Godzilla: The Album

One of the more distinctive cultural legacies left by Sony/Tristar’s 1998 Hollywood blockbuster incarnation of Godzilla is all the myriad ways the studio attempted to transform it into the apex example of a four quadrant multimedia hype machine. Not surprisingly, that’s also one of the major criticisms of it: that the marketing was just as important as the actual content of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s film, if not more so—the movie’s “Size Does Matter” tagline representing their ambitions to outdo the previous decade’s worth of summer crowd-pleasers in every respect. So, trailer campaigns, promotional tie-ins with places like Taco Bell, toys, and Saturday morning cartoons were not just there for a little extra dosh on the side, but a core part of the entire endeavour—and the general short-to-medium-term disinterest that audiences showed those tie-ins ultimately did more harm to a potential American-led Godzilla’s franchise potential than even the poisonous critical reception did. The movie being mostly hype was its downfall when it was the hype inevitably died down.

Among the products produced for the movie was, of course, the soundtrack of “inspired by” rock/pop tracks whose presence in the movie was mostly optional, although the singles and their tied-forever-to-the-movie music videos were key parts of the marketing campaign. Compared to the toys and other merch, Godzilla: The Album was actually fairly successful, a platinum seller in multiple countries with singles that charted on various Hot 100s. This was at a time when every major motion picture had a similar tie-in soundtrack, and most of them sold regardless of the general opinion of the movie—the only explanation is this was the peak CD era, and you had to actually put in the effort to not sell at least a million discs.

Godzilla: The Album did not have the high concept hook of previous soundtracks for summer disappointments like Spawn, which featured collabs between heavy metal and electronica musicians—closer in spirit to the soundtracks to the Joel Schumacher Batman films, it is instead a repository of mostly alternate rock and other popular genres of the late nineties, a clear attempt to make the music associated with Godzilla ’98 contemporary and “cool.” However, a more accurate description is that it’s a repository of the bloodless form of alternative rock that shambled on through our radios after the boom period in the first half of the nineties inevitably collapsed—it’s a real mishmash of veterans of the genre like Foo Fighters and Rage Against the Machine, mostly forgotten newcomers like Fuel and Fuzzbubble, as well as semi-associated artists like Ben Folds Five, just to give you the discombobulating experience of going from hard rock and rap to piano to whatever the heck Joey DeLuxe is supposed to be. The tracks themselves are a mix of written-for-the-soundtrack entries, established deep cuts (like Silverchair’s solid “Untitled”), and weird hybrids like Green Day’s “Brain Stew (The Godzilla Remix)”, where their insomniac anthem is interspersed with samples of Godizlla’s trademark roar. As you can tell, some of the contributors put more effort into this than others, and some put in effort that they eventually felt was not worth it—Foo Fighters were apparently excited to create a song for a Godzilla movie, right up until they actually saw the Godzilla movie they created a song for.

Lost in all of this pure 1998 marketing buzz is Godzilla…you know, the popular monster on which the film is supposedly based. One would assume that Godzilla would be a bit central to the whole project, especially since the aforementioned marketing push seemed to be based on the notion that the world’s most popular giant monster should be able to handily scale up every accomplishment of something like Jurassic Park. So, the state of alternative rock and pop music in 1998 is one thing, but the real question remains: what does any of this have to do with Godzilla? For a good chunk of the songs, the answer is often “nothing, really”, and that sometimes even applies to original songs produced specifically for this album. But surely there was some thought process behind the lead singles in particular, some inkling of what kind of song would be appropriate for the King of the Monsters. The only way to know for sure is to look at each of them and suss out their radioactive DNA.

Zillatinum: Part 3 (All Monsters Attack & Godzilla vs. Gigan)

Let’s return to the Showa era, and examine how the Godzilla series looked towards the youth in two different ways.

Zillatinum: Part 2 (The Return of Godzilla & Godzilla 2000: Millennium)

The anniversary capsule reviews return! This time, I cover two of the many reboots of the Godzilla series, both offering reflections of the time in which they were made, and how the King of the Monsters could still potential resonate within them.

Godzilla vs. Charles Barkley

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.

Mothra vs. Godzilla & Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)

1964 was the turning point for the Godzilla films—after ten years and four movies, the series not only solidified into what it would be for the rest of the Showa era, but what it would be in all the years beyond that. After hitting on the kaiju battle premise in Godzilla Raids Again, King Kong vs. Godzilla, demonstrated that having multiple monster headliners duking it out brought in audiences like nothing else. As we have seen in the sixty years since then, it’s a pitch that finds its way back into public favour even after a period of downtime—watching two or more big monsters fighting hits a primal nerve.

These shifts in focus inevitably changed how the stories were written—for one, humanity was no longer living in a world where monsters were a freakish and tragic aberration, but one where they are woven into the fabric of existence. More importantly, though, was how all of this altered the depiction of Godzilla, which spoke of changing attitudes in Toho and possibly in the populace. Although the tone of the movies had significantly softened after the stark nuclear terror of Ishiro Honda’s original, one thing that stuck around even with the relative optimism of Raids Again or the lighthearted spectacle of KKvG was the idea of Godzilla as the ultimate threat, a walking disaster that humanity must contend with again and again as a constant reminder of what they had brought upon themselves. In 1954, Godzilla’s atomic origins made it feel like a new existential problem for life itself—but what happens when that becomes normalized? If Godzilla is eventually part of everyday life, how are we supposed to see him? Could he even become something more than a menace?

Circumstances at Toho led to the regular monster movie crew producing two movies in the Godzilla series in 1964 (with Dogora released between them), and you can see the drastic shift in the tone of this series happen in real time as you watch them. Godzilla gets one more round as the antagonist that brings humans (and more benevolent monsters) together—but within a few months, the tables turn completely, and it is Godzilla himself that humanity turns to for help from an even greater threat. There is something of a logical through line in this—Godzilla’s subsequent change into monster hero did not come from nothing—but it still rather dramatically realigned how these movies would be made from then on.

