With A Purposeful Grimace And A Terrible Sound....

And now for the main event: all this month I will be providing a retrospective on the original series of Godzilla films (1954-1975), reviewing them and even doing a little reminiscing about their place in my childhood and doubtless the childhoods of many. For this first post we’ll be looking at the origin of the King of the Monsters and appraising his first two movies, which were both made in the same decade and filmed in black and white. So put on your hazmat suit, cower in fear and prepare for the end of humanity because here comes

Godzilla MAYhem 

Part I: The Fifties 

The story of the creation of Godzilla is pretty well known, so I won’t go into too much detail here. As well as being an obviously potent symbol of the nuclear holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Godzilla was more directly inspired by the Lucky Dragon Incident, where in 1954 a Japanese fishing boat was exposed to radiation from an American nuclear test in the Pacific. Later that year Toho producer Tomoyuki Tanaka and director Ishiro Honda gave the nuclear threat to the human race physical form as a 50 meter tall, charcoal grey, reptilian nightmare named Gojira (or Godzilla).

1. Godzilla (1954)

The first Godzilla movie is very earnest and very grim. The titular monster is an unstoppable, rage filled, radiation spewing terror that represents the sins of humanity made flesh. Unlike later films which almost revel in the destruction of miniature sets and delight in fantastical monster battles, here everything is taken seriously – you are not meant to cheer Godzilla as he destroys Tokyo, you are meant to emphasize with the suffering of the victims. And yet, when he meets his end at the conclusion of the film one almost feels pity for the monster, who is not truly *evil*. Human beings are just doing what they need to in order to survive, just as Godzilla did what he naturally did – destroy.

Godzilla is a triumph for director Ishiro Honda. He lets the mystery and tension build through the first part of the film until the reveal of the monster, then lets the tension build again until the attack on Tokyo. Then he puts you right into the middle of it, letting you experience the horror firsthand. Composer Akira Ifukube gives cinema one of its finest scores – emotional, savage and memorable. This is one of the few instances where the orchestra being non polished is a good thing… the rough strings slicing through the opening theme, for instance, really lets you know what is going to come ahead. Takashi Shimura (who also starred in Seven Samurai that same year) gives a noble performance as a paleontologist who wants to study Godzilla but realizes in the end that he must be destroyed. The main protagonist of the film though is ultimately Dr. Serizawa, as played by Akihiko Hirata. It is he who must make the most painful decision of the movie – help to destroy Godzilla with his new Oxygen Destroyer device and risk unleashing a worse weapon on the world or declining to let his work be used as a weapon and watch Godzilla burn Japan. David Gerrold in his book The World of Star Trek pointed out that the key theme to any real drama is not “hero in danger” but “hero has a decision to make.” The decision that Dr. Serizawa makes at the end of the movie is saddening but logical. This would be the first and last Godzilla film to have any such real dramatic conflict (kind of – more on that in the next post).

Are there any flaws with Godzilla? Of course (no movie is perfect). There are occasional lapses in the special effects, great as they are (by the visionary Eiji Tsuburaya). Also, the love triangle between Serizawa, his fiancée Emiko and her lover is rather melodramatic… and boy does Emiko cry. A lot. As in, the drop of a hat. Oh well. It’s a great film anyway, a classic that you should see at some point in your life.

1.5 Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956)

In 1956 Godzilla was released in the United States as Godzilla, King of the Monsters. Adding footage of American actor Raymond Burr and snipping any mention of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US version is still watchable but not quite as potent. It’s actually kind of cheesy watching Burr as reporter Steve Martin (hah!) narrate Godzilla’s rampage through Tokyo, fretfully wiping his brow – I even remember thinking so as a kid when I saw it for the first time. Not bad, but in this age of DVD and Blu-Ray you can now see the original, so just stick with the original.

2. Godzilla Raids Again (1955)

The sequel is nowhere near as good. Directed by Motoyoshi Oda and scored by Masaru Sato (Kurosawa’s composer of choice from 1955 to 1965), Godzilla Raids Again ends up being almost a rehash of the first, which isn’t surprising considering it was released only a year after the first – presumably to cash in while the original was still in the minds of the public. Once again, there is a love triangle. Once again Godzilla rampages and destroys (duh). Once again a character will have to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to stop him. The only things different this time around are a) Godzilla trashes Osaka and not Tokyo (which would see it’s fair share of monster mayhem in the years to come, so don’t breathe easy yet, Tokyo), and b) he’s not alone.


Yes, this is the first Godzilla movie, and by extension the first Japanese monster movie to have a giant monster battle. Godzilla’s first of many opponents is Anguirus, a spiny ankylosaur-looking thing who will ironically enough become an ally later on in the 60s and 70s. Their fight is an interesting one: instead of the camera being over-cranked in order to make the action slower and “weightier”, footage for the monster scenes was accidentally under-cranked, meaning that Godzilla and Anguirus’ fights have a quick, almost feral look to them. Overall, Godzilla Raids Again is worth picking up if you’re a Godzilla or kaiju fan but don’t expect anything really special…

…unless of course you want to laugh your ass off, in which case watch the American version, released as Gigantis the Fire Monster. I’m not going to go into detail about how this turkey got made (zip on over to the Wikipedia real quick) but suffice to say this is one of the worst localizations ever… with dubbing to match. Because the producers wanted the English dub to match the lip movements of the original actors, some of the dialogue in this movie is bizzare, to say the least. In addition the main character (voiced by Keye Luke) will not shut the Hell up, and narrates everything, and I mean everything (“When I got back from my scouting trip I had to take a big dump. So I went to the toilet and crapped out a big one. It was kind of fat and very long, with some interesting speckles in it. Then I….”). Add to that a whole bunch of extraneous footage was pasted in from other sources, and the effect is about what you’d expect. It’s too bad the guys at Mystery Science Theater 3000 never got their hands on this. Oh well, if you have the DVD you can make fun of it with your friends – a great way to spend your Saturday night.


Well, that’s Godzilla in the fifties: a frightening nuclear menace terrorizing a country still recovering from World War II. Next time we’ll look at the Big G as he evolves during the early sixties into a reluctant anti-hero.