There have been films about the Loch Ness Monster pretty much from the beginning—the first movie about the monster released in 1934 (a film edited by future Lawrence of Arabia director David Lean), only a year after the first noteworthy sightings took place. Needless to say, very few of them are particularly noteworthy, so The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep can take the crown as both the most well-known Loch Ness Monster movie and the best one almost by default (I’ve already written about the only other contender.) Based on a novel by Dick King-Smith (whose book The Sheep Pig was adapted in the movie Babe), Water Horse is pitched as a traditional sort of whimsical family movie, with a cast of respected British thespians and the structure of a “child befriends an animal” story enlivened with fantastical elements ala ET. It burnishes this well-worn plot by taking advantage of the historical context of the Loch Ness Monster story, arguing why a legend like this may have resonated in an era of strife.
The popularity of the Godzilla films in their heyday did not just lead to homegrown competitors and imitators—as we saw with Yongaryand Gorgo, film makers worldwide sometimes made their own attempts at similar monster material. I’ve written about that particular “Monster Boom” period pretty extensively, but a very similar pattern emerged following Pokémon, a later monster-based phenomenon that was clearly inspired by nostalgia for the original Monster Boom. That series’ thundercrack emergence in the late nineties led to a plethora of other media based on the idea of monster collecting and battling, especially in Japan, and I’ve written about some of thoseas well (you can also find a surprisingly deep recollection of even more Pokémon coattail riders in Daniel Dockery’s 2022 book Monster Kids)–but wouldn’t it be interesting to see how the basic ideas of a monster collecting franchise could be filtered through a completely different cultural lens?
This brings us to Monster Allergy, an Italian kids comics-turned-attempted-franchise that doesn’t outright announce its indebtedness to Pokémon and the other kids monster series of its era, but come on—it’s about “monster tamers” capturing monsters in small objects, and that alone makes the connection obvious. It’s certainly no rip-off, as any similarities largely disappear past those barest of surface elements, and instead follow more traditional western low fantasy storytelling. But regardless of the degree of intention, this does represent a very European take on some of Pokémon‘s core ideas, a kid-focused adventure in a monster-filled world, and In this way, it is to Pokémon what a Gorgo or a Reptilicus was to the original Godzilla.
We haven’t ventured back to the original Japanese Monster Boom in a while, but there is still material there left to pore over. Giant Robo hails from the latter half of that brief period of monster ascension, debuting within weeks of Ultrasevenand Monster Prince, and feeling a bit like a halfway point between those two series: espionage antics involving an international peacekeeping organization as well a child hero with his own giant, monster-fighting companion. It ended with the same 26-episode run as Monster Prince, a truncated existence easily overshadowed by the much longer and more influential Ultra series, but unlike Monster Prince, Giant Robo was dubbed and aired on North American television thanks to the efforts of our old pals at American International Pictures, its title changed to Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot. Johnny Sokko became something of a staple of syndicated TV in the seventies, gaining a cult following among English-speakers who went on to start punk and ska bands referencing it—so despite being “lesser” tokusatsu, it has had a surprising amount of staying power in both the west and in Japan, where it has received irregular reboots (all of them animated) in the decades since.
Now begins our brief evaluation of some of the monster movies of the previous year, to see just where filmmakers have been taking the form in recent times. At least in the beginning, the Finnish film Hatching (Pahanhautoja), directed by Hanna Bergholm, seems to lean into modernity, introducing us to a family documenting itself in online video form, and positioning itself as aspirational in the way social media influencers often do, with their gleaming, crystalline European abode and their coordinated normalcy (their house is really the only way they flaunt any kind of wealth, which is the one crucial difference between them and most other influencers.) This, as it turns out, is really only one component of the story, an inescapable twenty-first century incarnation of some well-worn themes of image obsession and parental pressure, all your favourite adolescent anxieties presented here with the addition of a gross and bizarre monster, a thing of pure chaos that manages to both briefly assuage and act upon those anxieties.
Despite the neglect of the studio heads initially hindering its box office performance, animator Brad Bird’s directorial debut The Iron Giant became a cult hit whose acclaim and influence only grew over time. Very very loosely based on the book The Iron Man by British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (which, it should be noted, ends with the titular character matching wits with a continent-sized space dragon in order to create world peace), it is a classic story of a kid befriending an otherworldly being and finding both outside acceptance and self-acceptance, themes that will likely always resonate. It’s also a unique piece of American animation, made as the boom of traditionally animated movies was on the downswing, but nonetheless doing many things very differently than the animation norm of the nineties. Most importantly for us on this site, though, it’s also a homage to, and critical analysis, of the Science Fiction and monster movies of the 1950s, using decades of hindsight to craft a portrayal that captures all the complexities of that time. Despite feeling very modern—well, modern for 1999 I guess—it still very accurately reflects many of the ideological components of those older movies, something I’ve only really come to appreciate after becoming more immersed in the source material.
