Godzilla vs Hedorah

Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971)
Toho Studios
Director: Banno Yoshimitsu, Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects)
Also known as: Godzilla vs the Smog Monster (the US title – technically, Hedorah’s more of a sewage monster, but a title like “Godzilla vs the Crap Monster” wouldn’t have done this film any favours).
Also discussed: Space Amoeba (1970).

Toho gave Godzilla a rest in 1970. The new feature headlining the summer Champion Festival that year was Space Amoeba (1970, a.k.a. Yog, Monster from Space), which can probably best be described as a kaiju exploitation flick. In this, an alien microorganism hijacks an unmanned space probe and rides it to a splashdown on Earth, near one of those classic fictional Pacific islands. There, it somehow inflates a cuttlefish (Gezora), a stone crab (Ganimes) and a matamata turtle (Kamoebas) to daikaiju size and pilots them around the island, terrorising the inhabitants and a visiting Japanese research team as a prelude to somehow conquering the world.

Apart from its own flaws, there are two sad things to note about Space Amoeba. Firstly, the special effects titan Tsuburaya Eiji had died of a heart attack at the start of the year, leaving behind him a hugely successful TV production company. He’d continued to offer advisory or supervisory help on Toho’s tokusatsu movies since going his own way and received an honorary credit on several of them; Space Amoeba was the first Toho kaiju eiga to definitely have no input from Tsuburaya. Secondly, it was the last Toho tokusatsu movie to be made by a dedicated special effects department. To economise, Toho underwent a restructure at this time and the special effects team was folded into a larger and more general visual production department. Most of the same people would provide effects for the Godzilla movies that followed.

In 1971, Toho’s management asked Banno Yoshimitsu to breathe fresh life into the Godzilla franchise. Banno was already on their books as an assistant director, but had just done some eye-catching audio-visual work for Expo ’70, the World’s Fair in Ōsaka. Godzilla vs Hedorah, which he co-wrote and directed, would be no less eye-catching.

I joked above about Hedorah being a “crap monster”, but it’s hard not to think toiletary thoughts when you see the opening shot of Hedorah bobbing up to the surface of a scum-coated body of water. The main title sequence is roughly half documentary footage of polluted waters and half James Bond movie intro, with psychedelic visuals and a woman singing about the natural world having vanished and the need to bring it back.

The film cuts to a much more idyllic scene, a village house near Mt Fuji, the home of the Yano family. Little Ken plays in the garden with his plastic kaiju toys. Godzilla’s his favourite – as he tells his uncle Yukio, he thinks Godzilla’s a real “Superman”. A fisherman pays a visit to show Ken’s father a strange fish he found in Suruga Bay – the only thing he’s caught all morning. Completely inert, it looks like a tadpole the size of Dr Yano’s hand. Later, over dinner, the Yano family watch a news report about two oil tankers that were sunk by a large, unidentified creature that Ken believes is of the same type as the giant tadpole.

Dr Yano takes Ken down to Suruga Bay and goes diving to see what’s happened to the once popular fishing spot. The floor of the bay is carpeted with litter and, as Ken discovers while he waits on the shore for his father, the mussels and crabs in the rock pools are nothing but empty shells. Suddenly Ken sees the monstrous version of the strange tadpole swimming towards him, then launching itself at him. He escapes with nothing worse than a burnt hand, but Dr Yano is cornered by the creature underwater. He's interviewed by journalists later on at his home as he lies in bed, weakened and with half his face horribly scarred. Ken has now named the creature Hedorah (literally “sludge-ra”). The TV news reports that more oil tankers have been attacked by Hedorah.

A disjointed sequence of images follows. First, topping off the news report in the previous scene, we get a brief animated vignette about Hedorah, the first of three that will pop up during the course of this film. Next comes a shot of Godzilla posing against a zoomed-in shot of the rising sun. (He honestly looks as if he’s about to sing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning”.) This cuts abruptly to images of the sea, matted with dead fish and household waste. Finally, behind a similar scene at night, Godzilla rears up out of the water and blasts the rubbish with his breath, setting it on fire. (Well, that’s not going to help.) Over this last section, we hear – and see printed on the screen – the words of a poem little Ken has apparently written in class, about how Godzilla would be angry and do something about pollution if he could. All of this is revealed to be a dream Ken is having. Ken is convinced his dream is a premonition that Godzilla will come and save everyone from Hedorah.

In his home laboratory, Dr Yano finds that the creature the fisherman brought him has dried out completely and readily crumbles into a charcoal-like powder. Each particle of it can be revived in water, forming its own minuscule tadpole, and it thrives in muddy water. What’s more, the particles are drawn to merge with each other, suggesting that Hedorah is some sort of composite creature whose growth has been accelerated by the pollution of Japan’s coastal waters.

That evening, Yukio hangs out at a youth club where his girlfriend Miki is dancing and singing. She sings the film’s title song while a drunken Yukio hallucinates that everyone around him has the head of a fish. (It’s traditional to insert comments about drug culture here.) Meanwhile, Hedorah hauls itself out of the bay, now in a shambling, vaguely quadrupedal form with large, glowing, red eyes. It latches onto a factory chimney and swells as it inhales the smoke. Suddenly Godzilla arrives on the scene and the two kaiju fight. Two noteworthy things happen during this fight. One is that, when Godzilla grabs Hedorah and whirls it around his head, chunks of it fly off into populated areas of the city. Yukio and his friends at the club are briefly menaced by one of these blobs. They seem to have a will of their own and, like the particles in Dr Yano’s home lab, are drawn back to remerge with the larger Hedorah. The second is that Hedorah attacks Godzilla by firing what can only be described as a poop missile at him, badly burning his shoulder. Godzilla seems to gain the upper hand by repeatedly breathing radioactive fire over Hedorah, but the creature escapes back into the water.

The next day, Dr Yano gathers more samples from the site of the battle and, after further tests, concludes that Hedorah is a mineral organism unlike any other life form on Earth. The active compound in its biology appears to be a carbon-based substance that Ken immediately names “hedrium”, which metabolises waste chemicals into sulphur. Hedorah exudes some of this sulphur as a mist of sulphuric acid which, depending on the scene, instantly skeletonises people and corrodes metal or merely produces an unpleasant smog. Yano theorises that Hedorah is an alien organism that came to Earth in a meteorite.

Hedorah soon reappears in broad daylight in a new form, something like a flying flatfish but with the same sludgy texture and baleful red eyes, held aloft by its own gaseous emissions. It devastates the southern part of Fuji City, killing or injuring thousands and even choking Godzilla when he tries to intervene. Yukio and Miki, who’ve been entertaining Ken at an amusement park, barely escape with their lives when Hedorah swallows their car, while Ken has already fled the scene to warn his parents. Later at the youth club, Yukio declares that it’s impossible to beat Hedorah and announces his plan to replace a million-strong youth protest against pollution with a “go-go” party on the slopes of Mt Fuji.

Spurred on by a suggestion from Ken, Dr Yano experiments with passing an electric current through a Hedorah sample and succeeds in reducing it to a dessicated powder. He passes the idea on to the JSDF. Meanwhile, only 100 people have turned up to Yukio’s party, Ken included, but they enthusiastically rock out around a bonfire anyway. Hedorah is drawn to Mt Fuji and flies directly over the Yano house, its sulphuric mist leaving Dr and Mrs Yano unscathed but (in a scene reminiscent of the Oxygen Destroyer test in Godzilla (1954)) reducing Yano’s large tank of tropical fish to skeletons.

Ken watches as Godzilla confronts Hedorah at Mt Fuji. Hedorah is now huge and bipedal, the crown of its head glowing as red as its eyes. It can also now fire some kind of death ray out of its eyes. It blinds Godzilla’s left eye with one of its poop missiles, then menaces the assembled partygoers. Yukio leads some of them in throwing burning torches at it, but to no effect, and Hedorah kills them with toxic sludge. Godilla punches one of Hedorah’s eyes in retaliation, but only succeeds in coating his forearm with acidic slime. Hedorah attempts to drown Godzilla in a pit of filth, but is distracted by oxygen deployed by a JSDF helicopter.

