The 1998 American disaster movie re-imagining of Godzilla, brought to us by director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin in the wake of their smash hit Independence Day, was defined as much by its massive pre-release hype and merchandising as it was by the movie itself—and when the movie premiered and failed to meet the expectations of pretty much anyone, the companies producing said merchandise were left with a lot of unsold, or unsalable, stock. Among the inevitable tie-ins greenlit for that misbegotten project was a Saturday morning cartoon that aired on Fox Kids from Fall 1998 to early 2000, and even hardcore Godzilla fans who despised the movie have been known to vouch for the animated series. Considering that it was following up not only on the Emmerich movie, but also the previous animated Godzilla series from the seventies, there would have needed to be a concerted effort by the producers to create something that compared unfavourably to either.
At a conceptual level, Godzilla: The Series moves away from the pared down giant-monster-on-a-rampage model used in the movie and back towards the wacky kaiju battles of the Toho sequels, with each episode introducing a new monstrous foe for our titular lizard to battle. Nothing could be simpler, or better suited for a kids cartoon. Its premise is almost exactly the same as the Hanna-Barbera show, with a team of scientists going around the world investigating monster events with a heroic Godzilla in tow (who has a tendency to conveniently and illogically appear when needed), but benefits from more interesting designs, being able to actually depict monster-on-monster violence, and also giving Godzilla his official roar, which goes a long way towards making it feel authentic. By all means, this was about as close as a North Americans in the late nineties got to a regular dose of kaiju action (unless you count Power Rangers, I guess), which is probably what endeared it to both the target audiences and G-Fans bitter about the movie, although it is not necessarily as different from the movie as you may have heard—a thick undercurrent of 1998 runs through both.
The series follows up on the stinger scene from the end of that movie, with one surviving Godzilla egg (because Godzilla could lay self-fertilized eggs, remember?) in New York hatching into another radioactive reptile. The funny thing in the first moments of the first episode is that protagonist Dr. Nick Tatapolous (Matthew Broderick in the movie, voiced by by Beverly Hills 90210 star Ian Ziering in the series, apparently subbing in for his co-star Jason Priestley when he couldn’t fit it into his schedule) is immediately adamant that the military do a thorough search of the area, as if he sensed that a movie ending stinger scene happened. Dr. Nick ends up finding the egg himself, and the newly-hatched baby Godzilla (cuter than any of the ones in the Toho movies, I think) imprints on him, and as it quickly grows full-size, he learns that it will listen to his commands. It takes a while for the military (led by Major Hicks, voiced by Kevin Dunn reprising his role from the film) to be convinced that the “worm guy” has control over the monster, but once it takes down another monster off the coast of Jamaica, they are willing to give this set-up a shot. Nick’s team consists of movie characters Dr. Elsie Chapman (Vicky Lewis in the movie, Charity James in the series) and Dr. Mendel Craven (Malcom Danare in both), and some cartoon creations, Randy (voiced by VO veteran Rino Romano), the kind of cool guy hacker who was all over the nineties, and hypercompetent French secret agent Monique (Brigitte Bako), essentially taking the place of Jean Reno’s character from the movie (although he still shows up from time to time in the series, voiced by someone else of course.) Nick’s reporter girlfriend (played by Maria Pitillo in the movie) is voiced by Paget Brewster, while the wisecracking cameraman played by Hank Azaria is now voiced by Joe Pantoliano— Hank Azaria is an actual voice actor but couldn’t come back to play his own character in a cartoon, apparently. Most importantly, Michael Lerner comes back to voice Mayor Ebert, that Emmerich-created character who is absolutely not a bitter and pathetic swipe at the guy who dared to criticize Universal Soldier.
(As you can tell, this is one of those nineties cartoons that loaded itself with character actors, especially for one-off appearances—don’t be surprised to hear the voices of Robert Forster, Linda Blair, Michael Chiklis, and good ol’ Roddy McDowall in one of his last roles.)
With everything set in place by a two-part opening story, the series gets down to the business of monsters, monsters, monsters. It’s not entirely clear if the mutations that Nick and his team track down are all supposed to be irradiated aberrations like Godzilla, and while some are given explicit origins (a few scientific experiments gone wrong or a prehistoric throwback here or there), others just sort of appear out of nowhere without explanation—but that’s not all that different from the average kaiju universe, really. One of the things that likely appealed to classic Godzilla fans is how much more respectful it is of the Toho originals than the movie, not just bringing back the monster throwdown aspect, but even including some blatant homages. The series’ only three-part episode, “Monster Wars”, is heavily based on Destroy All Monsters, with a plot revolving around aliens taking control of the Earth’s various kaiju—and the scenes of the monsters appearing in the world’s major cities closely recreates similar scenes from the movie. Those episodes even have the aliens rebuild the 1998 movie Godzilla as a cyborg, essentially the series’ version of Mechagodzilla (with some coincidental similarities to both the Heisei and Millennium versions of Mecha-G), a surprising nod to both the classic and modern movies. In another episode where the crew head to Japan (at one point, a mother says to a child “Why would Gojira come to Japan?”), Godzilla fights and then teams up with a robot ape likely based on Mechani-Kong from King Kong Escapes. As you can tell, it wouldn’t be difficult for fans to recognize the work of fellow fans.
