Welcome, whoever you are, to this blog about giant monster movies.
Once a week over the course of 2024, in chronological order of cinematic release, I’ll post something about a movie, or occasionally about more than one. The blog won’t be exhaustive, by any means, although I do intend to cover all the Japanese Godzilla movies. Why? Because it’s the 70th anniversary year of Godzilla (1954), of course!
Up front, let’s clarify what this blog is and is not. It’s not about reviewing the movies (or not only that) – I’m not interested in rating and ranking them. I am interested in laying out my thoughts on them and hopefully sharing some of what excites me about them.
Why this? Why giant monster movies? I realise no one’s likely to think of them as High Art (barring, possibly and only on public holidays, the original King Kong (1933) and Godzilla (1954)), but what does High Art really tell us? High Art, in any medium, is rarely anything more than a way for middle-class people to show off to other middle-class people how clever they are. Pop culture actually tells us something about the world in which it was made. The creators are rarely expounding their grand vision at their leisure and are more likely struggling to churn out something entertaining on a budget and to a deadline. They might put in some intended socio-political message, but they’re as likely or more likely to reflect the prevailing mood without thinking about it, which makes their work a more useful socio-political document.
Taken out of the context of their time and source culture, pop cultural works can still be fascinating – intriguing in their strangeness to the viewer’s eyes. They might give us a mind-broadening glimpse into another society. (Equally, of course, they might exhibit attitudes and behaviours we wouldn’t find acceptable in our own society or time, or they might be reinterpreted in unintended new ways.) With a bit of effort, we can learn more about the works and the context within which they were made and maybe understand them a little better.
Not that I’m promising to do that for you, you understand. I just like watching giant monster movies and now I’m hoping to like writing about them. And you know, sometimes it’s just soothing to watch an actor in a rubber lizard costume trampling all over a tiny model city.
Most of the movies under discussion in this blog are Japanese, and will be known under English titles quite different from their original Japanese titles. The majority of them were produced by Toho Studios, and fortunately we know exactly what we should call those ones because Toho have clearly stated the titles under which they would prefer their films to be distributed in Anglophone markets. Those are the titles I’ll be using. I’ll be noting some of the alternative English titles they’ve been given by American distribution companies, but for the most part I won’t use those. For non-Toho, non-Anglophone movies, I’ll use what I think are the correct English titles.
I’m going to assume some familiarity on your part with the genre, but not too much. I imagine you’ll know the Japanese word kaiju (weird creature), or even daikaiju (giant weird creature), but maybe not much more than that. That’s fine – nearly all of the handful of Japanese words I know, I’ve picked up from watching kaiju eiga (monster movies). For the most part, when I make a confident statement about the meaning of a Japanese word or monster name, you can assume I’ve been led by the Kaiju Wiki (wikizilla.org) or by Google Translate (uh oh). I intend to present Japanese names in the Japanese style, family name first (although I might not get it right all the time).
Hopefully you’ll already know the words Shōwa and Heisei – these are formal names for periods in Japan’s history defined by the rule of a particular Emperor, and are also used to refer posthumously to the Emperors themselves. Because of the decline in Japanese genre cinema towards the end of the reign of Hirohito, the Emperor Shōwa, and their reviving fortune during his son’s reign, Japanese kaiju movies fall conveniently into Shōwa era and Heisei era groups. The term “Millennium era” is sometimes used to distinguish the third major wave of Godzilla movies from the Heisei era second wave. Although Akihito’s still alive as I write this, he abdicated in 2019 (so the Heisei era of Japanese history is already over, but Akihito isn’t yet referred to as “Emperor Heisei”). We’re now in the Reiwa era, defined by the reign of Emperor Naruhito, and some fans have taken to referring to a current Reiwa era of kaiju movies.
I imagine you’ll have seen at least the better-known American blockbusters under discussion here, but for convenience I’ll assume you’re not familiar with any specific film or films. It’s often convenient to be able to refer to the plot of a movie when discussing it, so I’ll be including brief summaries in most cases. Warning, therefore: this blog will contain spoilers. If you haven’t seen a particular movie and don’t want the plot spoiled, don’t read that entry. (Or at least, skip past the plot summary section.)
Beside the plot summaries, I’ll be throwing in what I might generously call my own insights or theories. These will be focused more on trying to understand the context around the movie than on the fictional world of the movie, although there might be a bit of that too. Because this is a scratch blog with a breakneck weekly pace, I won’t be rigorously footnoting everything. (I might come back in subsequent years and add in footnotes, but let’s not hold our breath on that.) There are a lot of excellent fan-written non-fiction books out there, and inevitably I’ll repeat some information from those around the production of these films, as well as from wikizilla.org. But rest assured, I have some thoughts of my own about them, and in a couple of cases, I’ve even done a little original online research in trying to place them in their historical context. What would be the point of doing this blog if I didn’t?
