Historically, Toho’s approach to the Godzilla brand has a befuddling mix of heavy-handed and strangely permissive. For example, they have never given the go-ahead to the distributors of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 to release that show’s two episodes riffing on Godzilla movies on any home video format, possibly because they think they’re disrespectful (or maybe because they think the original dub releases of the movies are.) Considering how Godzilla movies were treated as a punchline outside Japan for so long, you might be able to understand why they’re a little sensitive about the matter. On the other hand, there are many officially sanctioned appearances from the King of the Monsters that give the impression that they aren’t so absolutely rigid about how seriously Godzilla should be treated.
The question is: in what world do the jokes lobbed at Godzilla vs. Megalon on MST3K do more harm to the franchise’s image than the subject of this post, the ballyhooed 1992 Nike commercial featuring their star monster and NBA all-star Charles Barkley playing a one-on-one game of hoops? If anything plays into the schlocky reputation of classic Godzilla in North America, certainly this would be it—and yet Toho was seemingly all for it. Was it simply because of the money? Was it the weird place the Godzilla movies were in in the early nineties? Or did they recognize that, intentionally goofy or not, there was a surprising amount of well-intended love behind this concept? As surprising as it is, Godzilla vs. Charles Barkley is a fascinating piece of the Godzilla canon.
By 1992, the Heisei Era of Godzilla films was picking up, and this commercial aired between the release of Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah and Godzilla vs. Mothra, the latter becoming one of the most successful movies in the series’ history. However, following the more involved and high profile localization effort for The Return of Godzilla/Godzilla 1985, the English release of its sequel Godzilla vs. Biollante in North America had stalled, eventually going straight to video in November 1992—after that, no officially-released English version of the subsequent movies would be available there until Tristar began releasing dubs starting in 1998, likely as a tie-in to the American Godzilla reboot. That is several years where no new Godzilla movies were easily accessible to North American audiences, and yet the licensing deals Toho made often included material from those movies, such as the nineties Trendmasters toy line or the 1993 Super NES game Super Godzilla, giving American fans exposure to monsters they’d have no context for.
It’s important to note that the Heisei movies initially sold themselves on the idea that they were the modern, cool version of Godzilla that brought the series back to seriousness after the Showa era’s slide into corny children’s entertainment. That was the image they were projecting, at least, and whether or not movies that included time-travelling androids and a bug-eyed new baby Godzilla were ever actually serious is another matter entirely. But I guess the point was moot, because none of those cool, modern Godzilla movies were being widely seen outside their country of origin, and subsequently were not the prevailing image of the series.
So, in the early nineties, Charles Barkley—just about to be traded from the Philadelphia 76ers to the Phoenix Suns and work his way to the 1992-1993 MVP award (but not yet the master of the Chaos Dunk)—has a shoe sponsorship deal with Nike, as NBA players are wont to do. To really sell the launch of the Barkley-branded sneakers, the advertising firm decided to go big and pair him with a superstar from another realm, a concept that was in the air at the time after people saw Michael Jordan meet Bugs Bunny for the first (but not last!) time during the Superbowl. Apparently inspired by Nike reps describing the sneaker as being for “a big man”, the minds at the firm immediately took to the idea of pairing Barkley with Godzilla, an idea that all parties signed off on.
All involved treated this thirty-second TV spot like a big deal, to the point that they made “trailers” for it that aired before its actual premier during the MTV Video Music Awards in September 1992. This was early in the era of “event commercials”, and I’m sure there was a time where having a trailer for a commercial was considered novel…or gauche. Or perhaps both. The response to the commercial was apparently highly positive, a net benefit to the careers of both the titular participants.
Toho was no stranger to licensing Godzilla’s image to American commercials—here’s a 1990 ad for Honey Nut Cheerios featuring incongruous footage from both Return of Godzilla and the Showa era; and there was the slightly more off-model Dr. Pepper commercial from 1985, which coincided with the blatant Dr. Pepper product placement in the American-made footage for Godzilla 1985. Those, however, feel like a product of the age when Godzilla was a joke, and its hokey reputation shines through in the way those commercial were made. The Godzilla vs. Barkley ad is something else entirely—for as silly as it is, there’s a superior level of craft and attention to detail to it that far surpasses other Godzilla-based commercials, and that’s entirely because of the talent at Industrial Light & Magic who produced it.
Yes, it is odd to think that there was one instance where the biggest effects studio in Hollywood worked with Godzilla, and it was a thirty-second Nike ad…odder still to think that they were probably knee-deep in Jurassic Park when they had a small team go a little retro with miniature sets (modified from the miniature cityscape seen in Ghostbusters II) and someone in a monster suit (a professional ballet dancer.) The effects here are classic suitmation, and according to this oral history (as well as some more contemporaneous behind-the-scenes documentation), the crew were basically figuring out all the old tricks to make it blend together smoothly, using compositing and altering frame rates and clever camera angles. Even though the commercial is meant to be funny, the version of Godzilla seen in it is the spikier and bulkier Heisei incarnation rather than a throwback, and aside from having larger and more expressive eyes (all the better to look sheepish when Barkley calls him out for cheap shots), the suit is not terribly different from what was being used in the movies at the time. It’s a quality homage to the source material that took advantage of modern effects advances to give just that extra bit of personality, all the more impressive because the director was apparently not a Godzilla fan.
