King Kong vs Godzilla

King Kong vs Godzilla (1962)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)

1962 was Toho's 30th birthday, and the company was in a celebratory mood. When Hollywood producer John Beck approached them with a script treatment for a film pitting King Kong against a giant-sized Frankenstein’s monster, unwanted by any studio in America, it must have seemed like an absolute gift. Who in Japan in 1962 didn’t love King Kong (1933)? The Frankenstein part of the concept seems to have been a harder sell (although you haven’t heard the last of it...). In the end, Toho paid RKO for the rights to use the character of Kong but brought him together with their own tribute to Kong, the brawling lizard Godzilla, in a new story scripted by Sekizawa Shinichi, the writer of the previous year’s hit Mothra (1961). King Kong vs Godzilla was the studio’s birthday present to itself and a huge box office success.

The film opens with a segment from a pop science TV programme called World Wonders, which talks about warming in the Arctic Ocean and rising sea levels. The United Nations has sent a team to investigate on board the American nuclear submarine Seahawk.

We cut to the advertising department of Pacific Pharmaceutical, the company that sponsors World Wonders, where marketing director Mr Tako complains about how boring the programme is. When he learns that one of Pacific Pharma’s researchers has returned from Faro Island with a sample of red “soma” berries with narcotic properties and tales of the island’s “giant demon god”, he orders Sakurai and Furue, two of his employees, to travel there and investigate. The company might be able to find a commercial use for the berries, but Tako’s real interest is in the “demon god”, which could generate some sensational media exposure for Pacific Pharma.

(Sidenote 1: The fictional “Faro Island” is not to be confused with the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic – it’s in the South Pacific, about 100km from the Solomon Islands. Since Kong's former home, an island near Indonesia since named as Skull Island, was destroyed at the end of Son of Kong (1933), it seems reasonable to find him on a different island here. In any case, this presumably isn't meant to be the same Kong who fell to his death in the original film. But just how many islands with giant apes are there?)

(Sidenote 2: It’s notable that this film, coming hot on the heels of Mothra and written by the same scriptwriter, also features a red juice with mystical properties found on an isolated Pacific Island. I’ve no idea if this was a topical reference – perhaps a health craze of some kind? – but it’s one of the odder kaiju eiga tropes.)

(Sidenote 3: The fact that, until his first on-screen appearance, Kong is referred to as “demon god” – in Japanese, “Majin” – might give a chuckle to anyone who’s seen the later Daimajin movies (1966) produced by Daiei Film.)

Sakurai pops home to tell his sister Fumiko he’s off on a sea voyage, and is irked to discover she’s next door with her boyfriend, the engineer Fujito. Fujito demonstrates a new, thin, high tensile wire he’s invented, which will obviously become significant to the plot later.

Meanwhile, the Seahawk has homed in on a glowing iceberg that’s emitting Cherenkov radiation (or, as the American actors insist on pronouncing it, “Chelenkov” radiation). The submarine crashes into the iceberg; as water floods in, a familiar roar is heard and someone on board the sub shouts out the name “Godzilla”.

Godzilla was last seen being buried under an avalanche on an island made of volcanic rock, yet here he is breaking out of an iceberg. Later dialogue refers to him having been trapped in there, which seems to be a fumbled reference to Godzilla Raids Again (1955). Everyone knows who he is – the crew of the American helicopter who search for the Seahawk also recognise and name him. He looks a bit chunkier than he did before. His radioactive breath is still kind of misty, but in colour we can see that it and the glow of his dorsal plates have a blue tint.

As Godzilla heads for land, the JSDF try several methods of repelling him, without success. Tanks don't work; a big pit full of explosives and poisonous gas has no effect on him; 100,000 volts run through a chain of electricity pylons diverts him but doesn’t deter him. The news of Godzilla’s return dominates the media and infuriates Mr Tako, whose sole concern at this time is that nobody’s watching the programmes sponsored by his company.

Sakurai and Furue have meanwhile arrived at Faro Island and ingratiated themselves with the locals with gifts of transistor radios and cigarettes. Like the inhabitants of Infant Island in Mothra, the Faro Islanders are all played by blacked-up Japanese actors and portrayed in an over-the-top “primitive” way. Their language seems to be a variety of pidgin English. Their village is positioned in front of a massive wooden framework that keeps their god contained in the island’s interior. The ad men are sceptical, but hear some ominous roaring sounds that they can’t explain.

During the night, a gigantic octopus emerges from the sea and attacks the village. It’s now that the “demon god” shows up in person – Konno, the ad men’s Faro Islander guide, immediately names him as King Kong. There’s a brief tussle, but Kong drives the octopus back into the water by throwing things at it (including the wooden scaffolding which was supposed to hold him back from the village and which, in hindsight, clearly wasn’t fit for purpose). He then drinks several vats full of the red berry juice prepared by the islanders and falls asleep.

Anyone expecting Kong to look like he did in 1933 will be disappointed. His fur is paler, even a bit mangy, his skull is oddly misshapen and his teeth stick out all over the place. He’s let himself go, frankly. Sakurai and Furue take the opportunity to tie the sleeping giant to a raft, laden with dynamite in case the plan really goes wrong, and start to tug him back to Japan. Tako is delighted, not least because Kong (and Pacific Pharma) has knocked Godzilla out of the news headlines, and travels out to meet the ship. Unfortunately, so does a JSDF battleship; the official who boards the expeditionary vessel says that Kong has been classified as smuggled goods and tries to hustle Tako for money. The crew decide to cut Kong loose and blow up his raft, but Kong escapes and swims towards Japan, on a collision course with Godzilla.

In the next half hour of to-and-fro, we discover several things. In close quarters combat, Godzilla likes to bludgeon his opponent with his tail while Kong prefers to throw large rocks. Godzilla doesn’t like high voltage electricity but Kong weirdly seems to thrive on it – when he encounters the pylons erected to stop Godzilla, he tears off the cables and stuffs them into his mouth, as if the power were literally feeding him. Later on, a lucky bolt of lightning to the head gives him his second wind in the climactic fight against Godzilla. He doesn’t like fire, though, and his fur is easily singed by Godzilla's radioactive breath.

After the kaijus’ first fight, Kong wanders through Tokyo, takes a shine to Sakurai Fumiko and climbs the Diet Building with her in his hand. (Like his RKO namesake, he has an eye for the ladies and enjoys scaling tall buildings.) By this time, Pacific Pharma have managed to extract the active ingredient from the soma berries, and the JSDF are able to use this in aerial bombardment to put Kong to sleep. Fujita, who was on hand to run in and carry Fumiko to safety, now offers the JSDF his high tensile wire as a means to relocate Kong while he’s asleep, which they do by suspending him from several weather balloons and escorting him towards Mt Fuji, where Godzilla is. Their plan is let their two daikaiju problems sort each other out.

Kong and Godzilla wrestle each other across country from the foothills of Mt Fuji to Atami Castle on the coast. (Note: that’s maybe 40km as the crow flies.) They fight each other to a standstill (but demolish most of the castle) and fall together into the sea. Godzilla is not seen to re-emerge, but our protagonists suspect he might return. As Kong swims off into the distance, back to Faro Island, we hear a dubbed over roar from Godzilla, then one from Kong.