The JSDF have erected a pair of gigantic electrodes further downhill, 40 metres high, and are trying to herd Hedorah between them. Their plan is to channel three million volts through the electrodes and dessicate Hedorah. To ensure their power supply, they’ve diverted all electricity from the Chūbu and Kantō regions (roughly, the middle part of Honshu island). Unfortunately, Godzilla and Hedorah wreck the power lines in their struggle. The JSDF are unable to repair the power supply in time, but Godzilla is able to charge up the electrodes and bake Hedorah by firing his radioactive breath into one of them. He plunges his claws into the corpse and pulls out two large white spheres, which are given their own special blast of electricity.

(Fans have long speculated about just what these two objects are supposed to be. The clean answer is that they're Hedorah's eyeballs, but they’re the wrong colour for that. Perhaps they're meant to be concentrated pockets of "hedrium", vital digestive organs for Hedorah. Then again, family entertainment in Japan can include testicle humour, as Studio Ghibli’s animated film Pom Poko (1994) shows, so who knows?)

But wait, there’s more! A smaller, flying Hedorah bursts out of the larger husk and flees. In hot pursuit, Godzilla reveals an astonishing new ability when he fires his breath at the ground and lifts off, propelling himself backwards through the air. (He will never be seen to do this again in any film.) Much weaker than before, Hedorah is easily subdued and brought back to the electrodes. The JSDF team have now made their repairs, but tragically blow a fuse when they switch on, so Godzilla’s forced to activate the electrodes again. He spends quite a bit of time tearing Hedorah into small pieces and jumping up and down on them before charging up the electrodes one last time. His triumphant exit is undercut by a reprise of the opening image of Hedorah rising from the mud and a caption suggesting it could all happen again.

Following his metafictional appearance in All Monsters Attack (1969), Godzilla walks the borderline between fiction and in-story “reality” in Godzilla vs Hedorah. He’s effectively summoned into the movie by little Ken, who is seen at the start playing with a couple of plastic Godzilla toys that clearly belong more in our own world than in the world of the earlier Shōwa era movies. In response to early news reports about Hedorah, Ken declares his belief that Godzilla will turn up and sort the beast out. When we get our first sight of Godzilla, it’s Ken’s dream image of him, accompanied by the narrated suggestion that Ken thinks pollution would make Godzilla angry. This is the second Toho kaiju movie in a row, and only the second ever, to feature a dream sequence, and in both cases the dreamer is a young boy calling on Godzilla for help. It’s only after this that Godzilla makes his first “real” appearance to confront Hedorah, just like Ken said he would. Ken even mimics Godzilla’s fighting moves the morning after the fight despite not having been there to see it. And what strangely human fighting moves they are, too – at one point in the later confrontation at Mt Fuji, Godzilla even strikes a pose in imitation of Ultraman, presumably another of Ken’s favourites.

Ken also seems to have some limited power over Hedorah – after all, if Godzilla’s around (whenever Ken says he is), it must mean Hedorah’s nearby too. He’s the one who names Hedorah and the alien mineral hedrium, looking for all the world like the know-it-all child hero of a Gamera movie. It’s as if he’s using the science-fictional conventions of his favourite films as a frame to interpret the news reports about oil spills and his father’s lab work. He has an uncanny knack of being where Hedorah’s about to turn up but escaping unharmed, although his uncle Yukio isn’t so lucky. And Yukio’s girlfriend Miki doesn’t seem to be any more upset about that than Ken, which adds to the sense that it isn’t quite real. I imagine Ken at the dinner table, excitedly telling everyone how this was when the monster ate Uncle Yukio’s car and that was when the monster killed Uncle Yukio, and Yukio grinning sheepishly and humouring him.

I could almost theorise that the movie never left Ken’s dream sequence, but I’ll settle for suggesting that what we’re shown isn’t meant literally, but is rather a kaiju eiga gloss Ken has put on his observation of the mundane facts of toxic chemical burns, acid rain and a sewage-filled harbour.

It’s customary to say two very obvious things about Godzilla vs Hedorah: it’s “the weird one” and it’s “the green one”. We’ll come back to the greenness in a minute. I think the weirdness is connected to what I’ve hinted at above, that this film presents a hyperactive child’s point of view rather than some documentary version of reality. In the interest of coherence, I’ve prepared a summary of the plot that doesn’t do justice to the kaleidoscope of visual non sequiturs that commentators tend to describe as “bizarre” and “surreal”. Barring one final hurrah at the end of the film, these oddities stop just ahead of the denouement on Mt Fuji, perhaps suggesting that part of their purpose is to stave off the viewer’s boredom until the big fight. Remember that Godzilla vs Hedorah debuted as part of a Toho Champion Festival to an audience of kids whose entertainment diet had shifted from the cinematic to the visual fast food of television. I don’t think director Banno was aiming for the art house crowd here. More to the point, the intrusions happen with a regularity that suggests the pattern of commercial breaks interrupting a TV show.

Some of these intrusions look like they’re emulating or commenting on other parts of the entertainment landscape that would be familiar to the kids watching. There are three animated PSAs about pollution starring a cartoon version of Hedorah – very on-the-nose for a feature that would share its Festival billing with three animated shorts. When Dr Yano holds forth on his thoughts about Hedorah’s extra-terrestrial origin and metabolism, we’re treated to flurries of illustrative images (slides of nebulas and animations of atomic reactions) as if he were presenting an educational TV programme. The frequently inserted news bulletins could also be counted as part of this narrative channel-hopping. The last major irruption of weirdness before the climactic showdown is a debate about Hedorah between two pundits in a TV studio that descends into a psychedelic collage of vox pops. Apart from the angry members of the public venting their opinions, the talking heads seem to include a baby buried collar-deep in mud, a floating skull, and Godzilla and Hedorah themselves.

Other moments seem to be just plain strange, although they could be explicable. I’m not going to attempt to reason out the third Hedorah PSA, which leads in a very Terry Gilliam-esque fashion from the silhouettes of the faces of two smog casualties to a shaded area of the same shape on a map of Fuji City in the news report about Hedorah’s attack on the amusement park. The youth club scene in which Yukio hallucinates that everyone around him has the head of a fish is something of a signature moment for this film, but I doubt it’s intended as a comment on 1970s drug culture. It happens while Miki sings about all the fish having died out, so the implication seems to be that we’re next. It presages Yukio’s turn towards fatalism after he loses his car to Hedorah. In a very weird moment, the film comments on Yukio’s Mt Fuji “go-go” party by cutting to half a dozen sombre, dead-eyed representatives of an older generation watching from the sidelines; they don’t look much more impressed when Godzilla shows up. And that final hurrah – Godzilla’s triumph, complete with heroic march music, isn’t undermined only by the question mark ending but by the ironic juxtaposition of a bay full of dead fish and Hokusai’s famous “Great Wave” woodblock print.

On to the question of environmentalism. Godzilla vs Hedorah doesn’t really dig into the “green” theme very deeply. It goes to extreme lengths to emphasise that pollution is bad, but beyond the oil tanker crashes and some animated industrial chimney stacks, it doesn’t go into any great detail about the causes of pollution and how they might be mitigated. On the other hand, the subject was in the air (so to speak) and perhaps Japanese schoolchildren were already well versed on the matter. (Perhaps, like little Ken, they were all writing poems about how angry it would make Godzilla.) International awareness of ecological issues had been growing steadily since the 1950s, with Clean Air Acts to combat urban pollution in Britain (1956) and America (1963) through regulation and the publication of Rachel Carson’s highly influential book Silent Spring (1962) on the impact of synthetic pesticides on the biosphere. In April 1970, the first Earth Day had been held on sites across America, with strong youth involvement – there was a definite overlap between its organisers and the participants of earlier college campus protests against the Vietnam War.