Although pulling a list of writers from all over, including comic writers Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, and Scott Lobdell, and Batman: The Animated Series/Gargoyles writer Michael Reeves (some of these guys always seem to pop up whenever I talk about cartoons these days), the plots themselves are generally nothing special, with standard ideas (a mother Loch Ness Monster is enraged because Roddy McDowall has stolen her baby) or movie riffs (an episode-length homage to The Thing, complete with a variation on the blood test scene and a monster “made of pure DNA”, whatever that means), with the closest thing to clever being, for example, an episode where Godzilla is hunted by heavily-armed rednecks named Dale (voiced by RoboCop and Total Recall‘s Ronny Cox), Bill, and Hank (I tell you what.) Attempts at deeper themes appear sporadically, asking how much humanity can trust Godzilla (it’s worth noting that despite having more violence, the show still goes out of its way to make sure there are never any human casualties), and questioning the ethics of corralling the kaiju on this series’ version of Monster Island—the latter is the focus an episode featuring an extreme animal rights activist group, told in the style of TV news documentary. Monster-of-the-week shows like this benefit from going a bit more out there in terms of ideas, but aside from having a radioactive shrew merge with a radioactive tornado(?) or having Godzilla fall in love with a giant monitor lizard, nothing particularly unexpected ever really happens. Much like the movie, too, the writing is also rife with egregious sitcom-style dialogue and comedy subplots, so characters spend most of their time delivering either exposition or quips, and the character of NIGEL, an exploratory robot (voiced by VO superstar Tom Kenny) created by Dr. Craven, exists to make TV and movie references and be destroyed in every episode like Kenny on South Park. I didn’t find this stuff as irritating as something like Robocop: Alpha Commando, which premiered the same year, but it’s definitely in the same wheelhouse—we were no longer in the era of cartoon writers talking down to kids, but rather the era of cartoon writers trying really hard to come off as clever.
Where the series really stands out is with the actual monster designs, and that’s especially impressive given how the series is saddled with the late nineties colour palette consisting of damp greys and pukey browns. While the human characters have a weird, lumpy quality to them (a trait shared by other Sony-produced cartoons from the time like Men In Black and Extreme Ghostbusters), the monsters benefit from the idiosyncratic look—even ones with fairly generic concepts like “giant bat” or “giant rat” (and sometimes something a bit more unusual, like “giant hummingbird”) end up becoming these fleshy, malformed grotesques (the Ron Perlman-voiced aliens are particularly gnarly designs), and visually pop alongside this series’ version of Patrick Tatapolous’ re-imagined Godzilla. We get a good introduction to this show’s stylings in the opening two-parter, where we first think the enemy monsters are gross-looking giant squid, only for it to be revealed that those are actually the prey of the real monster, a gangly deep sea abomination with a flower-shaped face. This success comes down to the imagination of lead character designer Fil Barlow, who has appeared before on this site (see Plasmo and Captain N), and is one of the most consistently creative creature creators around, never settling for anything less than bizarre-looking (also credited on the visual side are Duckman creator Everett Peck, Mummies Alive! designer Jon Suzuki, and Sam Liu, who is now one of the primary directors for DC’s direct-to-DVD animated projects.) Even if the very of-its-time animation isn’t your thing, it’s hard not to appreciate the uniqueness and visual coherence of the monsters, especially when you read stories about how many of the artists on the series weren’t even allowed to see the movie’s design for Godzilla until after the movie came out (the show premiered a little over three months later, remember.)
While I have my issues with the way it’s written, I wouldn’t argue that the series didn’t fulfill its role as a delivery system for cool monsters, putting it well above the Hanna-Barbera cartoon. As well, it at least tries to live up to the promise of a “modern” interpretation of Godzilla that a new generation and longtime fans could both enjoy. I doubt that the artists working on the show knew it would end up essentially being a salvage job (the proposed sequel to the 1998 movie would never materialize), but aside from the mean-spirited cameo in Godzilla: Final Wars, it’s the best use of Devlin and Emmerich’s radioactive iguana—and, at the time, it was apparently a ratings success. There was indeed some demand among kids for a regular dose of monster combat, which it benefited from…unfortunately for Godzilla: The Series, it just so happened to premier at the same time a new breed of monster combat was gradually taking the world by storm, and during its inconsistently-aired second season (which ended up having two unaired episodes), Fox Kids essentially cast it aside in order to promote something more in tune with the monster collecting craze that was sweeping television and the toy aisles. Just as in the series itself, the original monster was eradicated by its progeny.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 