This is a very self-aware film. It’s the first to revolve around a big fight between two daikaiju – although we saw Godzilla settling a territorial dispute with Anguirus in Godzilla Raids Again, that was all over by half time, and in any case the film wasn’t called “Anguirus vs Godzilla”. This will become the standard format for most Godzilla movies, but here it feels like we’ve already been given the parody, with Mr Tako cast as the promoter of a big celebrity boxing match, the Don King of the kaiju world. When he’s not claiming corporate ownership of Kong, he describes himself as Kong’s sponsor. He gets very excited at the thought of staging a clash between Kong and Godzilla, prompted by one of his underlings musing on which of the two would win in a fight – a conversation I’m sure the staffers at Toho must have had more than once, even before John Beck approached them. Someone else responds by grumbling that they’re not organising a wrestling match, yet that’s exactly the plan the JSDF settles on. And when Tako’s fuming about all the press attention Godzilla gets, a Pacific Pharma employee needles him further by noting that there’s even a film...

There still isn’t a defined Godzilla series at this stage. Toho were trying all kinds of things with tokusatsu (special effects driven media) and seeing what did or didn’t work at the box office. Having done a few films that were specifically about daikaiju, they experimented with Gorath (1962), a space adventure released five months before King Kong vs Godzilla that included an entirely gratuitous kaiju; Atragon (1963), an anti-war action movie prominently featuring an experimental flying, burrowing submarine and, less prominently, a kaiju; and Dogora (1964), produced shortly after the next Godzilla film, a gangster heist movie whose plot is derailed by a diamond-eating kaiju. This is the context into which King Kong vs Godzilla fits: an experiment in kaiju comedy, a lampooning of post-war consumerism (very ironic, for a film studio loudly celebrating 30 years of commercial success) that expresses itself through the medium of kaiju.

Godzilla no longer represents Japanese anxiety over atomic weapons tests or US military aggression – he's just a hugely popular movie monster and therefore, like King Kong, a product to be commodified. There’s a revealing moment in a scene in the middle of the film, when the public have been told to evacuate Tokyo and the Sakurais run into one of their neighbours, when the neighbour’s young son excitedly says that he wants to see Godzilla. We’re already hitting the tipping point between Godzilla as the stuff of nightmares and Godzilla as a figure of family-friendly fun.

Speaking of family-friendly fun, the castle that Kong and Godzilla demolish in their final battle is not a historic monument but, appropriately, a great big commercial fake. Atami is a hot spring resort a little way around the coast from Tokyo. Atami Castle is a tourist complex and was built in 1959 – so, like the Tokyo Tower in Mothra, it’s a recently built and well-known edifice that can be torn down by kaiju to the delight of the audience. But it also ties in handily with the film’s overall theme.

There’s comedy beyond the film’s spoofing of consumer society, and again it focuses largely on Tako. His first scene sees him berating his team for not finding something better than World Wonders to sponsor, then he immediately gets a call from the Chief Executive giving him the exact same lecture. There are slapstick shenanigans a-plenty with him leaning against the emergency plunger for the dynamite on Kong’s raft. Then there’s the scene where a battleship draws alongside the ship and a customs official comes aboard. In the American version of the film, he merely tells Tako that Kong can’t be allowed into Japan because he’s a threat to public safety, but in the original he says that Kong has been classed as smuggled goods and invites Tako to pay his way out of trouble. He also advises that Tako will be held financially responsible for any damage Kong causes in Japan, which prompts a clownish show of anguish from Tako.

Some familiar faces pop up again. Appearing as Fujita, the engineer and romantic male lead, is Sahara Kenji, who played the young hero Shigeru in Rodan (1956). Hama Mie, playing the female lead Fumiko, hasn’t appeared in this blog before but will be better known to Western audiences as James Bond's love interest in You Only Live Twice (1967). In that same year she played the villainous "Madame Piranha" in Toho's less well-known giant ape flick, King Kong Escapes (1967). Wakabayashi Akiko, James Bond’s other love interest in You Only Live Twice, here plays a supporting role as Fumiko’s friend Tamie.

Naturally, Hirata “Dr Serizawa” Akihiko turns up as a scientist. He plays Professor Shigezawa, a knowledgeable scientist and evidently a figure of some authority. He's first seen at the Defence Agency, which I think is the basis on which the American re-edit recasts him as the Minister of Defence. Secondary sources suggest that he's meant to be the Prime Minister, but there's no obvious sign of that on screen. When asked to explain the emergence of ancient creatures in the present day, he pulls out the same line about a 3,000-year-old lotus seed germinating that his character gave in Rodan (1956).

The special effects are a mixed bag. The giant octopus is notable for not being a puppet (except in the shots of it flinging itself at Kong’s face) or a man in a costume, but a real octopus. This is fine when the octopus is interacting with miniature model huts, but the composite shots that put it alongside objects thrown by Kong or the human characters are rarely convincing. The mismatch of lighting and colour balance between the elements of the scene is far too obvious, and there are a couple of shots where one layer of the image moves and the other doesn't. The costume for Kong is distractingly shabby, although Godzilla looks fine. On the positive side, the miniatures are superb, especially the model of Atami Castle, and the practical effects are supplemented with nice moments of stop motion when Faro Islanders are seized by the octopus’ tentacles and cel animation when the JSDF soldiers clamber in silhouette over a drowsy Kong to tie the weather balloons onto him. Whatever its faults, you can’t say the film’s not ambitious.

Mothra

Mothra (1961)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)

Here’s a big, wild spectacle of a film, brought to you in widescreen Tohoscope and lurid Eastmancolour. Toho has finally entered its “golden age” of kaiju eiga.

A typhoon wrecks a Japanese ship off the coast of Infant Island, the site of recent nuclear tests. Four crewmen are later recovered from the island but show no signs of radiation sickness. They claim to have been protected by a strange red juice that was given to them by the inhabitants of the island.

The government of Rolisica, the nation responsible for conducting nuclear tests on or near Infant Island, claims they checked thoroughly beforehand and found it uninhabited. (Fair enough, we don't see any islanders until they're summoned by the Shobijin, so possibly they just stayed hidden, but it's a bit of a stretch.) They decide to mount a joint expedition to the island with a team of Japanese scientists, but because the private businessman Clark Nelson finances the expedition he ends up effectively in charge of it.

One of the scientists is Chūjō Shinichi, a linguist with a special interest in Polynesian languages. He's interviewed at home by Nitto Press’ ace reporter Fukuda “Snapping Turtle” Zenichiro and photographer Hanamura Michi. Zen will later stow away on the ship, defying the ban on reporters during the expedition.

Once they get past the barren, rocky shoreline, the scientists find that the interior of Infant Island is lush with greenery. Chūjō wanders off and discovers some large, mutated plants in a forest near a cave. He notices an unusual form of mould on the plants’ leaves and speculates that this might be the source of the famous red juice (although this is never confirmed outright, and this element of the plot is soon forgotten). While copying down an inscription on the wall of the cave, he’s attacked by another variety of mutant plant, a fast-moving vine with apparently carnivorous tendencies. He sets off an alarm in the radiation suit he’s wearing, and its high-pitched sound attracts what seem to be two women, no more than a foot tall, who rescue him from the plant. When Zen hears about this incident, he dubs the tiny rescuers “Shobijin” (“Little Beauties”), which he admits is the sort of thing you’d expect from a tabloid journalist.

