so are many latter Toho Godzillas. That is, he’s squarely within the series’ hypertrophied tradition, in contrast to the iguana-like beast in Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla film — an aberration rightly derided by Japanese fans.
Despite Dr. Serizawa’s sacrificial suicide in the original 1954 version, Godzilla returns in film after film, sometimes as humankind’s enemy and sometimes, as in the latest Hollywood iteration, its unlikely protector. England says that diversity is the character’s strength: “Godzilla has been everything: nuclear metaphor, the hero of humanity and even a parent.”
Toho is set to release a digitally remastered version of the original, viewable now as close to its pristine 1954 condition as 2014 technology can make it. The Gareth Edwards version may be the franchise’s biggest box-office monster ever — it earned nearly $200 million worldwide in its first weekend — but if you don’t know the first film, you don’t know Godzilla. And not, please, the one with Raymond Burr.
“Godzilla” was the first Japanese movie I saw. It was also the first for many other American baby boomers, though we did not view Ishiro Honda’s 1954 original, but a version that had been heavily edited and dubbed for the U.S. market, with additional footage featuring Raymond Burr as an intrepid American reporter in Tokyo. This version was released in the U.S. in 1956 as “Godzilla, King of the Monsters!” and it became a big hit, opening the floodgates for other Japanese films starring various kaijū (giant monsters).
A little over a year later, this Americanized version was then imported back to Japan as “Kaiju o Gojira” (literally, “Monster King Godzilla”) and was received enthusiastically by local fans.
Since 1954, the”King of the Monsters” has appeared in 28 Toho films (and two big-budget Hollywood films, including Gareth Edwards’ new one, which opens in Tokyo on July 25), but has the old thrill gone?
Though crude by today’s CGI standards, the original Godzilla has retained his primitive power — he represents powerful forces, from the natural to the manmade, that humans struggle to control or understand.
In the 1954 film, the only effective weapon against Godzilla is the Oxygen Destroyer — itself so fearsome (it transforms living creatures into lifeless skeletons in seconds) that Dr. Serizawa, its conflicted creator, finally burns his research papers and ends his own life. He tries to put the dangerous genie back into the bottle, something the inventors and users of the atomic bomb knew was impossible.
I saw “Godzilla, King of the Monsters!” on television sometime during the late 1950′s and, though its anti-nuclear message flew over my 9-year-old head (as was intended by the U.S. producers, who had excised most of it from the film), it left a huge impression on me. Instead of beating my chest like King Kong, the other influential creature of my childhood, I took to terrorizing the ant colonies around our house with Godzilla-like stomps.
I wanted to be Godzilla, with all that destructive power at my command and the license to use it anyway I wanted, smashing Tokyo for the sheer naughty thrill of it.
Or at least that’s the way it seemed to me then. Seeing the original again recently as a digitally remastered version (that Toho will release locally on June 7), I found a film which was serious and sad — utterly unlike the cheesy, campy reputation the series acquired in its other Toho entries. (The last, Ryuhei Kitamura’s “Godzilla: Final Wars,” was released to a lukewarm box office reception in 2004.)
As has often been noted, “Godzilla” references the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with its stark scenes of destroyed cityscapes and radiated victims, as well as the tragic March 1954 encounter of a Japanese fishing boat, the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon 5), with fallout from a U.S. hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll. In the film, the radiation that sickens the sailors comes not from a bomb but a nuclear-radiated monster: Godzilla.
Though it’s obvious from the beginning that Godzilla is a stand-in for nuclear destruction, to a Japanese audience in ’54 — with World War II ending less than a decade earlier — his epic tromps through Tokyo, leaving flaming ruins in his path, would have reminded many of the fire-bombings unleashed by allied warplanes on major cities throughout the country. And older viewers may have associated his ground-rattling stomps with the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake that leveled much of Japan’s capital and caused an estimated 142,800 deaths.
That is, as a metaphor, Godzilla is somewhat mixed, but not one to be treated lightly, as every note of Akira Ifukube’s famous slashing score makes clear.
What is also apparent from the new, meticulously restored version, is that, far from being a B-grade cheapie, “Godzilla” was intended as a head-to-head challenge by Toho to Hollywood’s science fiction films, then popular with young fans. At the time, Toho was one of Japan’s leading studios in terms of talent (director Ishiro Honda’s mentor and friend Akira Kurosawa was on the payroll) and resources — both financial and technical.
At the same time, Toho effects wizard Eiji Tsuburaya and his staff did not have the sort of lengthy production schedule accorded to the makers of the 1953 Warner Brothers hit “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” which was a “Godzilla” inspiration that featured a stop-motion dinosaur awakened from its 100-million-year sleep by atomic explosions. Their solution — an actor in a Godzilla suit, trashing miniature cityscapes — became a series signature, if one that grew dated over the decades, as CGI technology made its relentless advance. Nonetheless, Toho effects technicians made doing more with less a sophisticated craft.
“The work that went into making Godzilla films astounded me,” comments Norman England, a lifelong Godzilla fan who worked on the six Godzilla films of the so-called Heisei era series, which streched from 1999 to 2004.
“You’d have dozens of people laboring for days on end just to make one brief shot of Godzilla’s foot smashing into a country hotel,” says England.
Also, though big, scaly and fire-breathing, the first Godzilla looks little like his latter incarnations, which have ranged from the grotesquely cute (including Godzilla’s bumpy-headed son, Minilla) to the atomically glowing and ferocious.
“A new suit is built for almost every film, with each somewhat different from the last.” England notes — which makes snarky fan nit-picking over the look of the title monster in Gareth Edwards’ new “Godzilla” seem beside the point. Yes, he’s bigger and bulkier than the original, but so are many latter Toho Godzillas. That is, he’s squarely within the series’ hypertrophied tradition, in contrast to the iguana-like beast in Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla film — an aberration rightly derided by Japanese fans.
