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.