By deliberately setting off the alarm in the forest, the members of the expedition are able to lure out the Shobijin. They don’t talk (yet) but communicate by making a high-pitched jangling sound that sounds suspiciously like a treated recording of someone playing the top keys of the Ondes Martenot. Clark Nelson makes a grab for them, with the apparent intention of taking them back to Japan and putting them on the stage. The Shobijin respond by singing a melody in their jangly voices that summons the Infant Islanders en masse. Nelson and his henchmen produce handguns, but between the aggressive stares of the islanders and the objections of the scientists with them, they back down.

(On a side note, isn’t it odd that Nelson is more interested in exploiting the Shobijin as theatrical performers than the Infant Island red mould extract as a commercial treatment for radiation exposure? Then again, we're told he has form in trying to exploit other people for entertainment – specifically, an attempted abduction of women from the Amazon in the 1950s – so perhaps he’s just unpleasantly fixated on making his fortune by treating women as property and is blinded to any other possible way of making money.)

The expedition leaves the island, but Nelson’s gang later return without the scientists to abduct the Shobijin, shooting several islanders as they depart. Nelson soon opens "The Secret Fairies Show" in Tokyo, at which Japanese urbanites can gawp at the tiny twins in a theatrical setting while they sing. The melody of their song is essentially the same as the alarm call they made to summon the islanders earlier. Judging by his later remarks, Nelson has no idea that the words they’re singing have any meaning. (They’re not in Japanese, that’s for certain – Wikizilla suggests the lyrics were written in Indonesian.) While they sing in Tokyo, the islanders back on Infant Island perform a dance to wake up Mothra, a gigantic insect larva that hatches from a blue and yellow egg.

Chūjō, Zen and Michi go to Nelson’s theatre to confront him about his treatment of the Shobijin. Nelson allows the trio to visit the caged performers in their dressing room in the belief that they can't communicate, but the Shobijin privately reveal that they can now speak Japanese thanks to their telepathic powers. (Possibly they learned to sing in Indonesian the same way.) They assert that Mothra will save them, but are sad because of the destruction she'll cause. Mothra apparently has no understanding of good or evil and is driven purely by an instinct to protect the Shobijin. (This is a detail that will soon be forgotten in subsequent films.) Chūjō recognises the name Mothra from a repeated symbol in the inscription he copied from the cave wall.

The Mothra larva swims towards Japan, defying all attempts to stop it. Once it hits land, it ploughs through central Tokyo and starts to climb the Tokyo Tower (a broadcasting tower and prominent landmark that was constructed in 1958). The JSDF bombard the larva and only succeed in breaking the top off the tower. The larva then cocoons itself against the base of the tower. The Rolisicans help the JSDF by bringing in their experimental Atomic Heat Cannons, satellite-dish-like ray weapons mounted on the back of flatbed trucks. (In a rare display of safety consciousness, the assembled military and scientific personnel put on dark goggles before switching on the big atomic weapons.) The cocoon bursts into flames, but just when everyone thinks it’s been roasted, the adult Mothra emerges. (That was an extremely short pupal stage.)

Mothra is, as the name suggests, a moth-like creature. She has a white head, blue compound eyes and a distinctive black, red and yellow pattern on her wings. She’s large enough to blow down buildings by flapping her wings. Scientists quickly discover that they can use an artificial shielding material to block her telepathic link to the Shobijin, but this doesn’t calm her down or stop her rampage – it just allows Nelson to flee back to Rolisica and take the Shobijin with him. However, soon enough contact is re-established and Mothra flies off to devastate the Rolisican capital New Kirk City instead. Public opinion in his home country turns against Nelson and, trying to escape an angry mob, he dies in a shootout with the police.

Chūjō, Zen and Michi have pursued Nelson to Rolisica and recover the Shobijin. Inspired by the sight of the sun behind a Christian church cross and the melody of the church bells (again, strangely similar to the Shobijin’s song), Chūjō is reminded of the Mothra symbol he saw in that cave inscription and devises a plan to defuse the situation. The sound of all the city’s bells ringing together gets Mothra’s attention and a huge painting of her symbol on the runway at the nearby airport draws her to where our heroes are waiting to hand over the Shobijin, safely away from the heavily populated city centre.

There's so much to say about this one.

First, some firsts. It’s the first time the Tokyo Tower has been destroyed in a monster movie, and it’s very, very far from being the last time. Admittedly, the tower was only put up three years earlier, so this is the first movie that could plausibly include such a scene. Genre filmmakers everywhere love to show familiar landmarks being destroyed – government buildings including the Diet (Japan’s seat of government) are popular targets in kaiju eiga, but the big, distinctive, red and white Tokyo Tower is a perennial favourite.

The Rolisicans’ Atomic Heat Cannons are the first step in a chain of similar-looking fantasy weapons that will eventually become the Maser Tank, the JSDF’s standard choice of anti-kaiju armament. Much larger fixed emplacements with a similar dish shape appeared in the pulp sci-fi adventure Battle in Outer Space (1959), set in the distant year of 1965, but this is the first truck-sized mobile version and the first suggestion that something like this might be within the reach of contemporary science. It’s never stated in later films whether the Japanese continue to develop this technology on their own or with assistance from another nation (presumably Rolisica or America), or simply buy the things. Whether they should be embracing such weapons at all is another question, but presumably it’s OK under the terms of Japan’s post-war constitution provided they only ever use them defensively against giant monsters. What the Rolisicans were planning on doing with them is anyone’s guess.

This isn’t Koizumi Hiroshi’s first kaiju movie – he played the hero Tsukioka in Godzilla Raids Again (1955) – but it’s his first appearance as a friendly scientist in the role of Chūjō, and that’s how he’s going to be typecast from now on. This is Frankie Sakai’s first role in a fantasy movie, playing “Snapping Turtle” Fukuda, although I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a serious role. He was well-known at the time as a comedy actor, and probably better known since as one of the stars of the American TV series Shōgun (1980). Michi, the third of the heroic leads, is played by Kagawa Kyōko who appeared in The Three Treasures (1959) as Princess Miyazu (the one Yamato Takeru nearly marries but leaves behind). And the twins Itō Emi and Yumi, a.k.a. J-pop duo The Peanuts, will reprise their role as the Shobijin in Mothra’s next two film appearances.

For the first time, a daikaiju is named by sticking the suffix “-ra” onto a pre-existing word in obvious homage to Godzilla. The "-ra" suffix doesn't have any significance in itself – Godzilla’s name (more properly in Japanese, “Gojira”) was famously made by combining the words for “gorilla” (“gorira”) and “whale” (“kujira”). The name "Mothra" is a straightforward Japanese rendering of the English word "Moth" with a Godzilla-style "-ra" on the end. There’ll be more where that came from.