We might expect this film to preach to its child audience by showing its younger protagonists finding a solution to their pollution problem. On the contrary, it gives contemporary youth very short shrift – the only response Yukio and his friends, defiant but defeatist, can mount against Hedorah is to organise a massive, impotent love-in that costs several of them their lives. One might imagine Banno had heard about the inaugural Earth Day and been unimpressed. No, this film has quite another saviour in mind.

Remember when Godzilla used to represent atomic power in the form of the bomb? Here, a heroic Godzilla saves the world from ecological collapse by using his radioactive breath to charge up the gigantic electrodes that fry Hedorah. We’re shown more than once that the JSDF can’t defeat Hedorah until Godzilla steps in and gives them the juice they need. He represents atomic power again, but this time as an energy source.

After some initial wariness, Japan’s first commercial nuclear reactor, at the Tōkai Nuclear Power Plant in Ibaraki Prefecture in the Kantō region, had commenced operations in July 1966. Two more reactors, at the Tsuruga and Mihama Nuclear Power Plants, had opened for business in 1970, the year before this film’s release – both were located in Fukui Prefecture in the Chūbu region. Chūbu and Kantō are the two regions specifically namechecked by the JSDF officer who explains the giant electrode plan to Dr Yano. These had all been built using the expertise and methods of the British nuclear power industry. In March 1971, just four months before the festival debut of Godzilla vs Hedorah, the first reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant began commercial operations. This was the first major collaboration between the Japanese and American nuclear energy industries, so if we wanted to re-establish Godzilla’s links specifically to American atomic power, we might look to Fukushima Daiichi, although it’s in the Tōhoku region to the north-east of the area specified in the film. Construction began on more nuclear plants in 1970 and 1971, in the Chūbu and Kantō regions and further afield, and more reactors would be added to the existing plants in subsequent years.

At its peak, around the turn of the millennium, nuclear power met as much as 40% of Japan’s total energy needs and was hugely popular with the public. It was widely seen as a cleaner alternative to burning fossil fuels and is still touted as such, although nowadays we can cite plenty of examples of how badly it can go wrong. (The disruption of Fukushima Daiichi by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and the resulting environmental contamination, for example, which would abruptly turn public opinion in Japan against nuclear power. Godzilla would end up commenting on that, too.) I’m sure there must have been some fanfare around the 1970 launch of the two power plants in the Chūbu region and the 1971 launch of the Fukushima plant. Whether any of these directly influenced Banno’s script is moot, but I think the overall theme is clearly there.

Godzilla vs Hedorah wasn’t well received by the press, and producer Tanaka Tomoyuki wasn’t best pleased with it either, particularly the scene of Godzilla “flying”. Banno wasn’t allowed near Toho’s Godzilla movies again, but on the bright side, he did end up as an executive producer on Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla (2014).

All Monsters Attack

All Monsters Attack (1969)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Nakano Teruyoshi (special effects in close collaboration with Honda)
Also known as: Godzilla’s Revenge (the American title, although it sounds more like a British euphemism relating to spicy food).

Prepare for a shock: This film opens with a song being growled out by a child. It’s no “Gamera March”, although it goes by the title of “Kaiju March”. This should give some indication of the influence Daiei’s Gamera series now has on the Godzilla movies. Listeners can probably work out that the song has something to do with Godzilla, Minilla and smashing things. After the opening titles, it plays again over scenes of a dystopian industrial cityscape. That’s contemporary Tokyo.

We follow a boy called Ichirō as he makes his way home from school. As he walks alongside a railway line, his father, a train driver, calls out to tell him he’ll be working late tonight. (Dad is played by Sahara Kenji, formerly the hero Shigeru in Rodan (1956) and a regular in the Godzilla movies.) Later, on a break, Ichirō’s father confides in a colleague that he worries he’s neglecting his son; the colleague is more interested in a newspaper report about a recent bank robbery. Ichirō scavenges for eye-catching junk along the roadside and, against his friend Sachiko’s advice, goes to nose around a derelict factory building. He’s driven off by a gang of children led by a bully that Ichirō and Sachiko privately call “Gabara”. (It’s not clear where this name comes from, other than the generic “-ra” at the end, but it’s explicitly not the bully’s real name.)

When he gets home, Ichirō heads straight for the apartment of his neighbour Shinpei, who has his spare key. (Clearly Ichirō’s mother is out at work too. Amamoto Hideyo plays Shinpei – this is his first major role in a Godzilla movie. He can be seen in minor roles as a butler in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964) and a Red Bamboo officer in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966). He was the villainous Dr Who in King Kong Escapes (1967).) Shinpei is a toymaker and shows Ichirō his current project, a tabletop computer that can recite facts about the Moon. (It displays a still shot of the moonbase from Destroy All Monsters (1968) as it does this.) Ichirō says the Moon’s all very well, but he’d rather go to Monster Island, the home of Godzilla, Minilla, Rodan, Kumonga and all the other daikaiju. (That’s “Kaijū-tō”, not “Kaijū-Rando” as in Destroy All Monsters, but given we’ll discover it’s a dream location apparently composited out of clips from earlier Godzilla movies, “Kaijū-Rando” is possibly where Ichirō got the idea from.) Monster Island is also home to Gabara, a monster that loves to fight, although Godzilla keeps him in check. Shinpei understands that this is a coded reference to the bully Ichirō calls Gabara and urges Ichirō to fight back against his tormentor. Ichirō heads over to his own apartment where he finds a note from his mother, eats his tea and watches some television, including a news report about the bank robbery. Soon bored, he fantasises about taking a flight from Haneda airport to Monster Island.

In this first dream sequence, Ichirō finds himself seated on board a passenger jet and then transported directly from it to Monster Island, where he watches a replay of Godzilla’s fight against the Kamacuras from Son of Godzilla (1967). Climbing up a tree, he spots various kaiju last seen in Destroy All Monsters, then sees the ginger buzzard Giant Condor from Ebirah, Horror of the Deep as it swoops towards Godzilla. Another replayed kaiju fight follows. Next, Ichirō is pursued by a Kamacuras and falls into a deep pothole. He’s unable to climb back out by himself, but is hauled out on the end of a rope by none other than Minilla. (And in all-new footage, too!) In a radical departure from his previous two film appearances, Minilla doesn’t make peculiar “wagwa!” noises but actually speaks to Ichirō in Japanese, his jaw flapping as he does so. He also appears at the same scale as Ichirō. (Both of these things only apply while Minilla is sharing the scene with Ichirō – in later scenes, lifted wholesale from earlier movies, he’ll be his old self again.) Minilla reassures Ichirō that he’s friendly and is sorry to hear about his absentee parents. However, both are obliged to hide when Gabara walks past.

This Gabara, the Monster Island dream counterpart to Ichirō’s nemesis, is a tall, tailless, reptilian kaiju with warty green skin, a ridge of horns from the crown of his head down to the back of his neck and a thin thatch of blond hair. He has large eyes, a mouth full of pointy teeth, an unpleasant smirk and a roar that sounds like cackling laughter. Just when he’s passed by, Ichirō is woken up by a shrill ringing sound.

This may be the sound of the telephone in Shinpei’s apartment or a coincidence, depending on how thin the walls are. Ichirō’s mother is calling to ask Shinpei to keep an eye on her son while she works late at the office to cover for a sick colleague. After she hangs up, her other co-workers mention the bank robbery again, just in case you’d forgotten about it.

Unable to get back to sleep after Shinpei passes on his mother’s message, Ichirō heads out and finds his way back to the derelict factory. It looks like it’s been abandoned for decades, but Ichirō finds a brand new driver’s licence in the dust. This belongs to one of the two bank robbers, who are hiding in the building. The robber follows Ichirō home and notes which apartment he lives in.