Despite Dr. Serizawa’s sacrificial suicide in the original 1954 version, Godzilla returns in film after film, sometimes as humankind’s enemy and sometimes, as in the latest Hollywood iteration, its unlikely protector. England says that diversity is the character’s strength: “Godzilla has been everything: nuclear metaphor, the hero of humanity and even a parent.”
Toho is set to release a digitally remastered version of the original, viewable now as close to its pristine 1954 condition as 2014 technology can make it. The Gareth Edwards version may be the franchise’s biggest box-office monster ever — it earned nearly $200 million worldwide in its first weekend — but if you don’t know the first film, you don’t know Godzilla. And not, please, the one with Raymond Burr.
- Published on
From NPR.org
There have been hundreds of monster movies over the years, but only a handful of enduringly great movie monsters. Of those, only two were created for the screen: King Kong, the giant ape atop the Empire State Building, and his Japanese heir, Godzilla, the city-flattening sea monster who's a genuinely terrific pop icon. He not only stars in movies — Hollywood is bringing out a new Godzilla on May 16 — but he's even played basketball with Charles Barkley in a commercial for Nike.
It's been six decades since Godzilla first hit the screen, and to celebrate the big guy's birthday, Rialto Pictures is releasing Ishiro Honda's 1954 original — in a restored, 60th-anniversary edition — in theaters. I've seen Godzilla many times since I was a kid, but watching it again, I was struck that it might be the best single film about the terrors of the nuclear age.
I suspect you know the plot. It begins when American H-bomb tests in the Pacific disturb the watery environment that's the home of Gojira, as the monster is called in Japanese. After sinking assorted ships, this enormous beast winds up in Tokyo, where he stomps on buildings, flosses with power lines and blasts citizens with his radioactive bad breath. When the army is unable to stop him, the only hope is a new invention called the Oxygen Destroyer. But its idealistic creator is reluctant to reveal it for fear it will become a weapon — just look at the destruction that followed from splitting the atom.
Yet even as the inventor says this, the movie itself is offering us the seductive spectacle of violent ruin. And make no mistake: Destruction is great to look at. There's an amoral pleasure to be had in watching Godzilla reduce Tokyo to fiery rubble, rather like the beauty of seeing those napalmed palm trees flare like matches in Apocalypse Now or the illicit thrill of seeing the White House get obliterated in Independence Day — before Sept. 11, of course. Quite clearly, it's this joy in destruction that helped make Godzilla influential, especially in Hollywood, which over the past half-century has fed the worldwide audience's appetite for images of spectacular violence.
That said, Godzilla's real strength lies not in its effects — impressive for the time — but in its underlying emotional and cultural seriousness. It's not simply that the music is often doleful rather than exciting or that we see doomed children set off Geiger counters. The movie has a gravity that comes from being created in a Japan that knew what it was to have children die from radiation poisoning and to see its capital city in flames. Both drawn to and terrified of the monster's power, the movie is steeped in Japan's traumatic historical experience. It has weight. It means something.
Godzilla's resonance is also inseparable from something else that once defined the best monster movies — a sense of compassion for the monster. Boris Karloff's Frankenstein may have been scary, but we also felt his frailty and fear at being hunted. King Kong was dangerous, sure, but his eyes were charged with almost human feeling when he gazed at Fay Wray. The same is true of Godzilla, who starts out wreaking havoc but, by the film's end, takes on a melancholy, sad-faced grandeur.
These days, our pop culture doesn't encourage such identification. Ever since Jaws and Alien and Predator, whose creatures are ruthless murder machines, our monsters have increasingly become soulless things to be destroyed. Consider today's favorite monster, the zombie. Although zombies could hardly seem more human — heck, they just were human — the walking dead have no individuality and run in packs. They basically exist to have their heads shot off in movies and TV shows that resemble video games.
Godzilla is not remotely like this. In Jim Shepard's wonderful short story "Gojira, King of the Monsters" — part of his collection titled You Think That's Bad — Shepard offers a fictionalized account of the making of the movie. At one point, Shepard has director Ishiro Honda explain why the vanquishing of Godzilla feels so sad, and his words sum up brilliantly what gives Godzilla its strange power. "By the time the movie ends," Honda says, "[Godzilla] is like a hero whose departure we regret. It's like part of us leaving. That's what makes it so hard. The monster the child knows best is the monster he feels himself to be."
There have been hundreds of monster movies over the years, but only a handful of enduringly great movie monsters. Of those, only two were created for the screen: King Kong, the giant ape atop the Empire State Building, and his Japanese heir, Godzilla, the city-flattening sea monster who's a genuinely terrific pop icon. He not only stars in movies — Hollywood is bringing out a new Godzilla on May 16 — but he's even played basketball with Charles Barkley in a commercial for Nike.
It's been six decades since Godzilla first hit the screen, and to celebrate the big guy's birthday, Rialto Pictures is releasing Ishiro Honda's 1954 original — in a restored, 60th-anniversary edition — in theaters. I've seen Godzilla many times since I was a kid, but watching it again, I was struck that it might be the best single film about the terrors of the nuclear age.
I suspect you know the plot. It begins when American H-bomb tests in the Pacific disturb the watery environment that's the home of Gojira, as the monster is called in Japanese. After sinking assorted ships, this enormous beast winds up in Tokyo, where he stomps on buildings, flosses with power lines and blasts citizens with his radioactive bad breath. When the army is unable to stop him, the only hope is a new invention called the Oxygen Destroyer. But its idealistic creator is reluctant to reveal it for fear it will become a weapon — just look at the destruction that followed from splitting the atom.