Mothra herself is the first kaiju to be described as female. As previously noted, it's possible to script a film like Godzilla (1954) in Japanese without ever gendering the kaiju. Since I can't speak Japanese, I have no idea whether that's the case here, if Mothra is referred to as female in the original dialogue or if that's something added in by the American dub a year later. But what exactly makes Mothra female? Was her protective nature seen as somehow feminine? But in this film she's only protective towards the Shobijin, and indiscriminately destructive in her mission to retrieve them. It's only in later films that we'll see her defending her own offspring or that she'll show greater altruism, eventually (in the 1990s) becoming the guardian of all life on Earth. Is it because her intermediaries, the Shobijin, are presented as female? Do they somehow reflect some aspect of Mothra herself? It can't be her egg making Mothra a mother, because here we only see her hatch from an egg as a larva - it's not until Mothra vs Godzilla (1964) that we see an egg laid by Mothra herself. We'll be introduced to Godzilla's own son soon enough, and in the absence of another adult Godzilla we might fairly assume he's reproduced parthenogenetically, which by most medical accounts would make him female. And yet people stubbornly continue to describe Godzilla as male. Something else specifically makes Mothra female in people's eyes, and I'm damned if I know what.

The parallels between Mothra and King Kong (1933) are obvious. A mysterious creature, worshipped like a god on its home island, is abducted, brought to the big city and made to perform (or at least, its humanoid representatives are). Things get out of hand and the monster trashes the city, although this time the monster gets to go home and the unscrupulous businessman dies. At this point, the world has only seen one Godzilla sequel, and that was pretty much a reflex reaction to the success of the first film. Toho Studios don’t yet have what we’d call a franchise – they’re still trying different things out, seeing what works. So far we’ve had an allegorical monster horror film, a more straightforward action flick with the same monster and, with Rodan (1956), a more American-style creature feature with giant bugs and pterosaurs. Now, at last, here’s Japan’s answer to Kong (except that it’s a feminine moth god).

This film marks a turn away from the iconography of prehistoric creatures and towards a world of stranger, more fabulous monsters. It won’t entirely stick – Godzilla and Rodan are both going to come back a lot, and there are more saurian daikaiju ahead – but we will also see daikaiju that can’t be so easily categorised. More than this, Mothra isn’t a victim of the Bomb like Godzilla, but something nearer divinity, with her own religious worshippers and definite supernatural overtones. The plants on Infant Island might have been mutated by exposure to atomic radiation (might have been – we’re not actually told one way or another), but the cave inscription Chūjō finds is ancient, and the Shobijin certainly can’t be explained away as a side effect of five years of foreign nuclear tests. Later films will blur the lines between physical creature and agent of divine wrath, for Mothra and for other daikaiju, but in her debut she seems entirely impervious to anything so mundane as depth charges or ray guns.

Religious symbolism, and specifically Christian symbolism, plays a significant part in the plot of this film, because it’s the pealing of church bells and the sun shining behind a cross that gives Chūjō the idea to bring Mothra to heel by using the sound and imagery that form part of her own worshippers’ rituals. Two priests actually pray for help from God in this scene and Michi joins them, while Zen makes a slapstick hash of the Catholic sign of the cross.

The physical realisation of Mothra is the usual combination of costume work and puppetry, but with a lot more emphasis on the puppets. Stunt actors control a costume version of the larva in some scenes on land, but it’s pretty obvious when a mechanical prop larva is on the screen. The adult Mothra is all puppet, but large enough to dwarf the miniature city sets. It’s remarkable how well it works on screen – thumbs up to Tsuburaya and Honda for their direction.

Let’s just quickly consider the fictional nation of Rolisica. It’s unclear why the filmmakers should be so coy as to make their villain a citizen of a generic Cold War superpower when there were only two real ones, and we all know which one a) had been conducting extensive nuclear tests in the Pacific and b) had a close if lukewarm relationship with Japan. The name “Rolisica” is meant to suggest an amalgam of Russia and America, but take one look at “New Kirk City”, its rip-off of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, the clothes its people are wearing and the fact that they’re all speaking English with American accents and it should be pretty obvious what’s going on. (Although Chūjō, Zen and Michi catch a Pan American flight from Japan to Rolisica, so apparently this is a world in which both Rolisica and America exist. Or the plane should have had "Pan Rolisican" written on the side and no one working on the film noticed the error.)

Perhaps they were treading carefully because Japan had just signed a renegotiated security treaty with America (the 1960 "Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan", replacing the "Security Treaty between the United States and Japan" that had come into effect in 1952). The earlier treaty had officially ended America’s postwar military occupation of Japan, but under conditions that amounted to a continued occupation. Under the new treaty, American forces in Japan would ask permission before mobilising, would not intervene in matters of domestic unrest and would actively defend Japan from attack if asked to do so, although their ongoing presence would de facto prevent Japan from adopting a neutral stance in the burgeoning Cold War between the USA and the USSR. The whole question of the treaty was controversial in Japan, with significant “Anpo protests” erupting in 1959 and 1960. In Mothra we see the Rolisicans come to Japan’s aid as requested when the larva attacks central Tokyo, although they seem to be using the city as a testing ground for experimental atomic weapons, which may suggest some scepticism on the writers’ part. In a possible jab at American capitalism, the Rolisican authorities vigorously defend Clark Nelson’s claim of ownership over the Shobijin until Mothra starts causing trouble on their own territory.

I’ve left it for last, but it’s time to confront an unpalatable truth: kaiju movies can be pretty terrible in how they depict Pacific Islanders. The makers of King Kong had the decency to at least not populate their island with white actors in dodgy make-up. (It's almost exclusively African Americans, although there's a Mexican American actor playing the witch doctor. Hollywood has its own problems around ethnic casting and exoticisation.) Perhaps Toho Studios only had access to Japanese or white American actors, but the upshot is that their Infant Islanders are exclusively played by Japanese actors very obviously blacked up. This sets a tone that will be repeated in numerous films to come. Eventually, the Heisei era movies will bypass the problem by not depicting Mothra's people at all, an act of erasure that poses its own problems.

We might also raise an eyebrow at the choice to primitivise the islanders by naming their home "Infant Island". The fact that the English word is used rather than a Japanese word meaning "infant" might imply that, in the story world, the island was actually named by British explorers, which would cast a bit of shade on another former Imperial nation with a patchy history in the Pacific Islands. But still, though. The primitivising continues in the depiction of Infant Islander culture: we see them trying to scare off Nelson and his armed goons by staring and banging rocks together at them, and we see them waking Mothra up with a spot of faintly sexualised dancing, and that's all we see them doing. None of them gets a single word of dialogue. The juxtaposition of Nelson's highly artificial staging of a blacked-up "native" dance around the Shobijin in his theatre and the actual islanders' dance is striking, because there's practically no difference. Add to this the cod Indonesian lyrics of the Shobijin’s song, a choice that casually exoticises another Asian Pacific culture, and you’ve got a problematic film.