After dinner, Ichirō dreams himself back to Monster Island, only to be confronted immediately by Gabara. He runs away and finds Minilla again, and the pair go to watch the big lizard-vs-lobster fight from Ebirah. This is followed by a reprise of Godzilla’s battle with Kumonga from Son of Godzilla, recut so that Minilla doesn’t have to step in and can continue to watch from the sidelines. No sooner is Kumonga dealt with than – new footage! – Gabara turns up. Minilla has told Ichirō that Godzilla wants him to toughen up and fight his own fights, so he grows to his more familiar kaiju size in a string of jump cuts and steps out to face Gabara. The result is an ignominious trouncing. Minilla, restored to human size, retreats with Ichiro to watch the scene of Godzilla destroying a squadron of Red Bamboo fighter jets from Ebirah. With the planes dealt with, Godzilla summons Minilla to him and the pair re-enact the “learning to breathe fire” scene from Son of Godzilla. As he watches from the greenery, Ichirō is seized by a predatory plant and wakes up.

He has in fact been seized by the bank robbers, who’ve broken into his apartment and abduct him at knifepoint. One of the men stays at the old factory building with Ichirō while the other goes to steal a car. Ichirō wills himself back to Monster Island, where he sees Gabara bullying Minilla. Encouraged by Ichirō and a very pushy Godzilla, Minilla bests Gabara, but only temporarily. Gabara soon tries his luck with Godzilla instead. At last the father and son duo send Gabara packing. Ichirō cheers them on, but panics as Godzilla seems about to turn on him and wakes up back in the derelict building.

The other robber returns and the pair decide to take Ichirō with them for insurance as they make their escape, but their stolen car won’t start. Inspired by his dreams of a newly confident Minilla, Ichirō gets away from the robbers and leads them back into the building, where he takes them down with a series of Home Alone-esque pranks. Meanwhile, Shinpei has gone looking for Ichirō and finds the car with a bag full of stolen money in it, and calls the police in to arrest the robbers.

The next morning, Ichirō seems to have made his peace with the idea that his parents will be out at work all the time to support him. He’s ambushed outside his apartment by journalists and tells them that Minilla helped him beat the bank robbers; Shinpei explains to them that the fictional kaiju is a kind of spiritual role model for Ichirō. On his way to school with his friend Sachiko, Ichirō is set upon by Gabara’s gang but gives the bully a beating. He then terrorises a worker painting a billboard and leaves his dad to sort out the mess behind him. He continues on his way with Gabara’s gang now tagging along with him.

In December 1969, Toho made their bid to win Godzilla’s audiences back from television to cinema, or at least to present a viable alternative form of entertainment for children who could now get their fix of hyperactive kaiju action every week for free at home. Tokusatsu movies released to theatres in the usual way just couldn’t hold their own at the box office any more. The last one Toho sent out to fend for itself, in July, was the execrable Latitude Zero (1969), based on an American pulp radio serial and notable for being filmed entirely in English and guest starring Cesar “The Joker” Romero as the villain. I would suggest that this item was never going to turn Toho’s fortunes around, but in any event it clearly didn’t do much to restore the studio’s confidence in kaiju eiga.

Their solution was the Toho Champion Festival: a half-day event, usually on a Saturday, run as many as three times a year at its peak. (Spoiler alert: its peak lasted about four years. From 1975 to 1978 it ran only once a year, in March, and then, to borrow a phrase from Edgar Allan Poe, television held illimitable dominion over all.) For the price of admission, parents could leave their kids at one of Toho’s theatre outlets and get some time to themselves, and the kids could take in multiple features with a total runtime of a bit less than four hours. The attractions were a mix of old tokusatsu edited down to an hour and a quarter (less talk, more action!), cinematic cuts of TV episodes, animated features and shorts and the debut releases of the last six Shōwa series Godzilla films.

Toho copied this format from Toei Company’s successful Manga Festival (dedicated, despite the name, to live action as well as anime), which had been running since 1964. At least Toho had the luxury of being able to do this, unlike the Daiei Motion Picture Company which would have been too far in the red by the end of 1969 to try anything similar on Gamera’s behalf. The Champion Festival’s most lasting and infamous legacy is that those cutdown reissues of Toho’s earlier films were achieved by butchering the original film negatives, causing them severe damage.

All Monsters Attack, the first Godzilla movie to debut in this setting, leans heavily into the situation. It isn’t a film about Godzilla, but a film about an ordinary, contemporary child who reflects the intended audience, who’s watched the recent Godzilla movies and uses them as a moral compass in his parents’ absence. Perhaps some of those festival attendees were themselves “latchkey kids”, passing some time at the cinema while their parents were out working extra hours. The film has a proportional content of recycled footage that would make even Gamera vs Viras (1968) blush, but this is put into good service as the clay out of which Ichirō’s dreams are formed. Like many of the young viewers, I’m sure, Ichirō has seen those earlier movies and, in the days before home media, has relived the action scenes in his head, perhaps misremembering them or mixing them up, even projecting himself into them. The replayed scenes even anticipate the Champion Festival’s strategy of filling time between new material with reissues of older films. (Edited versions of Ebirah and Son of Godzilla, the two features most heavily referenced in All Monsters Attack, would eventually headline the July 1972 and July 1973 festivals respectively.)

This isn’t a trick Toho could play more than once, but once you’ve stepped into the Land of (Meta)Fiction, it’s not that easy to step back out again. Although subsequent movies will return to the familiar model of telling stories about Godzilla, I think the question of who’s telling those stories will remain. I mentioned while discussing Destroy All Monsters that the concept of “Kaiju Land” felt like a toybox, and this movie’s Monster Island dreamscape only reinforces that. Bear that in mind when Monster Island reappears “for real” in Godzilla vs Gigan (1972) and Godzilla vs Megalon (1973).

The actual message of the film is a bit of a mixed bag. Ichirō is urged to stand up for himself and fight his own battles, and sure, that’s all well and good, although it fundamentally involves him punching the crap out of Gabara and biting his arm, then adopting his gang. It also involves Ichirō causing a painter’s slapstick “accident” and leaving his father to carry the can for him. He’s become more independent, but he’s also become something of a menace. It’s not uncommon for children to be portrayed as little tearaways in kaiju eiga – see especially the Gamera movies – but I’m not sure whether this is meant as a release of pressure or incitement for the child viewers in a society as famously polite and deferential as Japan’s.

On a broader scale, is it meant to needle the kids’ parents? Is this message of defending oneself through free self-expression, and potentially through aggressive direct action, intended to map onto Japanese society or even onto Japan as a player on the global stage? America had been urging Japan to stand up and fight its own battles for some time now, encouraging it to write its own constitution following their nominal withdrawal and rearm itself. Japan was understandably reluctant to do this, given America’s prior actions against them. All Monsters Attack does seem to hint that Japanese society ought to embrace change, however troubling and occasionally violent the consequences might be.

To start with, it looks like it might offer a critique of absentee parenting, an inevitable consequence of the economic impact of Japan’s post-war rebuild. Ichirō’s father says early on that he worries he’s not spending enough time with his son, and when Ichirō’s mother says in her final scene that she’ll give up working late shifts at the office, it feels like a predictable follow-on from what’s gone before. Yet Ichirō rejects that and repeats the argument his neighbour Shinpei used earlier in the film, that those extra shifts are necessary to support the family financially. He demonstrates his maturity and independence by accepting the new status quo – which the rest of the film has presented as an undesirable set of conditions that leaves Ichirō neglected, bored and in danger – in place of the older social standard we might have expected from this film, that of a stay-at-home mother raising her child. From a 21st-century perspective, we might consider this bit of scriptwriting progressive. What Ichirō doesn’t have – but Minilla does, as seen in Son of Godzilla – is a pushy parent driving him to study and take his own place on the treadmill. He does now have his own gang, though. The kids are all right, the film seems to say, but I’m not sure how sincerely it says it.

Destroy All Monsters

Destroy All Monsters (1968)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Arikawa Sadamasa (special effects)

So here’s a great big celebration of Toho’s kaiju eiga to date, an indulgent jam that throws together a whole bunch of their giant monsters in a lightly plotted, high-stakes runaround with rockets and aliens. Plenty of costumed fighting, plenty of showy miniature work for the special effects team, surprisingly little reused footage (although it’s there and it’s not hard to spot).