Yet even as the inventor says this, the movie itself is offering us the seductive spectacle of violent ruin. And make no mistake: Destruction is great to look at. There's an amoral pleasure to be had in watching Godzilla reduce Tokyo to fiery rubble, rather like the beauty of seeing those napalmed palm trees flare like matches in Apocalypse Now or the illicit thrill of seeing the White House get obliterated in Independence Day — before Sept. 11, of course. Quite clearly, it's this joy in destruction that helped make Godzilla influential, especially in Hollywood, which over the past half-century has fed the worldwide audience's appetite for images of spectacular violence.
That said, Godzilla's real strength lies not in its effects — impressive for the time — but in its underlying emotional and cultural seriousness. It's not simply that the music is often doleful rather than exciting or that we see doomed children set off Geiger counters. The movie has a gravity that comes from being created in a Japan that knew what it was to have children die from radiation poisoning and to see its capital city in flames. Both drawn to and terrified of the monster's power, the movie is steeped in Japan's traumatic historical experience. It has weight. It means something.
Godzilla's resonance is also inseparable from something else that once defined the best monster movies — a sense of compassion for the monster. Boris Karloff's Frankenstein may have been scary, but we also felt his frailty and fear at being hunted. King Kong was dangerous, sure, but his eyes were charged with almost human feeling when he gazed at Fay Wray. The same is true of Godzilla, who starts out wreaking havoc but, by the film's end, takes on a melancholy, sad-faced grandeur.
These days, our pop culture doesn't encourage such identification. Ever since Jaws and Alien and Predator, whose creatures are ruthless murder machines, our monsters have increasingly become soulless things to be destroyed. Consider today's favorite monster, the zombie. Although zombies could hardly seem more human — heck, they just were human — the walking dead have no individuality and run in packs. They basically exist to have their heads shot off in movies and TV shows that resemble video games.
Godzilla is not remotely like this. In Jim Shepard's wonderful short story "Gojira, King of the Monsters" — part of his collection titled You Think That's Bad — Shepard offers a fictionalized account of the making of the movie. At one point, Shepard has director Ishiro Honda explain why the vanquishing of Godzilla feels so sad, and his words sum up brilliantly what gives Godzilla its strange power. "By the time the movie ends," Honda says, "[Godzilla] is like a hero whose departure we regret. It's like part of us leaving. That's what makes it so hard. The monster the child knows best is the monster he feels himself to be."
- Published on
The original Godzilla/Gojira will be shown in Japan as it is being done here, there is the official website godzilla1954.jp with info on the movie, cast, theaters, and more. Below is the trailer for the new showings, the classic trailer, original poster, and promo banner for the showings.
- Published on
From Huffington Post
Godzilla is a multicultural icon. If there was a Coca-Cola commercial featuring monsters that sung the national anthem, he'd be singing his part in a mixture of English and Japanese. He's been terrorizing Tokyo for longer than Disneyland has been around. Over the span of 60 years, he's battled Earthlings, space monsters and robots, spawned offspring and chased Matthew Broderick, all while belting out the most iconic roar in film history. He's appeared in 28 Japanese films, a 1998 American film and an upcoming 2014 reboot, countless comic books, novels, video games and TV. That's an astounding feat of sustainability. The daikaiju has nestled in our hearts (and nightmares) carving out a permanent place in the annals of entertainment lore. But even more astounding is Godzilla's secret past. Where did Godzilla come from, and why? In anticipation of Godzilla 2014 hitting theaters May 16 (directed by Gareth Edwards, and starring Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Olsen and Ken Watanabe), here's a brief guide to the monster's origin story. The truth may actually blow your mind.
Godzilla is the original radioactive superhero -- or antihero, in this case. The reptilian giant was born out of a genre of Japanese film called Hibakusha Cinema, developed in the unique cultural climate of post-war Japan. At the time, there were several prominent factors at the forefront of popular thought, a brief examination of which makes it easy to see what exactly led to the monster's development. The first, and most influential, was the fear of radiation and the potential long-term effects of the atomic bombings. Godzilla first appeared in the 1954 film, Gojira, directed by Ishiro Honda. Charlotte Eubanks, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Japanese at The Pennsylvania State University, elaborated on the widespread cultural anxiety at the time of the film's release:
During the U.S.-led occupation, which lasted until 1952, there was a moratorium on any press coverage dealing with the atomic aftermath in any in-depth way. The thinking was that too much attention to the atomic bombings would derail democratization efforts and would undermine U.S. authority, particularly since the U.S. had already begun using Japanese territory as a base from which to launch bombing raids on Vietnam. With the end of the occupation, some activists and journalists started to deal directly with the atomic bombings, but they were not getting much traction. People were more interested in trying to rebuild. But then there was a real game-changer. The U.S. conducted a nuclear test over the Bikini atoll and a Japanese fishing ship, the Lucky Dragon, its crew, and all their fish were exposed to the fallout radiation. When this hit the newspapers, it ignited an enormous scare, as people throughout the country feared that they had been exposed to nuclear radiation through consuming tainted fish. That was in March 1954, shortly before the release of Gojira, the opening scene of which features a fishing crew exposed to an unexplained, destructive flash of light. So, when that hit the big screens, it touched a real nerve with the Japanese public.
The short-term effects of radiation were already clearly visible in the individuals who had survived the blasts but had not been spared from the effects of radiation poisoning. This unfortunate group would become known as Hibakusha, which translates colloquially to "bomb-affected person." Hibakusha expressed a range of symptoms relative to their exposure. Some of them died shortly after the bombings from severe radiation sickness. Others of them developed radiation burn scars, along with a host of other symptoms that went undiagnosed and unexplored due to social prejudices. They would live ostracised lives, shunned by mainstream society. Even now, Hibakusha remain a taboo, and avoidance is the unofficial national policy. The fact that Godzilla is a giant Hibakusha should not go unnoticed. He's a reminder of the destructive power of radiation, and the transformative properties of the atomic bomb's devastation.