Despite these reservations, I do love the film and Mothra the kaiju in particular. What I think I love about it all is the unashamed weirdness. King Kong is relatable – we’re big apes, he’s an even bigger ape, there’s something in common there – and even Godzilla is bipedal and has a recognisable face. Mothra’s just an enormous bug. How are you going to make that relatable for an audience who’s meant to feel sorry for it? Well, what the filmmakers have done is to add in humanoid intermediaries, so we can empathise with them instead. No, not the islanders, we’re barely supposed to notice them. I’m talking about a pair of telepathic singing pixie twins. And if that doesn’t clear up the weirdness, I don’t know what will.

The Three Treasures

The Three Treasures (1959)
Toho Studios
Director: Inagaki Hiroshi, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)

Also known as: The Birth of Japan – a literal translation of the Japanese title.

A change of pace this week, as we look at a film sometimes described as the Japanese equivalent of a Biblical epic. I’m not sure that that’s exactly accurate. It does include some re-enacted mythological tales, but it mostly centres on Yamato Takeru, a figure more on a par with King Arthur or Robin Hood – a legendary folk hero who may have been based on a real person but who is widely treated as fictional. The adventures of the English folk heroes have been retold many times, sometimes with an emphasis on a presumed “historical authenticity” and sometimes as flat-out fantasy, and the same’s true of Yamato Takeru.

This film is on the “period piece” end of the spectrum. It has an air of the prestige production about it. It’s not one of Toho’s anniversary specials – the studio was founded in 1932 – but it was marketed as their thousandth film.

What’s a prestigious pseudo-historical epic doing in this blog? It does have a daikaiju in it – which was featured on promotional posters as if it were an important plot element – but only in one short scene, and that’s one of the cutaway mythological scenes. But it’s here because it lays some of the groundwork for later movies (the kaiju-laden fantasy Yamato Takeru (1994) and the kaiju movies featuring King Ghidorah), because it’s just interesting in its own right and because I think it’s worth thinking about a movie that, in the middle of these other Japanese and American atomic creature features, reminds us that supernatural giant monsters are also available.

The broad strokes of the story can be found in two texts, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, which were composed roughly a generation apart more than 1300 years ago. Both were intended to legitimise the Imperial rule of the House of Yamato by tracing its ancestry back to the gods, and both include Imperial genealogies (compare with the “begat” sections of the Judaeo-Christian Bible) with occasional asides as well as mythological tales now considered part of Shinto belief. The biographies of the first 25 emperors – up to about the start of the sixth century CE – aren’t generally taken to be historical fact.

Ōtarashihiko, the Emperor Keikō, is listed as the 12th Emperor of the Yamato line. Ousu no Mikoto (the “Mikoto” suffix indicating that he’s a prince), later called Yamato Takeru, was one of Emperor Keikō’s sons, but not himself an Emperor. (He had a brother called Ōusu – don’t get them confused!) His son, Tarashinakatsuhiko, was number 14, the Emperor Chūai. The missing link, lucky 13, is Wakatarashihiko, the Emperor Seimu, Yamato Takeru’s half-brother.

Both books pause in their begatting to detail Yamato Takeru’s adventures, although the Nihon Shoki attributes about half of them to his father instead.

(A properly indexed, searchable, online copy of an English translation of the Nihon Shoki can be found here – the relevant part is Vol I, Book VII, pages 188 to 216. The Kojiki can be found here as a collection of scanned pages in need of some volunteer editors – the begatting pauses between pages 204 and 223. Both translations were made in the 19th century. Both write the prince’s name as Wo-usu (and his confusing brother as Oho-usu), the Nihon Shoki calls him “Yamato-dake” and the Kojiki “Yamato-take”. The film calls him “Yamato Takeru” – I assume this is a question of archaic and modern forms of Japanese.)

As for the Anglophone market title, The Three Treasures: these are the Imperial Regalia of Japan, three ancient ceremonial objects used during coronations. The Japanese crown jewels, if you like. They are a mirror, a sword and a magatama (a comma-shaped stone bead) that were handed down from the sun god Amaterasu to the first Emperor’s grandfather, and at one point they passed through Yamato Takeru’s hands. In fact, one of them is used in one of his adventures.

Yes, I’m about to give a spoiler warning for a 1300-year-old account of an even older legend. Humour me, will you?

(Note: I'll be formatting the cutaway mythological parts like this.)

The movie opens with a narrated staging of the Shinto creation story, in which the gods create the landmass of Japan and two gods are sent down to populate it. (This would be the “Birth of Japan” referred to in the original title.)

We then cut to discover the narrator is an old woman entertaining the people of a small town while they wait for their beloved Prince Ousu and his friends to return from hunting. Ousu is told that his brother Ōusu has disappeared with a young woman he was supposed to be escorting to his father as a concubine. Ousu finds them both canoodling in a house, apparently right there in the town. He gives Ōusu a thrashing but tells him to exile himself.

(In the Kojiki, he brutally kills Ōusu. Perhaps the makers of The Three Treasures wanted to present a more humane hero. In this film, Ōusu’s an older brother, which matches the Kojiki – in the Nihon Shoki they’re twins. Their mother’s dead and the Emperor’s already had children with his second Empress, but clearly he wants concubines too.)

The scene moves to the Imperial court, where we meet two of the Emperor’s many other children: the effete Wakatarashi (the future Emperor Seimu!) and the younger, unimpressive Iogi. We also meet the Emperor’s trusted advisor Otomo, who is blatantly shady. Otomo is the brother of the second Empress and thus the uncle of Wakatarashi and Iogi, and spends his time conniving to put his relatives first in the line of succession. To that end, he stirs things up between the Emperor and Ousu, to try and get him out of the picture. This is made easier by the fact that Ōusu’s disappeared and Ousu is willing to let everyone believe he killed him for his treason. Otomo will later meet secretly with Ōusu, who wants to return from exile, and kill him himself.

(The character of Otomo has been completely made up to give this film a villain you can boo. In the Kojiki, the Emperor is unsettled by his son’s violence and keeps sending him out to war on his own initiative. In the Nihon Shoki, there’s no bad feeling between father and son.)

The Emperor is persuaded to send Ousu to defeat the neighbouring Kumaso warlords and subdue their territory with a small army. Along the way they stop in Mie Prefecture at the Grand Shrine of Ise (a real place!), dedicated to the sun god Amaterasu, where Ousu’s aunt Princess Yamato is the chief priestess. Here Ousu meets Princess Ototachibana, also a priestess there, who gives him a holy mirror as a gift. Princess Yamato gives him a pouch which he must only open when in danger.

Ousu enters the Kumaso court disguised as a serving woman at a banquet, where he spends long minutes staring daggers at the two Kumaso brothers on their thrones. The younger Kumaso is suspicious – apparently he’s the one with the brains. Kumaso senior not only doesn’t notice Ousu’s death stare but finds him attractive and beckons him over. Ousu immediately kills the older brother and kills the younger Kumaso in a showy sword fight. As he dies, Kumaso gives Ousu the formal name Yamato Takeru – “the bravest of Yamato”.

So now the prince is dangerous and proud, telling everyone to call him Yamato Takeru. Otomo persuades the Emperor to send him and his army away again, to subdue the lands to the East, even though they haven't rested. Yamato Takeru is upset about this. Later, in the town forum, he hears the old woman relating the tale of how the sun god Amaterasu got upset once.