In a sense, the commercial both is and isn’t representative of what Godzilla was in the early nineties—it’s got the proper Godzilla visuals, but it’s tongue-in-cheek qualities once again feel more akin to the perception people had of it from the endless re-airings of the lighter Showa-era films. That is, in the grand scheme of things, not an issue—even the self-serious Heisei era benefited from letting its star have some extra-curricular fun every once in a while, which includes being literally dunked on by Charles Barkley. That Toho was willing to green light something like this, when they were having trouble even releasing their movies in western territories, showed an openness in letting others keep their monster relevant across the world.
(Just to show how okay Toho was with this whole endeavour, the 1998 Playstation card game Godzilla: Trading Battle, which featured every Toho kaiju up to that point including the American Godzilla, also included an Event card clearly based on this commercial. That’s a company that uses everything in the name of fan service.)
That one-off experiment was able to stick around just a little bit longer thanks to Toho’s licensing deals with Dark Horse Comics. Dark Horse held the comics publishing rights to Godzilla from 1987 to 1999, producing multiple ongoing series and specials (some featuring the art of prominent creature feature fans like Steve Bissette and Art Adams among others), which was just another avenue for North American Godzilla fans who were enduring the dub drought in that period. In December 1993, they published a one-off simply titled Godzilla vs. Barkley, over a year after the airing of the commercial—I guess that’s a sign of how popular it was, or how slow going the development of the comic was (the thing itself provides some context for where Dark Horse was at the time, with the house ads in the back pages of the comic showcasing Frank Miller’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For and the first appearance of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy…followed by a tonal whiplash-inducing editorial about racism in comics.) You may be surprised to learn that a thirty-second commercial did not provide enough material to fill an entire comic issue, so while this version does include some key moments (like Barkley elbowing Godzilla and the two of them walking into the sunset side-by-side), it presents a slightly different interpretation of how Godzilla and Charles Barkley came into conflict.
The comic was written by veteran comics scribe Mike Baron—known for his work on The Punisher—and penciller Jeff Butler, a reunion of the creators of the eighties indie superhero comic Badger. The plot, on the other hand, is attributed to “Alan Smithee”, which I feel could be a self-deprecating joke about this being a tie-in to a commercial rather than an actual Alan Smithee situation. The appropriately tongue-in-cheek story has Godzilla appear in California, interrupting a commercial shoot starring Barkley (surrounded by a group of publicists and hangers-on, one of whom is there to make sure he doesn’t “say something that offends someone—like a little old lady in Vermont.”) Where the TV commercial seemed perfectly okay with having Charles be inexplicably building-sized, possibly implying that since many NBA players are already tall they must therefore also be kyodai heroes, the comic explains this through the use of a magic silver dollar given to Barkley by a preteen fan who had received the coin from his grandfather earlier, and who decides that the NBA star is the “Earth’s greatest warrior” and the only one who can stop the monster’s rampage.
That said, the comic is self-aware enough to not explain how Godzilla knows the rules of basketball, or why he would accept a one-on-one challenge, other than Barkley’s line that “It’s a little known fact that Godzilla is a sucker for B-Ball.” When a comic ends with Barkley gifting Godzilla with a pair of custom-made Nike sneakers and convincing him to practice layups in the deserts of Utah, no further contextualization is really needed. One change I noticed is the joke Barkley tells a despondent Godzilla—in the commercial it’s “The Lakers are looking for a big man”, while in the comic it’s the much snarkier “You got some moves…little work, you could maybe get a try-out with the Bulls, one of those second-rate teams.”
Like the commercial, the comic understands what the right tone is for something as self-evidently ludicrous as this, playing up the novelty without overselling it. The inherent ridiculousness of certain moments are better for being depicted with art that is not particularly showy, and mostly “on-model”, the primary wackiness being in what’s being depicted and not necessarily the way it is being depicted. It feels like the Internet rediscovers some of the more memorable panels from this comic every few years—having a few memorable panels is, in truth, probably the most the creators of this comic hoped to achieve given the assignment.
Like many long-lived fictional characters, a sign of Godzilla’s power and durability is how he can be used in something like this and not only come out of it intact, but in some ways enriched by the experience. The reality that the real Godzilla—not a parody, not a knock-off, but the same one who was in the movies—met Charles Barkley becomes one of those fun facts and historical oddities that only makes one enjoy Godzilla more, revealing a lighter side that doesn’t necessarily take away from the atomic terror he is supposed to represent. For all his latent meaning, it’s nice when Toho recognizes that he is also just a fun piece of pop culture imagery, and seeing him goof around in his own pair of kicks is a reminder of that.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 