Stephen D. Sullivan, author of Daikaiju Attack (a giant monster novel) and numerous other books and comics, including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, has this to say about the creature's origin:
Godzilla, both the character and the film, are a reflection on the Japanese experience at the end of World War II: destruction beyond imagining, and a lurking sense that "We brought this on ourselves" somehow, even without meaning to. In the film we see both the guilt, the feeling that the punishment perhaps outweighs the sin, and the striving for redemption, all of which are typical for such stories. In some ways, there's a similar arc in the origin of Spider-Man: radioactive accidental origin, great power used without regard for consequence (personal profit for Spidey), punishment out of proportion (the death of Uncle Ben), and eventual redemption as a hero.
Humanity has long had a twisted fascination spawning from deep-seated fears of a destructive monster, one so great as to annihilate whole societies indiscriminately. The Hindu religion expressed this idea in the form of the god Shiva, who is the destroyer of the self, of negative aspects of an individual, and ultimately of the Universe. In popular literature, the concept is commonly associated with the fiction of Lovecraft and his Cthulu mythos. Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, famously recited a line from the Bhagavad Gita uttered by Krishna, an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu (himself a creator and destroyer). Upon witnessing the destructive power of the bomb, Oppenheimer paraphrased the deity: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." The religious climate of Japan owes a great deal to its forerunners in Buddhism -- India and China -- who, in turn, owe a great deal to Hindu teachings. In some cases, Hindu pantheons have been completely adopted by Buddhist sects, ensuring the propagation of certain concepts into future generations of practitioners. Godzilla could very well represent one such concept, in the form of a destructive and indiscriminate deity born of Hindu philosophy and adopted into Buddhist thought.
Godzilla is a multicultural icon. If there was a Coca-Cola commercial featuring monsters that sung the national anthem, he'd be singing his part in a mixture of English and Japanese. He's been terrorizing Tokyo for longer than Disneyland has been around. Over the span of 60 years, he's battled Earthlings, space monsters and robots, spawned offspring and chased Matthew Broderick, all while belting out the most iconic roar in film history. He's appeared in 28 Japanese films, a 1998 American film and an upcoming 2014 reboot, countless comic books, novels, video games and TV. That's an astounding feat of sustainability. The daikaiju has nestled in our hearts (and nightmares) carving out a permanent place in the annals of entertainment lore. But even more astounding is Godzilla's secret past. Where did Godzilla come from, and why? In anticipation of Godzilla 2014 hitting theaters May 16 (directed by Gareth Edwards, and starring Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Olsen and Ken Watanabe), here's a brief guide to the monster's origin story. The truth may actually blow your mind.
Godzilla is the original radioactive superhero -- or antihero, in this case. The reptilian giant was born out of a genre of Japanese film called Hibakusha Cinema, developed in the unique cultural climate of post-war Japan. At the time, there were several prominent factors at the forefront of popular thought, a brief examination of which makes it easy to see what exactly led to the monster's development. The first, and most influential, was the fear of radiation and the potential long-term effects of the atomic bombings. Godzilla first appeared in the 1954 film, Gojira, directed by Ishiro Honda. Charlotte Eubanks, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Japanese at The Pennsylvania State University, elaborated on the widespread cultural anxiety at the time of the film's release:
During the U.S.-led occupation, which lasted until 1952, there was a moratorium on any press coverage dealing with the atomic aftermath in any in-depth way. The thinking was that too much attention to the atomic bombings would derail democratization efforts and would undermine U.S. authority, particularly since the U.S. had already begun using Japanese territory as a base from which to launch bombing raids on Vietnam. With the end of the occupation, some activists and journalists started to deal directly with the atomic bombings, but they were not getting much traction. People were more interested in trying to rebuild. But then there was a real game-changer. The U.S. conducted a nuclear test over the Bikini atoll and a Japanese fishing ship, the Lucky Dragon, its crew, and all their fish were exposed to the fallout radiation. When this hit the newspapers, it ignited an enormous scare, as people throughout the country feared that they had been exposed to nuclear radiation through consuming tainted fish. That was in March 1954, shortly before the release of Gojira, the opening scene of which features a fishing crew exposed to an unexplained, destructive flash of light. So, when that hit the big screens, it touched a real nerve with the Japanese public.
The short-term effects of radiation were already clearly visible in the individuals who had survived the blasts but had not been spared from the effects of radiation poisoning. This unfortunate group would become known as Hibakusha, which translates colloquially to "bomb-affected person." Hibakusha expressed a range of symptoms relative to their exposure. Some of them died shortly after the bombings from severe radiation sickness. Others of them developed radiation burn scars, along with a host of other symptoms that went undiagnosed and unexplored due to social prejudices. They would live ostracised lives, shunned by mainstream society. Even now, Hibakusha remain a taboo, and avoidance is the unofficial national policy. The fact that Godzilla is a giant Hibakusha should not go unnoticed. He's a reminder of the destructive power of radiation, and the transformative properties of the atomic bomb's devastation.
Stephen D. Sullivan, author of Daikaiju Attack (a giant monster novel) and numerous other books and comics, including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, has this to say about the creature's origin:
Godzilla, both the character and the film, are a reflection on the Japanese experience at the end of World War II: destruction beyond imagining, and a lurking sense that "We brought this on ourselves" somehow, even without meaning to. In the film we see both the guilt, the feeling that the punishment perhaps outweighs the sin, and the striving for redemption, all of which are typical for such stories. In some ways, there's a similar arc in the origin of Spider-Man: radioactive accidental origin, great power used without regard for consequence (personal profit for Spidey), punishment out of proportion (the death of Uncle Ben), and eventual redemption as a hero.