Since I’ve mentioned them, and before we go any further, here’s a curated list of relevant books that I’ve found informative, entertaining and useful, and you might too. You may have difficulty finding copies of some of them, but in a pinch there’s always Abebooks.com:
- Carrozza, JL, Japanese Special Effects Cinema: Godfathers of Tokusatsu, vol 1, Orochi Books. 9798986077901.
- Erb, Cynthia, Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture, Wayne State University Press. 9780814334300.
- Kalat, David, A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series, McFarland. 9781476672946.
- LeMay, John, The Big Book of Japanese Giant Monster Movies, Bicep Books. 9781734154641 (Showa Completion 1954-1989) and 9781734781649 (Heisei Completion 1989-2019).
- Mustachio, Camille DG and Jason Barr (editors), Giant Creatures in Our World: Essays on Kaiju and American Popular Culture, McFarland. 9781476629971.
- Rhoads, Sean and Brooke McCorkle, Japan’s Green Monsters: Environmental Commentary in Kaiju Cinema, McFarland. 9781476631349.
- Ryfle, Steve, Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star: The Unauthorized Biography of “The Big G”, ECW Press. 9781550223484.
My fondness for kaiju movies dates back only as far as my 20s, quite late in life by comparison with a lot of other fans. I was certainly exposed to the stop-motion adventure romps of Ray Harryhausen, featuring such notable giant monsters as his Cyclops, Talos and Kraken, and it’s unthinkable that I wouldn’t have seen King Kong at some point in my childhood. But if the dubbed American versions of any of the Godzilla movies were shown on British TV, I don’t recall hearing about them. (I mean, they were, rarely – the old TV listings can be found online to prove it. I just didn’t hear about them.) I would only have been aware of Godzilla through the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series – which got more than enough airtime in the UK – which means I would have thought of it only as a sort of tame sea monster that guest starred in the adventures of the human characters and their pet Godzooky, whatever the hell that thing was.
So three cheers for the much loathed Tri-Star Godzilla (1998), which spurred a flurry of British interest in the Japanese franchise that preceded it. BBC2 offered Monster Night, an evening’s programming hosted by comedian Bill Bailey that included Godzilla vs King Ghidorah (1991) and the Jeff Bridges King Kong (1976) – I enjoyed watching at least one of those – as well as a new documentary about the Japanese Godzilla. Through the framing gimmick of being set in a seedy gambling den, Monster Night also included monster “fights” that showed off clips from King Kong vs Godzilla (1962), Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966) and the bang-up-to-date Gamera, Guardian of the Universe (1995). None of this seems calculated to raise the audience’s interest in the American movie that justified its broadcast, but it was a fair introduction to the kaiju genre.
The local bookshop got in a few copies of Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star, a glossy coffee table paperback by Steve Ryfle that also seemed carefully timed to recruit new fans for the Japanese Godzilla franchise off the back of the American movie. I bought this and was duly amazed to discover how many previous movies there’d been.
Around the same time, 4 Front Video released about half of the Shōwa era Godzilla titles on VHS in the UK, with heavy advertising in genre magazines – I tracked down a couple of those, guided in my selection by the Ryfle book. On subsequent shopping trips, I was pleased to discover VHS copies of Godzilla vs King Ghidorah and Gamera, Guardian of the Universe, released by Manga Entertainment. And a little later again, around Christmas 1999, Channel Four broadcast a handful of movies in the very early hours of the morning under the banner heading “Vidzilla”.
In the decades since, it’s become a lot easier to get your hands on these old movies. (And I’m not talking about dodgy pirate copies – well, not only those. Most of these films can be bought legally, and as a general rule it’s a good idea to support niche home media distributors if you see them taking pre-orders for licensed Blu-ray releases of hard-to-find goodies. If they break even on one, maybe they’ll try again with others.) The market for giant monster movies – old and new, Japanese, American or other – seems to have blossomed in the last ten years or so, no doubt helped by the success of blockbusters like Pacific Rim (2013) and Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla (2014). I was fortunate to move to New Zealand right around the time local distributor Madman Entertainment put out four large Godzilla box sets on DVD – very nearly the full run up to Godzilla: Final Wars (2005), and a little online shopping helped fill the gaps. UK-based Arrow Films have done a sterling job of releasing box sets of other kaiju and kaiju-adjacent movies, and there’s more out there for those who are willing to look for it.
Which is one good reason for creating this blog now. I had planned to do this ten years ago, in time for Godzilla’s 60th anniversary, but ended up too busy with other things. Now seems like a more auspicious time for it, not least because of the tremendous global success of Godzilla Minus One (2023). That, and the increasing availability of his back catalogue, might make Godzilla’s 70th birthday his biggest yet.
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