The Movie Monster Game

The Movie Monster Game, well, it’s a game about movie monsters. Released in 1986 (the same year as the even more famous giant monster game Rampage) for the Apple II and Commodore 64 and developed by Epyx, a company that gained a name for itself in the eighties PC game space with titles like Impossible Mission and California Games, it comes from a very different epoch than the previous giant monster-based game I’ve written about, a strange and experimental time when game design didn’t always have clear rules, and where a degree of abstraction was still present as a game could only convey so much visual information (Epyx’s earlier giant monster title, Crush, Crumble and Chomp!, a strategy game released in 1981, provides an even primitive-looking example.) Despite that, The Movie Monster Game actually shares a lot in common with later entries in this category, especially in the presentation–decades before War of the Monsters surrounded itself with a nostalgic metafiction wrapper, Epyx went even further, not just basing its menus around a movie theatre motif (complete with “trailers” for other Epyx games that appear before you begin playing), but structuring their game as essentially a movie you construct from various component parts pulled from numerous giant monster movies across the subgenre’s history. Even this far back, you can see that the artifice of these stomp-em-ups, and the context of the audience itself, was considered an indelible part of the experience.

That’s all well and good, but there’s a major advantage that The Movie Monster Game has that even later creature feature games could not pull off: alongside a group of “original” monsters that directly homage specific movies and tropes, they managed to officially licence Godzilla from Toho, putting the King of the Monsters prominently on the package for all to see, and making it the first video game released outside of Japan to feature him. Epyx was not an unknown company in 1986, but even so, getting the sometimes fickle Toho to lend out their star monster to an American game developer at that point still seems like a feat (it is equally surprising that they agreed to let Godzilla and Pals appear in the recent indie brawler GigaBash, a game that I still intend to play.) This was not long after the release of The Return of Godzilla (and its English release Godzilla 1985), which at least put it outside the lowest periods for the franchise, and leads me to believe that this collaboration was not an act of desperation–maybe they were just feeling generous. In any case, Godzilla’s fully approved presence in something with as definitive a title as The Movie Monster Game certainly gives it an air of legitimacy.

Zillatinum: Part 1 (Godzilla Minus One & Godzilla Raids Again)

This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the original Godzilla–my, how time flies! I’ve written my fair share about the King of the Monsters, but I’ve generally avoided going over most of the actual films, which is territory that I thought was well-trodden, quite unlike, say, Godzilla’s appearances on Zone Fighter. Still, for an anniversary this special, I think it might be time to finally go all-out in the name of the G-Man, so expect a lot more Godzilla-related posts throughout the year, including the return of the capsule review format that I used to write about several of the movies a decade ago, which will give me even more opportunities to fill in the series gaps on this site.

Before we go back to the beginning (actually a couple of months after the beginning) though, let us travel to just a little over a month ago…

Monster Multimedia: Zone Fighter

I’ve written about Japan’s original mid-sixties Monster Boom pretty regularly—that period, roughly 1966-1968, and its explosion of kaiju-based media casts a long shadow over monsterdom. Less discussed on here is the second Monster Boom in the early seventies, which revolved around a new wave of tokusatsu television shows beginning with P Productions’ Spectreman in early 1971 and then followed a few months later by Tsuburaya’s Return of Ultraman and Toei’s indomitable Kamen Rider. This run of tokusatsu was paralleled by the continual decline of kaiju movies, as the Gamera series ended later that year (following Daiei’s bankruptcy) and the Godzilla series limped on to diminishing returns. This was coupled with a slew of other historical events that worked in the favour of TV tokusatsu, including Toho closing its effects department after the death of pioneering effects director Eiji Tsuburaya and restructuring of the studio, and the 1973 Oil Crisis and related economic downturn affecting both production costs and theatre attendance as budget-minded Japanese audiences chose to stay home (all this context and more can be found in this SciFi Japan article.) The presence of kaiju on television since the sixties already gave viewers an alternative to monster movies, and so it really was only a matter of time before the former became the preeminent venue for monster-based entertainment in Japan—something even Toho realized.

Monster Multimedia: Godzilla: The Series

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.

Creature Classic Companion: Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974) & Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)

The Mechagodzilla duology represents the end of Toho’s twenty year run of classic (and not-so-classic) monster movies, with a new one almost every year since the original Godzilla. Despite attempts to keep the series going, costs of production and declining box office (Terror of Mechagodzilla remains the least-attended movie in the series, theatrically) put the King of the Monsters on ice for a decade, when he could be revived in a rawer, meaner form with more modern SFX. Despite having the dubious honours of being in the last two entries of the Showa years, which deviated further and further from the seriousness of Godzilla ’54 with every entry, Mechagodzilla remains one of the more popular of the Big G’s opponents, I think for pretty obvious reasons—it looks like it was pulled directly from the collective imagination of every ten-year-old on the planet, with its endless supply of weapons and a sinister sneer frozen on its mechanical face. I definitely got the appeal when I was a kid who saw Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla on VHS, with many moments from that movie etching themselves into my memory. Nowadays, having a far greater understanding of their context within the history of kaiju films (and having just read Ed Godziszewski, Steve Ryfle, and Yuuko Honda-Yun’s Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film), these two movies don’t just represent the end of their era, but also of the directorial styles of the Godzilla series’ two most important directors: Ishiro Honda, the original and the one who directed most of Toho’s best-known special effects films, and Jun Fukuda, who became prominent during the series’ turn to more lighthearted fare aimed at kids in the late sixties and early seventies. Despite using many of the same elements, they end up producing movies that feel very different.