Humanity has long had a twisted fascination spawning from deep-seated fears of a destructive monster, one so great as to annihilate whole societies indiscriminately. The Hindu religion expressed this idea in the form of the god Shiva, who is the destroyer of the self, of negative aspects of an individual, and ultimately of the Universe. In popular literature, the concept is commonly associated with the fiction of Lovecraft and his Cthulu mythos. Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, famously recited a line from the Bhagavad Gita uttered by Krishna, an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu (himself a creator and destroyer). Upon witnessing the destructive power of the bomb, Oppenheimer paraphrased the deity: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." The religious climate of Japan owes a great deal to its forerunners in Buddhism -- India and China -- who, in turn, owe a great deal to Hindu teachings. In some cases, Hindu pantheons have been completely adopted by Buddhist sects, ensuring the propagation of certain concepts into future generations of practitioners. Godzilla could very well represent one such concept, in the form of a destructive and indiscriminate deity born of Hindu philosophy and adopted into Buddhist thought.
The final piece of the creature's origin story is an all-too familiar tale in the modern age. It's the story of human progress. Nature vs. Technology. What happens when man, through its incessant meddling, makes that long-awaited mistake that ultimately brings the Earth to its knees? Bringing our own species to the brink of extinction has long been a favorite subject of science fiction stories, and Godzilla is a prime example. Technology either awoke the monster from its slumbers deep beneath the ocean or outright created it. We know that, at the very least, Godzilla's exposure to radiation increased his destructive power; the blue flame he spews is known as his "atomic blast." And the creature rejuvenates his powers by sopping up the electromagnetic fields harnessed by crashing through electrical lines and power stations.
Says Eubanks: The basic premise of Gojira, the original 1954 version, is that nuclear testing in the Pacific has awakened a terrible dinosaur which, in its wrath, is bent on destroying Tokyo. But, as Barak Kushner and others have noted, the film isn't so much about destruction as it is about fear. Look at any screen shot of the movie, and pretty much every single person wears an expression of utter terror. This is true whether you're talking about the scene where the radio reporter is declaiming into his microphone right up to the moment when the monster crushes him, or you're talking about quieter scenes with the scientist in his lab.
Godzilla is many things, a product of the environment that created him. In our haste to make action-adventure blockbusters, we shouldn't forget the tangible sorrow that follows in the creature's wake. He is a symbol of destruction, prejudice and arrogance. In post-war Japan, Godzilla was a symbol of the side-effects of international conflict. A punishment brought on by the senseless brutality demonstrated through an abuse of technological progress. In the decades since his creature, Godzilla has become invariably changed.
Says Sullivan:It almost seems inevitable, though, that bad guys we love become good guys. I think that maybe, as fans, we tire of rooting for 'bad,' and, sensing that, the storytellers tend to drift toward making their creations more likable. So, eventually, Godzilla no longer stomps cities (except when under control by evil aliens), and, instead, fights the enemies of mankind in wide open spaces in the mountains of Japan, or even on another planet. I guess turning from anti-hero to hero is the price of popularity. And don't we all love a good redemption story?
Godzilla 2014 releases May 16. It isn't entirely clear how the upcoming movie will portray the scaly lizard, but from the marketing materials, it looks like they're gunning for a return to Godzilla's atomic origins. I only hope that the movie also showcases the gritty and unavoidable truths that led to the real-life formation of the monster.
Says Eubanks: The basic premise of Gojira, the original 1954 version, is that nuclear testing in the Pacific has awakened a terrible dinosaur which, in its wrath, is bent on destroying Tokyo. But, as Barak Kushner and others have noted, the film isn't so much about destruction as it is about fear. Look at any screen shot of the movie, and pretty much every single person wears an expression of utter terror. This is true whether you're talking about the scene where the radio reporter is declaiming into his microphone right up to the moment when the monster crushes him, or you're talking about quieter scenes with the scientist in his lab.
Godzilla is many things, a product of the environment that created him. In our haste to make action-adventure blockbusters, we shouldn't forget the tangible sorrow that follows in the creature's wake. He is a symbol of destruction, prejudice and arrogance. In post-war Japan, Godzilla was a symbol of the side-effects of international conflict. A punishment brought on by the senseless brutality demonstrated through an abuse of technological progress. In the decades since his creature, Godzilla has become invariably changed.
Says Sullivan:It almost seems inevitable, though, that bad guys we love become good guys. I think that maybe, as fans, we tire of rooting for 'bad,' and, sensing that, the storytellers tend to drift toward making their creations more likable. So, eventually, Godzilla no longer stomps cities (except when under control by evil aliens), and, instead, fights the enemies of mankind in wide open spaces in the mountains of Japan, or even on another planet. I guess turning from anti-hero to hero is the price of popularity. And don't we all love a good redemption story?
Godzilla 2014 releases May 16. It isn't entirely clear how the upcoming movie will portray the scaly lizard, but from the marketing materials, it looks like they're gunning for a return to Godzilla's atomic origins. I only hope that the movie also showcases the gritty and unavoidable truths that led to the real-life formation of the monster.
- Published on
Godzilla vs Biollante Screening
and Model & Camera Demonstration
Date:
May 3rd 2014
Location:
JACCC Aratani Theatre (Ticket is available on JACCC's website)
244 South San Pedro Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Phone: (213) 628-2725
Show Time:
3pm: 1st Screeing (English Dubbed)
6pm: 2nd Screeing (Japanese Audio w/English Sub)
Admisston:
$12.00 for adults
Free for children 12 years and under
Special Guest:
Mr. Kawakita, Director of Special Effects
Mr. Iwasakai, Marbling Fine Arts Co.
Godzilla vs. Biollante is a Japanese Tokusatsu Kaiju film made in 1989. Directed by Koichi Kawakita. Director Koichi Kawakita and Mr. Iwasaki will apper all way from Japan
"Godzilla or Biollante, whichever the winner is going to be the enemy...."