This might seem odd because 1968 wasn’t a significant anniversary for Godzilla, or for Toho Studios; this is only the ninth Godzilla film, and I don’t think it was a milestone number for the studio overall (assuming they kept count after The Three Treasures (1959), allegedly their thousandth production). The fact is, Destroy All Monsters was meant to be the last Godzilla film (yes, again, for real this time). This was supposed to be a big send-off for the franchise at a time when television was draining away Japanese cinema audiences.

Moreover, Godzilla was now getting the same treatment as Gamera in America – Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966) had gone straight to television in the US, and Son of Godzilla (1967) was about to go the same way. The American dub of Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965) wouldn’t even find a distributor until 1970, although it would at least debut in cinemas. With its unprecedentedly high monster quotient, Destroy All Monsters might recapture the American market’s attention and give Toho back a foreign theatrical outlet for their tokusatsu films.

Destroy All Monsters did get a theatrical release in America, and it ended up reviving Godzilla’s fortunes, at least for a little while. For the domestic market, Toho found another way ahead and made another Godzilla movie in 1969 (of which, more in the next blog post), but this was certainly the last Godzilla movie of the Shōwa era that was expected to fend for itself in Japanese cinemas.

Most of the kaiju featured have previously appeared in other Godzilla movies, but some may need an introduction. And as ever, being killed in their debut movie is no bar to kaiju making a reappearance. Godzilla, Minilla and Kumonga were all seen as recently as Son of Godzilla, while Rodan, Mothra, Anguirus and (spoiler alert!) King Ghidorah should all have made enough of an impression on everyone’s memory. The others are new to the franchise. Gorosaurus, who looks a bit like a Tyrannosaurus Rex but with an even more disproportionately large head, first appeared in the previous year’s King Kong Escapes (1967). He’s a native of Mondo Island and was last seen re-enacting the famous 1933 “Kong vs random dinosaur” scene. Fun fact: he wasn’t named in that movie, so he’s been promoted from bit player to star cast. Manda, a long wyrm-style dragon with stumpy, barely visible legs, was the monstrous antagonist in Atragon (1963). Atragon is an anti-nationalist fable about a flying submarine with a corkscrew drill attachment on the front. (You heard me the first time.) Fun fact: “Atragon”, a portmanteau of “atomic dragon”, was originally meant to describe Manda, but because that isn’t Manda’s name it’s sometimes mistaken for the name of the flying drilling submarine (which is actually called the Gōtengō). Baragon, the quadruped with a horn and big, floppy ears, comes from Frankenstein vs Baragon (1965, a.k.a. Frankenstein Conquers the World). It seems the costume wasn’t available for Baragon’s first scripted appearance, so Gorosaurus ends up subbing in for him, but he can be seen in the film’s climactic showdown. And Varan, the eponymous star of Varan (1958) who looks like a reptilian flying squirrel, isn’t even named in this film but can be seen floating into shot in a single scene (and it’s not reused footage, either!).

So without further ado, on with the show...

It's the end of the 20th century. There's a UN moonbase serviced by daily commuter rockets. The UN has also established a marine research station underwater near the Ogasawara Islands, where they’re apparently creating new species of fish. While they were there, they’ve also corralled all the world’s giant monsters onto one of the islands, which is now popularly known as “Kaiju Land”. We’ll find out later, in a press conference given by Dr Yoshida, that the island was sealed off from the outside world 10 years ago and the kaiju roundup started 20 years ago. (So around 1979, which I suppose works with the dating of the films so far. But see below.) In a helicopter flypast of the island, we’re shown Godzilla, Rodan, Anguirus, Mothra (in larval form) and Gorosaurus. Gas is automatically released along the coast to prevent the kaiju swimming away from the island, and magnetic force screens stop Rodan from flying away. The whole operation is controlled from an underground base, where we can also see uniformed staff at workstations monitoring Minilla and Manda.

Yamabe Katsuo, an officer on the moonbase, is in the middle of a videophone call to Manabe Kyōko, who’s just started work as a research assistant studying the inhabitants of “Kaiju Land”. (Their relationship isn’t explicitly spelled out, although they’re probably meant to be boyfriend and girlfriend. Some sources claim that she’s his sister, possibly on the basis of one of the film’s American dubs, but then some sources conflate the characters’ different surnames.) The signal suddenly drops out and the base’s electrical systems are disrupted before the scientists – and, above ground, the daikaiju – are knocked out with gas; all lines of communication with the island are lost. At the UN’s Science Council office in Tokyo, Dr Yoshida tries to re-establish contact and is shocked to see camera footage of the island deserted. Reports then start to come in of kaiju attacks on major cities around the world: Rodan in Moscow, Mothra in Peking, Manda in London, Baragon in Paris and Godzilla in New York. (Of these, we’re actually shown Rodan buzzing a Russian Orthodox cathedral, Gorosaurus destroying the Arc de Triomphe on Baragon’s behalf, although he’s burrowing like Baragon would, and Godzilla flaming New York’s harbour area.)

On a patrol of the lunar surface in his rocket, Moonlight SY-3, Katsuo and his crew see a black saucer-shaped object and try to pursue it. Tetsuo claims this is important because it’s humanity’s first contact with a UFO. (This makes a nonsense of Invasion of Astro-Monster and, although the UN might not know about it, Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster (1964). Just to recap, Astro-Monster was explicitly set in the 1960s, and this film’s set at the turn of the 21st century, but in just 30 years everyone’s forgotten the attempted alien invasion and all the UFOs.) The crew return to base and are ordered to head back to Earth to investigate the island. They’re met by Kyōko and her boss, Dr Otani, who act as if in a trance. Otani demonstrates how his team are remote controlling the destructive daikaiju – on a workstation screen, we see Mothra destroying a train, Godzilla a ship, Rodan an aircraft. The masterminds behind this are the Kilaaks, ensconced in the heart of the island base.

The Kilaaks come from an unspecified asteroid between Mars & Jupiter. They look straightforwardly human and seem to all present as female. We’re only introduced to one at this point. She wears a silver jumpsuit, gloves, cape and head covering. Rather like the Xiliens in Astro-Monster, her voice sounds like it’s being relayed through a PA system. She claims to be on a mission to advance civilisation on Earth. An invisible shield of some kind makes it impossible for the SY-3 crew to shoot or physically attack her. When the crew try to take Kyōko and Otani away with them, the Kilaak gasses them and sets the other base personnel on them. A gunfight breaks out in the control room. The crew succeed in retreating with Otani, whom they take to the UNSC office. Otani doesn’t answer any questions and instead jumps to his death from a window. Kyōko and some of the controlled scientists, armed with alien handguns, try to recover the body and kidnap Katsuo and Yoshida, but are chased away by the police. An autopsy later discovers a small pellet implanted behind Otani’s ear, made from an unfamiliar metal, that seems to be the means by which the Kilaaks are controlling the humans and the kaiju. The control signals are being relayed through devices, roughly the size of a football, concealed all over the world.

Kyōko draws Rodan, Godzilla, Manda and Mothra to Tokyo, destroying the city. The daikaiju then head towards Izu. Kyōko walks into the UNSC’s emergency headquarters to deliver an ultimatum: the Kilaaks have staged the monster attacks to force all humanity to submit to their control. When everyone has been subjugated, the kaiju will be returned to “Kaiju Land”. Kyōko confirms that the Kilaaks’ new base is in Izu, but Katsuo tears off her earrings, through which the Kilaaks were controlling her, and she collapses, unable to remember any further details of their plans.

The Japanese military, accompanied by rocket Moonlight SY-3, tries to storm the Kilaak base in Izu but is routed by Godzilla and Anguirus. Rodan chases the rocket crew away from following a glowing UFO to the alien base, which seems to be somewhere in the vicinity of Mt Fuji. Exploring the area on foot, Katsuo finds a way into the base through a cave with one of his crew and army Major Tada, but they are soon trapped by the Kilaaks (the one seen previously and five others in less sparkly clothing). They repeat their demand that humanity surrender to them or die, then release the three men. Meanwhile, the UNSC has reclaimed control of the “Kaiju Land” base and tracks the Kilaaks’ control signal to the Moon. The SY-3 returns to the moonbase and sweeps the lunar surface in search of the Kilaaks’ headquarters.