Previous techno-wary monster movies I’ve written about like The Invisible Boyand The Lift are about humanity losing control of their increasingly complicated machines—The Colossus of New York takes a different angle, asking if our increasing integration with that technology will cause us to lose our humanity. The idea of human enhancement with mechanical parts had existed in Sci-Fi literature prior to this, but in terms of film, Colossus is taking on what was likely fairly new ground even while using some of the ideas (sometimes pretty directly) from those earlier examples, and in doing so it anticipates decades of cyborg movies (as well as decades of movies with New York in the title that were definitely not filmed in New York) and debates about transhumanism, two years before the term “cyborg” was coined (but only a year after the term “transhumanism” was.) It is a classical sort of monstrous tragedy in many ways, too, but what struck me was how surprisingly dark it is.
I’ve argued before that much of movie monsterdom is based on the idea of finding some way to revive the dinosaurs, because people, and kids especially, will never not be fascinated with dinosaurs. As historically inaccurate as it is, I think the reason so many movies feature humans and dinosaurs coexisting is because many just wish that they could co-exist with them, and project it onto the distant past. With that in mind, I doubt many would disagree with me when I say that the ultimate dream of most children, maybe even more than befriending a robot, is befriending a dinosaur, which is like your typical animal friendship stories but massively scaled up. There have been plenty of pieces of entertainment that exploit that desire, and Dinosaurus! is technically one of them—although in practice, it’s really a movie about a kid befriending a neanderthal and then getting to briefly befriend a dinosaur as a fringe benefit. Still, there weren’t many movies about kids getting to spend any amount of time with a dinosaur in 1960, so maybe it could still stand out as something new and exciting.
An example of how context matters: Robby the robot in 1956’s Forbidden Planet, one of the most beautiful of all the fifties Sci-Fi classics, was a prominent supporting character and very clearly not a monster (that movie already has a pretty great monster anyway); he proved popular enough that the studio heads at MGM decided to put him in another movie a year later, and suddenly he’s “The Science-Monster Who Would Destroy The World!”, as proclaimed on the poster of The Invisible Boy. This is not just a case of them reusing the character or the suit, either, although he is credited in the opening credits as an actor (voiced, uncredited, by Marvin Miller), but by all accounts this is the same Robby the robot from Forbidden Planet, who in the backstory of this moviehas been taken from twenty-third century back to the 1950s by a time travel experiment. If a fantastical character goes from one setting or story to a different one, even if technically in the same genre, are they suddenly so out of place that they become a monster? It’s the kind of meta thought you get while watching this movie, which at times feels like a lighthearted parody of Science Fiction made for the kinds of kids who probably already loved Robby, before it suddenly turns into a serious thriller that is surprisingly well-constructed, and then back into a comedy again. It’s an unusual, interesting time capsule of a movie.
As we discussed in the Zone Fighterpost, the early seventies were a pretty weird time for kaiju in film, but things were going swimmingly for Ultraman and Tsuburaya Productions (at least for a while). 1972 was the company’s tenth anniversary, and for such an occasion they teamed up with Eiji Tsuburaya’s longtime partners at Toho to make a completely new giant monster movie, which turned out to be Daigoro v.s Goliath (full title Great Monster Battle: Daigoro vs. Goliath in Japan, a title that is both generic and possibly overblown, given the movie its attached to.) There is some speculation that this project evolved out of the unmade Godzilla vs. Redmoon, which was also supposed to have Tsuburaya Productions involved and has a small number of surface similarities to Daigoro, but there doesn’t seem to be any actual proof that the two are connected. Written and directed by regular Ultraman and Ultra Q director Toshihiro Iijima (he would be at the company long enough to direct the first Ultraman Cosmos film in 2001)—whose screenplay credit is under the pen name Kitao Senzoku—with special effects by fellow Tsuburaya regulars Minoru Nakano (later of The Last Dinosaurand Ultra Q The Movie) and Junkichi Oki, what this collaboration produced is something that is definitely of its particular era of giant monster movies, and then some.
By this point, kaiju film was firmly in the realm of children’s entertainment first and foremost, taking the kiddie-pandering that had been working for the Gameraseries (already ended at this time) and running with it—even Godzilla had become a cute, pug-faced superhero figure by the early seventies. Toho ended up leaning into this through their Champion Festivals in Japan, which showcased multiple kaiju movies new and old, animation, and TV compilations, and was often the debut for whatever their latest tokusatsu movie was, whether that be something like Space Amoebaor the latter day Godzilla films. Daigoro vs. Goliath premiered alongside a shortened version of Destroy All Monsters(re-edited by Ishiro Honda himself)and Panda! Go Panda!, an early animated short film by future Studio Ghibli co-founders Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki—that should give you an idea of what the intended audience for this movie was. But even that might not prepare you for the juvenile lightness of it all.
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