Story
Dr. Shiragami has been genetically engineering a form of indestructible plant life using a rare supply of Godzilla cells. This experiment has brought a strange new form of plant life into existence: Biollante, massive, yet peaceful in every way…until Godzilla returns to wreak havoc upon Japan. It is only then that something within Biollante stirs and the plant must fight to save her creator and the land she loves. It's the super-beast Battle of the Century when Godzilla and explosive fight to the finish.
and Model & Camera Demonstration
Date:
May 3rd 2014
Location:
JACCC Aratani Theatre (Ticket is available on JACCC's website)
244 South San Pedro Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Phone: (213) 628-2725
Show Time:
3pm: 1st Screeing (English Dubbed)
6pm: 2nd Screeing (Japanese Audio w/English Sub)
Admisston:
$12.00 for adults
Free for children 12 years and under
Special Guest:
Mr. Kawakita, Director of Special Effects
Mr. Iwasakai, Marbling Fine Arts Co.
Godzilla vs. Biollante is a Japanese Tokusatsu Kaiju film made in 1989. Directed by Koichi Kawakita. Director Koichi Kawakita and Mr. Iwasaki will apper all way from Japan
"Godzilla or Biollante, whichever the winner is going to be the enemy...."
Story
Dr. Shiragami has been genetically engineering a form of indestructible plant life using a rare supply of Godzilla cells. This experiment has brought a strange new form of plant life into existence: Biollante, massive, yet peaceful in every way…until Godzilla returns to wreak havoc upon Japan. It is only then that something within Biollante stirs and the plant must fight to save her creator and the land she loves. It's the super-beast Battle of the Century when Godzilla and explosive fight to the finish.
"G" In Jungle Event
If you are a true Tokusatsu film fan, come on join us at Entertainment Hobby Shop Jungle after screening. We will have Director Kawakita and Mr. Iwasaki for Panel, Q & A and Special screening "Nendo no Kamisama", 15 minutes short Tokusatsu film directed by Mr. Kawakita and the miniature model for the film was done by Mr. Iwasaki. This movie will be shown exclusively at Jungle.
Date:
May 3rd 2014
Location:
Entertainment Hobby Shop Jungle (Anime Jungle)
319 East 2nd Street #103, Los Angeles, 90012
Phone: (213)621-1661
Time:
9:00pm
Admission: Free (Maxmum capacity: 150, First come-first serve basis)
Event Contents: Panel Discussion, Q&A, Nendono Kamisama Screening, etc
If you are a true Tokusatsu film fan, come on join us at Entertainment Hobby Shop Jungle after screening. We will have Director Kawakita and Mr. Iwasaki for Panel, Q & A and Special screening "Nendo no Kamisama", 15 minutes short Tokusatsu film directed by Mr. Kawakita and the miniature model for the film was done by Mr. Iwasaki. This movie will be shown exclusively at Jungle.
Date:
May 3rd 2014
Location:
Entertainment Hobby Shop Jungle (Anime Jungle)
319 East 2nd Street #103, Los Angeles, 90012
Phone: (213)621-1661
Time:
9:00pm
Admission: Free (Maxmum capacity: 150, First come-first serve basis)
Event Contents: Panel Discussion, Q&A, Nendono Kamisama Screening, etc
These four exclusive posters will be available only at this event!! Do not miss out!!
- Published on
From The New Yorker by Richard Brody
My artistic career was ended by Godzilla—as a child monster-movie maniac, I stopped attending painting classes when the long-awaited film (the American version, of course, starring Raymond Burr) showed up on Saturday-morning television. So I take the weeklong run of the Burr-free 1954 Japanese-language original, which begins today at Film Forum, personally. I missed the 2004 screenings of the restoration, so this revival is a welcome chance to catch up with it, and the experience is surprising.
The first surprise is that the original version, directed by Ishiro Honda, is not a kids’ movie, not a hectic teen goof, not a grindhouse shocker but a serious drama of politics, romance, and conscience (both civic and intimate). The two versions are offered together in Criterion’s DVD double set, and it’s a commonplace that, in the Hollywood version, from 1956, the movie’s cautionary doings—regarding undersea nuclear testing, the nerve-jangling threat of atomic weapons, and Japan’s enduring trauma at being their victim—are drastically toned down, and its bitterness toward the United States for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is elided. In the Japanese version, a parliamentary discussion of the monster’s attacks devolves into fury when an official suggests suppressing the nuclear origins of Godzilla’s return—in order not to damage “diplomatic relations”—and the families of victims react with outrage.
Secrecy—one of the major themes in the Japanese cinema, via the depiction of rigid social codes that impede the uninhibited expression of emotion in private life—plays a major role in “Godzilla,” too (in both versions). The one weapon that might prove effective against the colossus is the work of a reclusive scientist, who discloses his invention to the woman he loves—the daughter of a paleontologist who’s part of the official response team—but she, for her part, is in love with another man, a young shipping-line official who is also involved in the battle.
My artistic career was ended by Godzilla—as a child monster-movie maniac, I stopped attending painting classes when the long-awaited film (the American version, of course, starring Raymond Burr) showed up on Saturday-morning television. So I take the weeklong run of the Burr-free 1954 Japanese-language original, which begins today at Film Forum, personally. I missed the 2004 screenings of the restoration, so this revival is a welcome chance to catch up with it, and the experience is surprising.
The first surprise is that the original version, directed by Ishiro Honda, is not a kids’ movie, not a hectic teen goof, not a grindhouse shocker but a serious drama of politics, romance, and conscience (both civic and intimate). The two versions are offered together in Criterion’s DVD double set, and it’s a commonplace that, in the Hollywood version, from 1956, the movie’s cautionary doings—regarding undersea nuclear testing, the nerve-jangling threat of atomic weapons, and Japan’s enduring trauma at being their victim—are drastically toned down, and its bitterness toward the United States for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is elided. In the Japanese version, a parliamentary discussion of the monster’s attacks devolves into fury when an official suggests suppressing the nuclear origins of Godzilla’s return—in order not to damage “diplomatic relations”—and the families of victims react with outrage.