Following a black saucer like the one they saw earlier, the astronauts find their target inside a crater. They break in, decompressing the base and causing the Kilaaks to revert to their true form – something like a silver slug with a rocky shell. The crew find an important looking piece of technology and remove it to take back to Earth – this is, as they guess, the aliens’ master control device. They also take a dormant Kilaak back with them. The UNSC boffins believe the Kilaaks to be living metal and that, although they’re essentially immortal, they need warm temperatures to maintain their human disguises and will need even higher temperatures – perhaps several thousand degrees – to revive them once they go into hibernation. Humanity can defeat them by cooling them down.

The UNSC redeploys the daikaiju, now under their control, to the Kilaak base near Mt Fuji, while the JSDF lines up the artillery in support and the press gives running commentary. The monster army consists of Minilla, Godzilla, Mothra (still only in larval form), Anguirus, Manda, Baragon, Gorosaurus, Kumonga (who only appears in reused footage from Son of Godzilla) and Rodan. (Varan puts in a brief appearance in the montage but isn’t named.) In response, the Kilaaks send in King Ghidorah, who isn’t among the kaiju now under human control. (Poor old Ghidorah, controlled by aliens again. It’s never stated whether the Kilaaks are his original owners or have him on loan. The shot of his materialisation is lifted from Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster.) A pitched battle ensues, in which Godzilla, Anguirus and Gorosaurus seem to do most of the work in taking down King Ghidorah. Ghidorah doesn’t fly away this time but looks as though he might actually be dead. The Kilaaks have one more trick up their sleeve, releasing a “Fire Dragon” that dogfights briefly with Rodan then strafes the UNSC base on “Kaiju Land”, destroying the stolen master control device. Godzilla takes the opportunity to break into the Kilaaks’ base – even though he’s no longer under control, he clearly views the aliens as enemies. With their base destroyed, they all go into hibernation. The SY-3 chases down and destroys the Fire Dragon, which turns out to be one of the Kilaaks’ flying saucers.

In a return to the status quo of the film’s opening scenes, our heroes Katsuo, Kyōko and Yoshida take a helicopter tour of “Kaiju Land” to see all the daikaiju peacefully returned there.

And what a send-off it would have been. There’s a literal fin-de-siècle feel to this movie, set in the barely imaginable future of the end of the 20th century with its moonbase and videophones, reflected in the sheer decadent indulgence of the proceedings. The global scope is refreshing and raises the movie above the usual run of the mill, making it feel like the stakes are as high as the alien invasion plot wants them to be. Having Toho’s kaiju constantly attack Japan before may have been no more ridiculous than the antagonists in American pulp SF movies only ever attacking America, but it’s nice to go a little further afield. So far Godzilla and his pals have only ventured outside Japan to visit fictional Pacific islands or outer space (or “New Kirk City” in Mothra (1961)) – I can hardly believe it’s taken them this long to get around to France. Alas, the international scenes are far too brief.

The model work and matte shots are great all round. It's painfully obvious that there are no people in the scenes of Moscow, Paris and New York, but that’s perhaps the only blemish on what would otherwise be an excellent showcase for Toho’s post-Tsuburaya special effects department. The big monster battles towards the end certainly deliver plenty of spectacle, and the crew have managed to sidestep any wire-related problems by not using the imago Mothra and only bringing Kumonga in through reused shots, allowing them to concentrate on manipulating Ghidorah’s three heads. As obvious as that reused material is, it’s used sensibly and woven into the story quite well.

The real problem is the plot, which is perhaps the most superficial one yet in this series of movies. Some aliens want to take over humanity because they just do, they use remote controlled kaiju to devastate a few major cities in arbitrary displays of intimidation, and they all spontaneously curl up into inert metallic balls the minute their bases are overrun. The characterisation is close to non-existent – just look at the complete lack of development around the relationship between Katsuo and Kyōko. Are they lovers or siblings? The lack of obvious concern on his part while she’s under alien control and the cold violence with which he frees her from that control don’t offer much hint either way. That said, Kubo Akira (making a quick return after starring as the journalist Goro in Son of Godzilla) gives the liveliest performance of the movie as Katsuo. Tsuchiya Yoshio (also recently seen in Son of Godzilla) is wasted as Dr Otani and Tazaki Jun (most recently seen as the lead villain in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep) doesn’t fare much better as Dr Yoshida.

Perhaps the greatest wasted opportunity is the concept of “Kaiju Land”. The idea that humanity has somehow tamed all of these near-supernatural creatures – reduced them again to pest animals and handled them as such – and contained them on an island is one that needs more consideration than it gets here. There’s a brief voiceover explaining the premise right at the start, and after that we’re expected to take it as much on trust as the rest of the plot. We see Rodan fishing a dolphin out of the island’s waters, but what do the rest of the kaiju eat? There’s not that much wildlife to be had, apart from other kaiju or scientists; there’s not even a nuclear reactor to keep Godzilla perked up. Don’t they get under each other’s feet the whole time? Do they get territorial in this foreign, enforced territory? What actually are the consequences of taking them all out of their natural habitats? Who’s defending Infant Island, or indeed the entire planet, if Mothra’s been locked up here?

With hindsight, the real legacy of “Kaiju Land” is that it establishes the idea of a single “home” for Earth’s giant monsters, a toybox they can be pulled out of and go back into as the situation demands. This idea will take on greater significance in films to come, starting with the very next one.

Son of Godzilla

Son of Godzilla (1967)
Toho Studios
Director: Fukuda Jun, Arikawa Sadamasa (special effects)
Also discussed: The X from Outer Space (1967), Gappa (1967), King Kong Escapes (1967).

1966 is often cited as an annus mirabilis for tokusatsu: the three Daimajin movies, Gamera vs Barugon, The War of the Gargantuas... well, and Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, I suppose... not to mention the debut of Tsuburaya Productions’ acclaimed “Ultra” series on TV.

But 1967 is remarkable for being the year in which all the major Japanese film production companies decided to have a go. Perhaps it wasn’t the most advisable time for it, given the decline in cinema attendance, but this is the year Shochiku and Nikkatsu released their sole Shōwa-era contributions to the canon of kaiju eiga. (Toei, meanwhile, were providing animation for Rankin-Bass’ The King Kong Show (1966-67) and producing the TV series Captain Ultra (1967), by a comfortable margin the fastest knock-off of Ultraman (original series 1966-67). The TV network had actually commissioned Captain Ultra to fill Ultraman’s timeslot while Tsuburaya Productions were preparing the follow-up series, so any resemblance is surely intended.)

At the end of March, a week and a half after the release of Daiei’s Gamera vs Gyaos, Shochiku’s film The X from Outer Space debuted (Japanese title: Giant Space Monster Guilala). In this, an extraterrestrial microbe is brought to Earth where it grows into a gigantic bipedal creature that wanders around destroying cities and absorbing energy from power stations. A joint Japanese and American team of astronauts and scientists names it Guilala and races to synthesise the substance the microbe was originally encased in, in the hope that it can be used to contain Guilala and transport it back into space. Guilala has a reptilian body with frilled limbs but birdlike feet. Its head, certainly its most distinctive feature, looks like a spiky, metallic UFO with a beak and an enormous pair of deely-bopper antennae. Its rampages all seem to take place at night, presumably in an unsuccessful attempt to hide the fact that the scenes are studio-bound. The movie is most memorable for its absurd 1960s pop-rock soundtrack and for spawning a parody sequel 41 years later.

