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.

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…

Creature Classic Companion: Mothra (1961)

Toho was seven years into the Great Kaiju Project, having produced sombre nuclear disaster stories like Godzilla (or The H-Man) and more traditional prehistoric monster mayhem like Rodan (or Varan), and were really putting in the work to find the next big (BIG!) giant monster film. This involved hiring three authors (Shin’ichirō Nakamura, Takehiko Fukunaga, and Yoshie Hotta) to write a serialized print story that was then given to screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa (who wrote previous Toho genre projects Varan and Battle In Outer Space, and would write the massive King Kong vs. Godzilla in 1962) to adapt. The story that resulted has the city destruction scenes you’d expect, but otherwise was very different from previous kaiju movies: lighter in tone, more fantastical, and less a grim warning of humanity’s negative impact on this planet than a gentle reminder, and all based around a rather unusual monster (which is also one of the few explicitly female giant monsters.) Sure, there were giant insect movies well before Mothra, but none were this colourful, and certainly none posited that the enlarged arthropod was probably in the right.

Of all the non-Godzilla Toho genre movies, Mothra probably had the largest impact, and its titular lepidopteran would thereon become the company’s second most recognizable creature, appearing frequently alongside the King of the Monsters (Godzilla movies featuring Mothra were often the most well-attended ones in their eras, just to show how much the Japanese audiences dug that bug.) The original movie reflected the changing tone in giant monster movies in the new decade, with subsequent movies often maintaining a similarly lighter touch with much more upbeat endings that allowed the monster to live on—but very few of them have the consistent sense of whimsy that this one does. It really feels like Sekizawa, director Ishiro Honda, and effects maestro Eiji Tsuburaya understood exactly how a movie featuring a giant caterpillar that becomes a giant moth, alongside a duo of tiny singing women, should look and feel, creating something that is a little strange and a little beautiful (and even a little satirical), and one of their most cohesive monster fantasies.

Dogora (1964)

Crammed into the months between two Ishiro Honda/Eiji Tsuburaya Godzilla movies (Mothra vs. Godzilla and Ghidorah The Three-Headed Monster, just for those keeping score), Dogora was always likely to be left in the dust of its more popular giant monster brethren—which was certainly not helped by some other things that I will get into shortly. Continuing on from what we saw in The H-Man, this is another Toho monster movie whose human element relies heavily on gangster and cops trying to one-up each other, with some light international intrigue, likely inspired by the popularity of yakuza-themed movies in Japanese theatres in the early sixties (as well as an uptick in real life organized crime.) It was also likely inspired by a scaling back of the original story proposal by Jojiro Okami (who had worked on previous Toho genre movies) by screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa (who wrote both of 1964’s Godzilla movies, as well as previous subjects Varan and Latitude Zero, among many others), using cops-and-robbers antics to fill in time that was originally meant for more globe-hopping cosmic horror. What you’re left with is an uneven movie with many of its more intriguing elements sticking out among the rather tepid filler.

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.

Matango (1963)

You could very easily argue that a movie like Matango (given the English title Attack of the Mushroom People back in the day) can’t be part of the “new” Creature Canon because it was part of the old one: although never receiving the international popularity of Toho’s kaiju movies, it’s had a following for decades. I know I’ve been reading about this movie for years before actually sitting down and watching it. So maybe this one is a little more well-known then what I usually cover for this, but I see nothing wrong with exploring some of the classics every once in a while.