Secrecy—one of the major themes in the Japanese cinema, via the depiction of rigid social codes that impede the uninhibited expression of emotion in private life—plays a major role in “Godzilla,” too (in both versions). The one weapon that might prove effective against the colossus is the work of a reclusive scientist, who discloses his invention to the woman he loves—the daughter of a paleontologist who’s part of the official response team—but she, for her part, is in love with another man, a young shipping-line official who is also involved in the battle.
There are two greater secrets at work in the original, and they’re absent from the American version: the scientist’s crisis of conscience over the prospect that he has created a weapon of mass destruction that will, like nuclear arms, inevitably proliferate, and the paleontologist’s desire to preserve the monster not just (as in the American version) for disinterested scientific study but to extract the secret of its resistance to radiation. In short, the rational hero of the original, a principled technocrat, rues the combat against a monster that’s laying waste to the country because he thinks that it may hold the key to Japan’s surviving a greater threat, nuclear war. (In response, the young shipping executive disagrees, deeming Godzilla “no different from the H-bomb hanging over our heads.”)
The second surprise is that—despite the many scenes, themes, and touches that are missing—the hacked-up and adulterated American version is better. It starts with an American journalist named Steve Martin (played by Burr), who is injured in Godzilla’s attack on Tokyo and turns the story into his extended flashback and first-person account. The additional footage featuring Martin and a few other added characters (notably, Martin’s friend, a Japanese officer, played by Frank Iwanaga) was directed by Terry Morse, flatly and unimaginatively, but the splicing is sufficiently deft, and Burr’s crackling voice-over covers the gaps—and, even more important, his voice creates a point of view and reveals a means of transmission. Martin mediates the movie and, in the process, gives it a kick of modernity. The story of Godzilla is the story of the attack’s reporting, of how a series of events coalesces into a narrative—and the single best moment in both versions takes place during Godzilla’s assault on Tokyo, when Martin expects to be killed and, in the hope of leaving a record of the events, brings out a suitcase-size reel-to-reel deck and records, in real time, a testamentary narration on tape. (The second-best thing is the surprisingly mournful, non-stirring music in the climactic hunt, which is the same in both versions.)
The flashback structure thwarts the incremental experience of Godzilla’s menace, the element of surprise within the suspense. What it especially sacrifices is shock, the sheer terror at the scope of destruction, which, in the English-language version, is apparent at the outset, as in a report of an actual disaster: the news has broken in a headline, the full story fills in the details, and it arrives by way of an intrepid and heroic reporter, the extra variable in the Godzilla event who’s subject to it yet remains outside it even as he defines it.
The second surprise is that—despite the many scenes, themes, and touches that are missing—the hacked-up and adulterated American version is better. It starts with an American journalist named Steve Martin (played by Burr), who is injured in Godzilla’s attack on Tokyo and turns the story into his extended flashback and first-person account. The additional footage featuring Martin and a few other added characters (notably, Martin’s friend, a Japanese officer, played by Frank Iwanaga) was directed by Terry Morse, flatly and unimaginatively, but the splicing is sufficiently deft, and Burr’s crackling voice-over covers the gaps—and, even more important, his voice creates a point of view and reveals a means of transmission. Martin mediates the movie and, in the process, gives it a kick of modernity. The story of Godzilla is the story of the attack’s reporting, of how a series of events coalesces into a narrative—and the single best moment in both versions takes place during Godzilla’s assault on Tokyo, when Martin expects to be killed and, in the hope of leaving a record of the events, brings out a suitcase-size reel-to-reel deck and records, in real time, a testamentary narration on tape. (The second-best thing is the surprisingly mournful, non-stirring music in the climactic hunt, which is the same in both versions.)
The flashback structure thwarts the incremental experience of Godzilla’s menace, the element of surprise within the suspense. What it especially sacrifices is shock, the sheer terror at the scope of destruction, which, in the English-language version, is apparent at the outset, as in a report of an actual disaster: the news has broken in a headline, the full story fills in the details, and it arrives by way of an intrepid and heroic reporter, the extra variable in the Godzilla event who’s subject to it yet remains outside it even as he defines it.
The third surprise is that I don’t think that either “Godzilla” is near the top of the genre, or is especially classical for anything other than iconic value—I think that the creature is famous for signifying the great movie monster without actually being one. The main problem is that Godzilla itself isn’t very interesting. The monster is a principle of pure destruction: it’s not feeding on human flesh or farm animals or asphalt or electricity; it’s just laying waste to whatever’s in its path, stomping and swatting and smashing and exhaling a fiery dragon breath for the sheer hell of it. In theory, the idea of a nihilistic monster is as good as the idea of a reflective one, a tormented one, or a hungry one—provided that it’s developed. Godzilla, the lord of the land and sea, has no objective, no goal, no guiding principle; it has been jolted from its somnolence, its habitat has been despoiled, and now it despoils ours. Godzilla is a premise, a device, and a look, but not a being; for all its violence, it’s essentially static.
Monsters are the realm of the child’s psyche, the projection of inchoate fears in concrete, quasi-personified forms, and even the ones that are meant for adults resonate with the unconscious. Incomprehension battles with comprehension, the unexpressed conflicts with the desire to see, the near-ridiculous and the audaciously comical arise from the gravest horrors and the deepest fears. That’s why the tabloid hysteria of drive-in sci-fi and the inspired regressiveness of Jerry Lewis and Frank Tashlin make for fifties monsters of unabated fecundity and enduring power. Where monster matters turn sternly adult, it takes backroom gameswomanship in the vein of Howard Hawks’s “The Thing from Another World” to play up the genre’s exotic overtones.
The earnest sobriety of “Godzilla” gets in the way—it thwarts both the histrionically but authentically puerile and the dangerously, irreparably adult. It is, for the worse, a serious movie. The morning I dropped art school for the broadcast of “Godzilla” left me feeling foolish for falling for the hype; the movie was a disappointment then and, nearly half a century later, it disappoints still.