April brought Nikkatsu’s film Gappa (also known as Gappa the Triphibian Monster and, in America, Monster from a Prehistoric Planet). This film sees Japan’s fictional answer to Hugh Hefner developing a holiday resort on a Japanese island. The main attraction of the island is to be a zoo populated with exotic creatures plundered from the Pacific Islands. The businessman’s minions find one such creature, called Gappa by the human inhabitants of its island, and bring it to Japan, with the predictable consequence that its parents come to reclaim it. The Gappas, like Guilala, are visually a blend of reptile and bird, although overall they look a lot more like monstrous eagles. (Despite the similar name, apart from the beak they don’t resemble the kappa, a well-known variety of Japanese folkloric monster.) As the word “triphibian” suggests, they swim, fly and trample. The story is highly derivative, with the familiar old tropes of an innocent kaiju being exploited by an unscrupulous businessman and a community of Pacific Islanders played by blacked-up Japanese actors, but the execution is as good as anything else produced in 1967. The movie’s probably best known to British science fiction fans as the source of the “unconvincing prehistoric monster droid” clips used in “Meltdown” (1991), the fourth season finale of the comedy series Red Dwarf.

In July, Toho released King Kong Escapes, their first kaiju movie of the year and their second attempt to tie in with the Rankin-Bass/Toei animated series. It lifted several concepts directly from the series. Firstly, Kong’s home island, which still hadn’t been named on-screen as Skull Island and had been named Faro Island in King Kong vs Godzilla (1962), is referred to as Mondo Island, the name used in the cartoon. Secondly, the chief antagonist is called Dr Who, which fans of British science fiction are likely to find confusing or hilarious. In the cartoon, Dr Who is a small, bald-headed man dressed in the white tunic, gloves and goggles of a caricatured mad scientist. In King Kong Escapes, actor Amamoto Hideyo looks uncannily like he’s cosplaying William Hartnell in the first episode of Doctor Who (1963-present), suggesting someone somewhere might have got their visual reference materials mixed up. Thirdly, Dr Who controls a metallic replica of Kong, called Mechani-Kong. In the cartoon, Mechani-Kong looks a lot more like Kong and has to be piloted from a cockpit inside its head; in its first appearance, Dr Who tries to use it to discredit the real Kong, an idea we’ll see used again when Godzilla meets his own robot double a few films from now. In King Kong Escapes, Mechani-Kong is unmistakeably a robot, all silvery and either autonomous or controllable from Dr Who’s headquarters.

Dr Who plans to use Mechani-Kong to excavate a highly radioactive mineral in the Arctic on behalf of his associate Madame Piranha, who wants to turn her nation (which explicitly isn’t the US, the USSR or China) into a nuclear superpower. Even Mechani-Kong, with its thick metal hide, can’t withstand the radiation, so Dr Who resorts to his backup plan: abduct Kong and force him to do the dangerous work. This doesn’t work, nor does kidnapping and coercing Kong’s American friends. Kong escapes and swims to Japan for... reasons?... and Dr Who sends in Mechani-Kong to retrieve him, leading to a kaiju bust-up in Tokyo before the triumphant ape finally heads for home. It’s only appropriate that this movie should be simplistic and cartoonish, but it doesn’t have a lot to offer beyond that. Mechani-Kong is a lot of fun, and it’s sad that this was the robot’s only cinematic outing. Kong, meanwhile, looks as bad as he did in King Kong vs Godzilla. Even the fact that it’s directed by kaiju eiga colossus Hondo Ishirō isn’t enough to recommend this movie to anyone but completists.

And then, in December...

Flying through a storm near the tiny, isolated Sollgel Island, a small Japanese aircraft encounters two strange phenomena. The first is a lot of unexplained radio interference. The second is the presence of Godzilla, wading through the water towards the island.

From this we segue into the extremely perky title theme, which should give us some flavour of the film to come...

On Sollgel Island, the all-Japanese members of Dr Kusumi’s United Nations research team inspect their field equipment and pick up interference on their radio. (The signage on their headquarters shows the UN logo and the acronym “WFPO”. They’re apparently doing work for the World Food Programme, founded in 1961, which has the acronym WFP and its own logo, but never mind.) A plane flying over the island drops two parachutes – these prove to be carrying Maki Goro, a freelance journalist, and his equipment. Goro has come in search of a story and insists he won’t leave without one. Unable to get rid of him, the scientists decide they’ll let him stay around as a cook and cleaner. On his first night on the island, Goro hears and sees one of the man-sized praying mantises that haunt the jungle; Fujisaki, Dr Kusumi’s deputy, warns Goro not to wander off at night.

On his daytime wanderings, Goro sees a young woman swimming in a deserted bay, but scares her off before he can photograph her. The research team later tell him that the island is uninhabited.

Over dinner, Dr Kusumi explains to Goro that the team is investigating the possibility of changing the environment in localised areas to make formerly barren land produce food crops. The global population continues to increase, and the “WFPO” is concerned about the possibility of mass starvation. The research is being carried out in secret because of the danger that this kind of weather control technology could be weaponised and abused. The team has been waiting for favourable conditions and is at last ready to carry out their first experiment the next day.

Goro runs through the jungle to the bay to warn the woman he saw about the experiment, but doesn’t see her. He’s caught at the bay at zero hour (well, 11am), when the team detonates a freezing device above the island and fires silver iodide into the air. The temperature drops as planned. The team moves on to the second part of their experiment, launching a small radioactive capsule with the intention of stabilising the new microclimate they've created. However, the unexplained interference prevents them from controlling the capsule, which explodes too soon, reacting badly with the cooled air and causing a massive heatwave and catastrophic storms. The team and Goro bunker down in the base. Four days later, the temperature on the island has returned to normal and the terrain around the team’s headquarters has been reduced to mud.

Kusumi orders a full systems check and strides off into the jungle, pursued by Goro. The two of them see three of the mantises, now grown as tall as the research team’s testing station. (That’s an astonishingly fast radioactive mutation, even for a fantasy film.) The mantises home in on the source of the mysterious radio interference, a pile of rocks that conceals an enormous egg. The next morning, Goro heads back out with another of the team, Morio, to spy on the mantis kaiju, which he’s named Kamacuras. (“Kamakiri” is the Japanese word for “mantis”. In the American dub, they’re renamed “Gimantis”.) The Kamacuras are attacking the egg with their forelimbs, and when it shatters they continue to jab at the creature inside it. Goro recognises this creature as “a baby Godzilla”. (God knows how, though, because the resemblance is less than entirely convincing.) At that very moment, Godzilla arrives on the island, trampling the scientists’ base and striding inland to defend the newborn creature from the Kamacuras.

The ”baby Godzilla” is unnamed in this film, but will come to be known as Minilla. (This is just “mini”, i.e. little, plus “ra”, and some sources give his name as “Minira”. At least one American dub has gone with “Minya”, but we’ll draw a discreet veil over that. Because Gojira is known in the Anglo world as “Godzilla”, it follows – and Toho has decreed – that his son Minira should be known as “Minilla”.) He has smooth, sluglike skin, somewhat paler than Godzilla’s, and a rounded face with no muzzle and a big, gummy mouth. He grows a couple of buck teeth later in the movie. He does have a tail, but like the rest of him, it’s stubby and pudgy. He has no dorsal plates. He makes sounds that are disturbingly like those of a human baby. (Actually, what he sounds like – and looks like, more than he resembles Godzilla – is the child/worm creature in Eraserhead (1977).)

Godzilla, meanwhile, looks greener and more cartoonish than before, with a taller head and large, round eyes.

Having routed the Kamacuras, Godzilla initially acts as if he’s mislaid Minilla and wanders off. The young woman Goro saw earlier takes the opportunity to befriend Minilla, calling to him and throwing fruit into his mouth. But Godzilla soon reappears and carries Minilla away on his tail. The woman returns to the cave she’s been living in, where she finds Goro, who apparently stumbled in there while fleeing from the kaiju fight. Goro learns that her name is Saeko and her father, an archaeologist, had gone into hiding on Sollgel Island after the war and died seven years ago, leaving her to fend for herself. He introduces her to the scientists. As a surviving Kamacuras threatens what’s left of their base, Goro suggests moving their equipment into Saeko’s cave.