The storm god Susanoo, Amaterasu’s brother, upsets her with an ill-advised prank and she seals herself in a cave. Because she’s the sun god, this means heaven is left without any light or heat. In order to trick her out of the cave, the other gods pretend to throw a party for their new sun god – in fact, a mirror and a necklace of curved stone beads hung on a tree. Amaterasu comes out to see what the noise is about and is amused to see her own reflection on the fake god.

(The film presents this tale and just leaves it hanging there, but in fact it’s a vital part of the story, because it’s the origin story of the three treasures. Japanese viewers might be expected to know this, but mugs like us have to do our own research. Recall that the three treasures are a mirror, a sword and a curved bead. Two of those – the mirror and the magatama – appear here as part of the decoration of the fake god. In the legend, Susanoo later gave Amaterasu the sword to apologise for his prank. We’ll see Yamato Takeru receive the sword, and find out where it came from, in just a minute. Remember that mirror Ototachibana gave him at Amaterasu’s shrine? It’s meant to be that mirror. Sorry to say, the magatama is not pointed out and we will not see Yamato Takeru acquire it on his travels – well, you can’t have everything, can you?)

(Did I mention this film is three hours long? There’s an intermission right here.)

Yamato Takeru goes to see his auntie at the Grand Shrine of Ise and sobs that his father obviously doesn’t love him and wants him dead. She rebukes him for sulking by telling him a tale about the storm god Susanoo sulking.

Once upon a time, Susanoo threw a tantrum because he couldn’t visit his mother Izanami, formerly one of the two Earth-populating gods but now dead and an underworld god. He cried so much that his tears used up all the water in the world and caused a drought.

(That’s it, that’s the whole story. It’s by far the shortest cutaway tale in the film. I like to imagine that in some parallel world, Princess Yamato might have introduced this to the prince as The Tale of How Susanoo Whined Like a Little Bastard. Also worth noting that Yamato Takeru and Susanoo are both played by the same actor, but this is the first point in the film at which the prince is compared directly with the god.)

Because her pep talk didn’t work, Princess Yamato gives Yamato Takeru the sacred sword Murakumo no Tsurugi (“the sword of gathering clouds”) and, lying through her teeth, tells him his father sent it for him. He’s delighted by this and goes back to where his army are camping, where he tells them the sword’s origin story.

Susanoo has been temporarily banished to Earth. (This is not related to his tantrum, but because of the prank he played on Amaterasu. These cutaway tales aren’t quite in chronological order.) On his travels, he meets a family of demigods with one daughter living by a lake. They used to have eight daughters, but each year the giant eight-headed serpent Yamata no Orochi appears and takes one away. (This is it, folks, the moment you’ve been waiting for!) Susanoo leaves out eight large bowls full of sake, one for each head, and sure enough, when Yamata no Orochi turns up that night it goes straight for the sake. Susanoo fights it while it’s drunk and sleepy, trapping its heads in a tree and hacking them off with his sword. He then cuts open Yamata no Orochi’s tail and finds a really big golden sword inside it. This is the Murakumo no Tsurugi. We’re told that Susanoo later married the surviving daughter and gave the sword to Amaterasu.

Orochi has reptilian green skin, dead eyes, eight long necks with little frills just behind each head, and a thick tail with eight short pronged offshoots. This is all we ever see of it – its body and legs, assuming it has those, stay in the water. It looks a bit like the lovechild of the Loch Ness Monster and the Hydra.

There follows a bit of romantic drama. Ototachibana follows Yamato Takeru but tries to reject him, because she's sworn to the shrine and if she hooks up with him it would anger the gods. Yamato Takeru throws down the sacred mirror (and we don’t see anyone pick it up again). He becomes engaged to Princess Miyazu, the daughter of the ruler of Owari, but leaves her behind to continue on his mission to pacify the Eastern lands. Ototachibana catches up with him again in the Ainu territory near Mt Fuji whose ruler has already been approached by Otomo’s henchmen and told to kill Yamato Takeru. The two are trapped in a burning field, but escape when Yamato Takeru uses the Orochi sword to cut down a clearing in the grass. Remember the pouch his auntie gave him earlier in the film? He pulls two flints out of this and uses them to pre-burn a safe path out of the field. His army kills the ruler and his army. Yamato Takeru renames the Orochi sword Kusanagi no Tsurugi (“the sword of grass-cutting”) and sends it to his abandoned fiancée.

Yamato Takeru decides that he and his army should return to Yamato while they’re at sea. When he orders his men to turn their ships around, they spontaneously sing a song about how great their homeland is and how much they miss it. (This is a song called the Kunishinobi-uta, taken directly from the books. The Kojiki says Yamato Takeru composed it, while the Nihon Shoki ascribes it to his father, the Emperor Keikō.) A storm batters their ships and sinks a couple. Ototachibana declares that this is a sign of the gods’ anger and throws herself into the sea to appease them, at which point the storm does indeed clear up.

Back in Yamato, the Imperial army led by Otomo's own son ambushes Yamato Takeru's army and a large battle ensues. Yamato Takeru delivers a rousing nationalist speech (which may give some clue as to the film's intentions) to his last remaining soldier, whose name is Yakumo, before they make their last stand. Yamato Takeru is killed, but his soul becomes a white swan that apparently causes a volcanic eruption and tsunami that wipes out Otomo's forces.

(This is a huge departure from the books, in which Yamato Takeru offends a mountain god, falls sick and dies without ever returning home. There’s no battle and no eruption, but the detail of his soul becoming a white bird is lifted from the books – it’s seen emerging from his mausoleum some time later. Note also that there’s no suggestion of where the future 14th Emperor comes from. His mother’s supposed to be called Futaji-no-iri or Futachi-iri, and we haven’t met her.)

Despite last being seen nearly dead and at the mercy of Otomo's forces, Yakumo and several of his comrades seemingly return to their families in full health. Seeing the white swan in the sky, they all run to follow it.

(In shifting Yamato Takeru’s death to the battlefield, bringing the appearance of the bird back to that same day and having his doomed soldiers reappear at home without any explanation to lead their families in chasing after it, the film makes this whole final scene questionable. Is it meant to be real or a metaphor? Are we supposed to tie it back to Yamato Takeru’s “I have a dream” speech? Is this meant to be a call to the audience to follow his lead?)

This film’s full of familiar faces. The elder Kumaso brother – the cruel but stupid one – is played by Shimura Takashi, who played Dr Yamane in the first two Godzilla movies. Takarada Akira, who played the romantic part of Ogata in Godzilla, is seen briefly as Prince Wakatarashi. Many more pop up in blink-and-you’ll-miss-them bit parts.

Yamato Takeru himself is played by Mifune Toshirō, the superstar of Kurosawa's acclaimed samurai films and probably one of the most recognisable Japanese actors outside Japan. He’s an incredible catch for a fantasy movie, even if it is being framed as a respectable period drama. I gather he wasn’t too fussed about it – he’s on record as saying that the films he made with Kurosawa were the only ones he was proud of. Nonetheless, he returned to the historical/fantasy genre to play the bamboo cutter in Princess from the Moon (1987), another Toho movie with a token kaiju that drew on popular folklore.