Monsters are the realm of the child’s psyche, the projection of inchoate fears in concrete, quasi-personified forms, and even the ones that are meant for adults resonate with the unconscious. Incomprehension battles with comprehension, the unexpressed conflicts with the desire to see, the near-ridiculous and the audaciously comical arise from the gravest horrors and the deepest fears. That’s why the tabloid hysteria of drive-in sci-fi and the inspired regressiveness of Jerry Lewis and Frank Tashlin make for fifties monsters of unabated fecundity and enduring power. Where monster matters turn sternly adult, it takes backroom gameswomanship in the vein of Howard Hawks’s “The Thing from Another World” to play up the genre’s exotic overtones.
The earnest sobriety of “Godzilla” gets in the way—it thwarts both the histrionically but authentically puerile and the dangerously, irreparably adult. It is, for the worse, a serious movie. The morning I dropped art school for the broadcast of “Godzilla” left me feeling foolish for falling for the hype; the movie was a disappointment then and, nearly half a century later, it disappoints still.
- Published on
From Turner Classic Movies
Thursdays this June, the cable station Turner Classic Movies will be airing a series of “Drive-In Double Features” of monster movies from the 1950s and 60s such as THEM!, THE VALLEY OF GWANGI, THE BLOB, TARANTULA, THE BEAST FROM 20000 FATHOMS, and THE THING. The lineup features fifteen movies never before aired on TCM, including four favorites from the Golden Age of Japanese movie monsters… GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS, RODAN, GHIDORAH THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER, and GODZILLA VS MONSTER ZERO. Also on the schedule are Toho’s THE H-MAN and the Japanese/American co-production THE MANSTER. All will be shown in their English language, US release versions.
Check the TCM website for the complete list of “Drive-In Double Features”.
TCM Japanese Monster Movie Schedule for June, 2011
Thursday, June 2
8:00 PM EST- GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS (1954/1956)
Nuclear tests awaken a prehistoric monster. Director: Ishiro Honda. Cast: Raymond Burr, Takashi Shimura, Momoko Kochi, Akira Takarada, Akihiko Hirata.
9:45 PM EST- RODAN (1956/1957)
Miners uncover the nest of a giant pterodactyl. Director: Ishiro Honda. Cast: Kenji Sahara, Yumi Shirakawa, Akihiko Hirata.
11:15 PM EST- GHIDORAH, THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER (1964/1965)
Mothra, Godzilla and Rodan join forces to take on a space monster. Director: Ishiro Honda. Cast: Yosuke Natsuki, Yuriko Hoshi, Hiroshi Koizumi, Akiko Wakabayashi.
1:00 AM EST- GODZILLA VS MONSTER ZERO (1965/1970)
Aliens try to use Godzilla, King Ghidorah and Rodan to take over the Earth. Director: Ishiro Honda. Cast: Nick Adams, Akira Takarada, Kumi Mizuno, Akira Kubo.
Thursday, June 16
3:30 AM EST- THE MANSTER (1958/1962)
A mad scientist turns a reporter into a two-headed killer. Director: George P. Breakston. Cast: Peter Dyneley, Jane Hylton, Satoshi Nakamura, Jerry Ito.
Thursday, June 30
9:30 PM EST- THE H-MAN (1958/1959)
Nuclear tests create a radioactive man who can turn people into slime. Director: Ishiro Honda. Cast: Yumi Shirakawa, Kenji Sahara, Akihiko Hirata.
Thursdays this June, the cable station Turner Classic Movies will be airing a series of “Drive-In Double Features” of monster movies from the 1950s and 60s such as THEM!, THE VALLEY OF GWANGI, THE BLOB, TARANTULA, THE BEAST FROM 20000 FATHOMS, and THE THING. The lineup features fifteen movies never before aired on TCM, including four favorites from the Golden Age of Japanese movie monsters… GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS, RODAN, GHIDORAH THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER, and GODZILLA VS MONSTER ZERO. Also on the schedule are Toho’s THE H-MAN and the Japanese/American co-production THE MANSTER. All will be shown in their English language, US release versions.
Check the TCM website for the complete list of “Drive-In Double Features”.
TCM Japanese Monster Movie Schedule for June, 2011
Thursday, June 2
8:00 PM EST- GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS (1954/1956)
Nuclear tests awaken a prehistoric monster. Director: Ishiro Honda. Cast: Raymond Burr, Takashi Shimura, Momoko Kochi, Akira Takarada, Akihiko Hirata.
9:45 PM EST- RODAN (1956/1957)
Miners uncover the nest of a giant pterodactyl. Director: Ishiro Honda. Cast: Kenji Sahara, Yumi Shirakawa, Akihiko Hirata.
11:15 PM EST- GHIDORAH, THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER (1964/1965)
Mothra, Godzilla and Rodan join forces to take on a space monster. Director: Ishiro Honda. Cast: Yosuke Natsuki, Yuriko Hoshi, Hiroshi Koizumi, Akiko Wakabayashi.
1:00 AM EST- GODZILLA VS MONSTER ZERO (1965/1970)
Aliens try to use Godzilla, King Ghidorah and Rodan to take over the Earth. Director: Ishiro Honda. Cast: Nick Adams, Akira Takarada, Kumi Mizuno, Akira Kubo.
Thursday, June 16
3:30 AM EST- THE MANSTER (1958/1962)
A mad scientist turns a reporter into a two-headed killer. Director: George P. Breakston. Cast: Peter Dyneley, Jane Hylton, Satoshi Nakamura, Jerry Ito.
Thursday, June 30
9:30 PM EST- THE H-MAN (1958/1959)
Nuclear tests create a radioactive man who can turn people into slime. Director: Ishiro Honda. Cast: Yumi Shirakawa, Kenji Sahara, Akihiko Hirata.