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.

Monster Multimedia: Monster Prince

We’ve now entered Dinovember, a month devoted entirely to those terrible lizards we all love. First on the agenda is a return to Japanese studio P Productions, who followed up previous site subject Ambassador Magma/The Space Giants with a series that is still just as youthful in spirit, but also very dino-centric. Monster Prince (Kaiju Ouiji) aired twenty-six episodes from 1967 and 1968, putting it in the latter days of Japan’s Monster Boom (and alongside the much higher profile Ultraseven), and in keeping with the trends of the period, aims to appeal to its target demo even more directly by having a kid protagonist who commands their own kaiju. This particular sort of giant monster fantasy, The Black Stallion with more property damage, was likely started with the Gamera movies, but it’s even more central to this series—while I’ve never heard this show be named as an inspiration for later kids & monsters franchises like Pokemon or Digimon (Gamera and the Ultra series are brought up regularly), it’s hard not to see the similarities. There’s also a few similarities between this and Ambassador Magma—specifically the structure and the pacing—and while I wouldn’t consider this on the same level as its contemporaries, it has plenty of peculiarities going for it.

Monster Multimedia: Hilda

One of those useless thoughts I’ll sometimes have when taking in something aimed at a younger demographic is asking whether I’d have enjoyed it when I was a kid, rather than the wan and decrepit skeleton beast I am currently. My youthful tastes were so contextual and arbitrary that I can never hope to have a definitive answer, but as someone who got really into reading about mythology and folklore in grade school (with, as I have mentioned in the past, their own ambitions of creating the ultimate bestiary of mythological creatures—I still have all my notes in a manila folder), and who then loved to see those stories and creatures I was reading about referenced in the wider culture (so I got to think “I know that one!”), Hilda endeared itself to me very quickly. Created by illustrator Luke Pearson (who has also worked in animation as a storyboarder on Adventure Time), Hilda began as a series of graphic novels, starting with 2010’s Hildafolk (sometimes titled Hilda and the Troll), carrying an adventurous and whimsical spirit that brings to mind both the work of Hayao Miyazaki and Tove Jansson (the latter can especially be seen in the clean, wide-eyed characters Pearson draws), reinterpreting and modernizing (mostly) Scandinavian legends in clever and often beautiful ways. In 2018, Netflix released an animated series adaptation, capturing Pearson’s art with its very smooth and colourful animation (and its ethereal soundtrack, with a theme song provided by Grimes), and expanding on the world presented in the comics, mixing direct adaptations of the books with original stories that fit the tone. I wrote briefly about watching the first Netflix season back in 2019, but after going through the second season that premiered last month, I have an even greater appreciation for the whole series, especially in the way it thoughtfully introduces all the fun stuff about folklore (the silliness, the scariness, the endless possibilities they present) to a new generation of kids.

Monster Multimedia: Ambassador Magma/The Space Giants

Ambassador Magma (dubbed The Space Giants in North America) is notable for two reasons: first, it was a show with a very similar premise to Ultraman (alien superhero fights giant monsters) that premiered six days before it, and as I learned from August Ragone’s Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters, the producers of Ultraman ended up airing a “live” special broadcast just to avoid having their thunder stolen; second, it was based on a manga by Osamu Tezuka—so yes, we’re back in Tezuka Town, albeit in a very different form than last time. The series, made by P Productions (who would go on to create the oddly influential Spectreman in the early seventies, which helped spark a second “monster boom”, as well as a series of tokusatsu shows about a lion man), received a respectable fifty-two episode run, and despite living in the shadow of Ultraman, had a decent following in Japan and even in its syndicated run in North America.