I wonder if any ambivalent feeling on Mifune’s part had an effect on his performance here, because he’s highly theatrical in a way he isn’t in the Kurosawa films, scowling through his lines and striking dramatic poses all over the place. It could just be that in the Yamato Takeru scenes he’s deliberately echoing the larger-than-life performance he gives in his other role as Susanoo. (The dramatic poses are notably the same.) All the cutaway tales of the gods are obviously recorded indoors on a soundstage and look artificial, which contrasts profoundly with the "real" scenes, many of them ostensibly outdoors. Mifune bringing some of that unreality into his performance as Yamato Takeru might strengthen the connection being made between the folk hero and the god, but at a cost. There’s a fair bit of over-the-top acting around him – his soldiers indulge in plenty of belly-clutching and "ho ho ho!" acting, and Shimura’s turn as Kumaso senior is quite a ripe one.

The film looks beautiful, and the special effects support it well. There are some very nice model ships and some subtle optical effects. The composite shots in the grand finale are a mixed bag, but some of them are astonishingly good.

And so we move on to the significance of this, Toho’s thousandth cinematic production.

People sometimes talk about overtones of nationalism in some of the Godzilla movies, and for the most part I can’t see it. When they’re not all about the monster fights, the Godzilla movies tend to be quite humble parables with no glorious triumphalism in the offing (although we’ve recently seen one possible counter-example). But in this film, I see it – the hero speech near the end is a dead giveaway. The folk hero talking about taking a Japan that’s lost its way and rebuilding it the way it used to be in the good old days ought to set alarm bells ringing. He starts off by imagining a Japan without suffering and that sounds nice, but then he starts in on “strength and joy” and it starts to feel awkward again. And throwing in a made-up treacherous adversary is a move awfully close to the “stab in the back” narrative favoured by nationalist demagogues and politicians.

But it’s not clear who the guilty party is supposed to be, given both Otomo’s nephews and Yamato Takeru are part of the direct lineage of Japan’s incumbent Imperial House. Maybe it isn’t a question of people but of ideologies. Wakatarashi and Iogi, tainted by association with their wicked uncle, are timid stay-at-homes, while the noble Yamato Takeru is out with his army forcibly subduing the neighbours. Maybe the film’s promoting a specifically militaristic kind of nationalism.

The kindest interpretation I can think of is that the filmmakers were thinking of the then ongoing American military occupation of Iwo Jima and the islands of Okinawa Prefecture. Perhaps Yamato Takeru’s dream of a reinvigorated Japan was simply meant to conjure up visions of a Japan not partially controlled by the US Army. I mean, maybe the writers, producers and director really were wishing for Japan to re-arm and re-invade its Pacific neighbours, but I’d prefer to think that’s not the case. (And there’s nothing else in any of their CVs that would really indicate that.)

And the eight-headed serpent Yamata no Orochi, what’s the significance of that? Well, look, y’know... sometimes a cigar’s just a cigar.

American re-edits

Varan (1958)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)

Also discussed: Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), Gigantis, the Fire Monster (1959), Varan the Unbelievable (1962), King Kong vs Godzilla (US, 1963), Godzilla 1985 (1985).

The time has come to talk of the American re-edits of Shōwa era Japanese kaiju eiga. Varan presents an excellent opportunity for this, as it was affected perhaps more than any other movie in its transition from source material to US cinematic release, and under particularly unusual circumstances.

It started as a co-production between Toho and American Broadcasting-Paramount Theatres (AB-PT); readers may recall that this company was originally planning to handle the US release of the first Godzilla sequel but ran into financial trouble... well, right around the time Varan was being filmed. The intention was to make Varan as a three-part serialised film for TV, in black and white and with a fast turnaround. When the American side of the production fell through, Toho pivoted to try to get a cinematic film out of the project, cutting the completed scenes together with new footage and cropping the picture for cinema screens. The result is honestly better than you might expect from this description, but that’s a low bar to clear – it looks cheap and uneven.

An academic expedition looking for rare butterflies in a remote village ends in the deaths of two students. The villagers, who are portrayed as superstitious, backwards and living in squalour, blame the deaths on their monstrous god Baradagi. A motley party of students and journalists explores the area and, sure enough, sees Baradagi rising from a misty lake in the woods nearby. It tramples the village and returns to the lake.

Dr Sugimoto, the students’ biology lecturer, renames the creature Varan on the basis that it’s clearly a member of the long-extinct Varanopode species. (Note: this species is entirely fictional. This scene looks like a slapdash do-over of the standard “I recognise that dinosaur” scene from other movies of our acquaintance. I wonder if it might have been intended as a parody?) Varan is a large, quadripedal reptile with spines all over its head and down its back and broad webbing down each side joining arms to legs. Morphologically, it looks more like a flying squirrel than any known dinosaur. It doesn’t look very much like a lake monster.

The JSDF rolls into the village area and tries to use chemical explosives against Varan, but this plan backfires. Varan climbs the nearest mountain, spreads his webbing and glides off towards Tokyo. As is usually the case, it’s impervious to conventional weaponry. The JSDF is stumped until a Dr Fujimura comes forward with an experimental explosive that could destroy Varan from the inside. (The scientist with the experimental weapon is, naturally, played by Hirata Akihiko, aka Dr Serizawa in Godzilla (1954). Also recognisable is Tsuchiya Yoshio, the air commander in Godzilla Raids Again (1955), playing one of the JSDF officers.) As luck would have it, Varan is attracted to flares to the extent that it will swallow them whole. Following a daring exercise to corral Varan, the JSDF succeeds in attaching the explosive material to a series of flares and dropping them into its mouth, sealing its fate.

A couple of years later, two American companies – Dallas Productions and Cory Productions – took on the project of preparing the movie for a US release, which was sold on to Crown International Pictures for distribution in cinemas. The Dallas/Cory co-production team retained only a third of the original content. For the rest, they filmed new scenes with an American cast, led by Myron Healey as a US Navy commander, and intercut these with Toho’s effects shots and some of the Japanese characters to create a broadly similar story. Varan the Unbelievable (1962), directed by Jerry A Baerwitz, looks even choppier than Varan. There seem to have been problems in particular with the cinematic aspect ratio – it’s been suggested that Dallas/Cory couldn’t get hold of the source footage and had to work from Toho’s final print.

The major changes made to the story, apart from the overhaul of the cast, are that the village is relocated from a rural area near Tokyo to an island, that the monster is not deliberately attacked at the lake but is disturbed by a perfectly innocent series of desalination experiments, and that all scenes of Varan flying are cut. Also, and for no readily apparent reason, Varan is referred to throughout as "Obake”.

This extreme change to the material, creating a second, ostensibly distinct feature, was nothing new. It was in keeping with what Jewell Enterprises had done several years earlier when they produced the American version of Godzilla (1954).

Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956) is shorter than Godzilla but only retains about an hour of its source film. The other quarter of the American version consists of new scenes starring Raymond Burr as Steve Martin, a journalist visiting his “old college friend” Dr Serizawa who finds himself trapped in Tokyo with the scoop of the century. Apparently the American producers felt unable to present their audience with a straight, dubbed, foreign film and decided to add Burr in to make it more marketable. (Burr was a known film actor but not a big name star – he hadn’t yet made his TV breakthrough playing stoic detectives, first in a series based on the Perry Mason stories of Erle Stanley Gardner which ran for a decade, then in the original series Ironside which ran for most of the decade following that.) Burr’s scenes were filmed with Japanese American actors “translating” some of the original dialogue for him, or with the camera shooting over an extra’s shoulder while Burr talked to them. These could then be intercut with close-up shots of the original cast, with the dialogue mistranslated or dubbed over as necessary, to give a convincing impression that journalist Steve Martin was in the thick of the action.

Godzilla, King of the Monsters! is an effective movie in its own right, but subtly different in tone from Godzilla. When we first see ships being destroyed, we also hear Godzilla’s roar, which wasn’t the case in Godzilla – this puts the fictional action at a further remove from the real-world events that inspired it. Dr Yamane still suggests that H-bomb tests are to blame for Godzilla’s appearance, but he doesn’t specifically talk about the kaiju’s deep-sea habitat being disturbed, and as the Soviet Union had by now tested a hydrogen bomb (in 1955, over land in what is now Kazakhstan), viewers might assume the blame is being spread further afield than the US-controlled Marshall Islands. Crucially, Yamane’s final dire pronouncement that more nuclear tests will mean more monsters is replaced with an upbeat voiceover from Martin to the effect that the crisis is over and the world can “wake up and live again”. On the positive side, making Martin and Serizawa old pals gives Martin an excellent reason to know about Serizawa’s research and to be involved in the plot’s denouement, although it affects the dynamics of the relationship between Serizawa, Emiko and Ogata. And most of the key scenes are kept in, including the horrors of the aftermath of Godzilla’s Tokyo rampage, giving the movie some impact.

King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) got similar treatment but for different and, I think, more entertaining reasons. (I’ll be covering King Kong vs Godzilla in a couple or three weeks and don’t want to steal too much of my own thunder, but here goes.) Willis O’Brien, creator of the stop-motion effects in King Kong (1933), had an idea for a sequel that would team Kong up with a monster created by a descendant of Dr/Baron Frankenstein.

Pause for a moment to let that nugget sink in.

By this time – the end of the 1950s – RKO Pictures had stopped producing its own films and its intellectual assets were being handled by Universal Pictures, who had produced several Frankenstein movies in the 30s and 40s, so there was at least a behind-the-scenes connection. Producer John Beck took O’Brien’s King Kong vs Frankenstein concept, commissioned a script based on it and touted it around, but was unable to get a US studio to back it. He ended up taking the script to Japan and offering it to Toho Studios. Toho decided instead to team Kong up with Godzilla and leased the character of Kong from RKO. John Beck nonetheless remained in charge of producing a version of the film for release in the US, with Universal distributing King Kong vs Godzilla (US, 1963).

Like Jewell Enterprises before him, Beck decided the movie would need significant changes before it could be shown to an American audience, including the insertion of several new scenes with American characters (played by actors you’re unlikely to have heard of). These scenes are set on board a space station (borrowed from the effects footage of a Toho space adventure) that is the base of operations for a United Nations news channel, monitoring and reporting on the events as they unfold.

Pause and let that one sink in, too – an orbital newsroom owned and run by the UN. In a scene added on the front of the story, the UN anchorman presents a good news story about the UN helping to clear up after an earthquake in Chile. In the next bulletin, it turns out that the nuclear submarine that accidentally wakes Godzilla up is not under the direction of the US, as in the Japanese original, but of the UN. This whole arrangement looks like the wet dream of a “New World Order” conspiracy theorist, except that I think it must have played differently in 1963.

Most of the comedy of the original, which was played for laughs, is gone, although the movie retains the slapstick shenanigans of Mr Tako, the marketing director of Pacific Pharmaceutical who wants to exploit Kong. The scenario is rewritten as if it were the first time anyone had ever seen Godzilla or Kong, even though somehow everyone already knows both their names. One major change, and I plan to expand on this in the King Kong vs Godzilla blog post, is that the kaiju are figuratively reduced from being barely comprehensible forces of nature to merely gigantic animals. The main reason for this seems to be so that, when the two are brought together, UN News’ guest correspondent on natural history can talk down Godzilla as having a brain the size of a berry while giving better odds on “thinking animal” Kong (not coincidentally, the American-made monster). The original leaves open the possibility that either kaiju might return, but the US version insinuates that Godzilla is gone forever and only Kong survives.

King Kong vs Godzilla feels like a rather mean-spirited retelling of King Kong vs Godzilla.

The changes made to Godzilla Raids Again were of a different nature. No new scenes with an American leading man were added in – only a new shot or two of extras in an “international” bar – but the name of Godzilla was removed entirely for the movie’s US release. This time Paul Schreibman was the producer – eventually – taking over from the defunct AB-PT. Schreibman was understandably loath to present an obvious sequel to something that had been released by someone else. Consequently, Godzilla was renamed Gigantis, although Anguirus was fortunate enough to keep his own name. (In an unnecessary extra twist of confusion, Gigantis is said to be another member of Anguirus’ species, despite the visible differences.) The biggest change had to be made to the scene in which Dr Yamane briefed a room full of officials by showing them special effects shots from Godzilla. These shots were replaced with a cobbled-together mess of cosmological and dinosaur effects shots from other films, covering every style from claymation to puppets to stuntmen in costumes. The result is that, in Gigantis, the Fire Monster (1959), directed by Hugo Grimaldi and ultimately distributed by Warner Brothers, Dr Yamane gives the terrified authorities a lecture on the history of our planet and the age of dinosaurs that’s only glancingly relevant to the crisis in that it tries to explain Gigantis’ fiery breath as being somehow connected to the Earth’s volcanic activity.

Watching these radically altered versions of the movies is a perplexing experience. They have their own merits, sometimes improving the pacing of sections of the plot, sometimes conveying what’s going on more clearly, sometimes adding a pleasing new turn of phrase to a scene. Sometimes, though, they feel awfully close to desecrating the original creators’ work.

Most Japanese kaiju movies screened in America were subjected to some alteration – usually redubbed dialogue that changed the meaning of scenes, shots moved around in the edit to present the action in a way better suited to American audiences, and sometimes re-editing to change the implication of the action. None were quite so violently reconstructed as these early examples... until The Return of Godzilla (1984). This movie was intended to relaunch the Godzilla series in the new cultural milieu of the late Cold War. Gone was the baggage of the Shōwa era movies, with the sole exception of the 1954 original. When New World Pictures got their hands on the US rights for this, just for old times’ sake they filmed a raft of new scenes with Raymond Burr reprising his role from Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, although this time he was stuck in one room reporting on the plot. (Burr was now tremendously famous, and at around this very same time he got the offer to star in a relaunch of Perry Mason that would run for another decade.) RJ Kizer directed these scenes and they were edited into selections from the Toho movie as Godzilla 1985 (1985). New World also made sure to re-edit certain scenes so that the Soviet characters looked more villainous.