The scientists soon start becoming feverish. Saeko says that the cure for this is the warm, red water that can be found in the volcanic lake right around the place Godzilla has settled in. It should be possible to get past him while he’s sleeping, but she’ll also need to get past the underground lair of Kumonga, a giant spider. (“Kumo” being the Japanese for “spider”. The American dub crassly renames it “Spiega”, because that sounds a bit like spider.) Saeko and Goro head out in search of the miracle cure. At the lake, they find Godzilla and Minilla behaving in an extremely human way as the parent trains the child in the arts of roaring and breathing fire. Minilla can only blow smoke rings at first, but manages a blast of flame when Godzilla steps on his tail. Godzilla proudly ruffles Minilla’s total absence of hair and the two settle down to sleep. Saeko and Goro seize their chance to collect some water from the lake, and soon enough the scientists back at the cave are feeling better. Dr Kusumi belatedly announces that the team will have to abandon the island.

Some time later, Saeko is attacked by a Kamacuras while foraging at the edge of the jungle. She calls Minilla, who unsuccessfully tries to chase off the Kamacuras. Godzilla follows behind and sees off the giant bug, but the fighting has disturbed Kumonga, who was buried nearby. Kumonga pursues Saeko and Goro, spraying sticky webbing from its mouth (suggesting it’s more like the larval form of Mothra than a typical spider) which Goro is able to burn through with a cigarette lighter. They escape back to the cave, but Kumonga follows them and traps everyone within. Saeko reveals a back exit that leads from the cave to the bay, and she and Goro swim out with the radio equipment that Fujisaki has just finished fixing. The team receives word that a rescue ship is on the way. Minilla happens to pass by and distracts Kumonga, who cocoons him in webbing – the ruckus between the two threatens to collapse the cave. Kusumi decides to use the team’s surviving test equipment to freeze the island again, so that they can have a chance to get past the battling kaiju and escape.

Outside the cave, the surviving Kamacuras has joined the fray and been swiftly defeated by Kumonga. The detonation of the research team’s freezing device wakes up Godzilla, who comes to save Minilla from Kumonga, but it’s Minilla who ends up saving Godzilla when Kumonga’s webbing gets the better of him. Father and son together destroy Kumonga with their radioactive breath. As snow falls on the island following the scientists’ successful second experiment, the team make their escape in an inflatable dinghy together with Goro and Saeko. Minilla and Godzilla are trapped on the island and buried in snow as the island freezes over; Goro thinks they’ll hibernate until it thaws out again.

Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965) could easily have wrapped up the Godzilla movies, the conclusion of a loose trilogy begun in Mothra vs Godzilla (1964) and, barring the following year’s The War of the Gargantuas, a last hurrah for the directorial dream team of Honda and Tsuburaya. Then Godzilla was dropped into the script for Ebirah, Horror of the Deep and Toho decided they weren’t done with him yet. Now here we have another tale of secretive scientific research and mutated beasts on a remote Pacific island, but apparently targeted at a child audience with the inclusion of Godzilla’s own infant son.

In the context of kaiju eiga, it feels like the title and concept of Son of Godzilla are nodding back to Son of Kong (1933). There are two problems with this. Firstly, although the words “son of Godzilla” do actually appear in the original Japanese title as well as the international Anglo title, Son of Kong was renamed Revenge of Kong for the Japanese market, so the reference would be lost on the domestic audience. And secondly, Minilla has absolutely none of the appeal of Little Kong. Years before Trolls and Cabbage Patch Kids, here’s a childlike thing that looks ugly but is also supposed to be cute. (Apparently the specific Japanese term for this is “busakawa”.) His appearance is sometimes compared to that of the Pillsbury Doughboy, an advertising mascot for a baking supplies company. He certainly doesn’t look much like Godzilla. He’ll turn up again in Destroy All Monsters (1968) and be a viewpoint character in All Monsters Attack (1969), but he won’t stick in the long term. The Heisei-era Godzilla movies will present a different and (in my opinion) much better take on the concept. Although Minilla himself crops up once more after that, in Godzilla Final Wars (2004), it’s in the context of a film that throws almost every single element of Toho’s Shōwa-era output into one big nostalgic bucket.

Minilla and Godzilla aside, the new kaiju are realised entirely through puppetry. The results are more than acceptable – the fact that the Kamacuras and Kumonga are puppets allows for a more convincingly insectile shape, and the wirework is good. And the matte effects in this film are better than in many of its predecessors. The shots of human characters trying to avoid flaming, disembodied Kamacuras limbs flying through the air are particularly well done.

Actor-watch: the scientific team on Sollgel Island is a veritable Who’s Who of contemporary kaiju eiga. Habitual viewers should have no trouble spotting Takashima Tadao (the hero in King Kong vs Godzilla) as Dr Kusumi, Hirata Akihiko (Dr Serizawa in the OG) as radio operator Fujisaki, Tsuchiya Yoshio (the lead alien in Invasion of Astro-Monster) as the cranky equipment inspector Furukawa and Sahara Kenji (the villain in Mothra vs Godzilla) as the younger equipment inspector Morio. Parachuting in as the reckless journalist Goro is Kubo Akira, who played the inventor Tetsuo in Invasion of Astro-Monster.

The name “Sollgel Island” is distinctive enough that it looks like it ought to mean something, although feeding the Japanese characters into Google Translate doesn’t offer me any potential leads. The nearest thing I can find is the sol-gel process, an industrial process whereby colloidal mineral solutions are used to fabricate novel solid materials. This was at least a scientific concept at the time Son of Godzilla was produced, although the real developments postdate it. It isn’t the same thing as cloud seeding, whereby metallic iodides are dropped into clouds in the hope of causing rain to condense out of them. Still, it’s possible the island’s name was meant to tie in somehow to the theme of weather control, even if only by invoking what was then a cutting-edge field of science.

Weather control’s an interesting subject, and a popular one in science fiction. The practice of cloud seeding postdates the Second World War but was a common enough idea by the time of Son of Godzilla’s production. Starting in 1962, the American government had sponsored Project Stormfury, a lengthy study into using silver iodide to affect the behaviour of tropical cyclones. There was some press coverage in 1965 when the project was wrongly blamed for a hurricane that caused significant damage in Florida. It was eventually abandoned in the mid-80s with inconclusive results.

The US Air Force did explore the possibility of using cloud seeding as a military tactic in the Vietnam War, but this experiment (later known as Operation Popeye) didn’t start until 1967 and wasn’t revealed publicly until 1972. There’s no chance that Dr Kusumi’s concern about weaponised weather control technology was a comment on this or a way of tying Godzilla back symbolically to American militarism.

The other thematic subject to consider is parenting in Japan in the 1960s. The post-war era saw Japanese society shift, much as in other industrialised nations, towards a norm of smaller, urbanised families in which both parents were likely to be working. The mid-60s also saw the rise of gakushū juku, after-hours “cram schools” offering supplementary tuition and extra-curricular activities to shepherd children through an increasingly competitive education system and into employment. A “pushy parent” stereotype gained currency in the 1960s, but specifically around mothers, “kyōiku mama”, not fathers. Goro uses the specific phrase “kyōiku mama” to describe Godzilla in the scene in which he and Saeko watch the kaiju educating Minilla. This would imply a broader view of Godzilla’s performance of gender in the film’s original context than comes across in the available Anglo versions. (The English language subtitles to the Japanese version replace the phrase with the bland "education fanatic", while the American dub substitutes the male-gendered "his father's a real study nut!") But Godzilla does also have time to give Minilla rides on his tail, so his parenting style is perhaps a more balanced one. Once the reference is explained to her, Saeku pities the hothoused children of 1960s Japan, but Goro seems more ambivalent, possibly reflecting ambivalence on the part of scriptwriter Sekizawa Shinichi. Sekizawa will have more to say about parenting and kaiju in All Monsters Attack, and it’ll be interesting to revisit this topic then.