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.

Journey To the Seventh Planet (1962)

Three years after The Angry Red Planet, Sid W. Pink and Ib Melchior’s film productions had been shipped off to Denmark, where they collaborated again to produce another interplanetary horror show in Journey to the Seventh Planet—the difference here is not only which planet we visit, but also that it’s Pink in the director’s chair this time. While one could accuse the two of lightly reusing their own ideas for this movie, many other scholarly viewers have accused it of stealing ideas from other, more famous Science Fiction works: the first is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, which saw its first publication in 1961—although it seems unlikely that either Pink or Melchior read it in its original Polish early enough to crib the idea of planet bringing men’s secret desires to life; the far more likely inspiration is Ray Bradbury’s short story “Mars is Heaven!”, which was integrated into The Martian Chronicles in 1950. Regardless of where the story came from, the appeal of it is quite apparent—extraterrestrial life attacking human interlopers with things pulled right from their subconscious, playing on human emotions in ways far more sinister than just employing space monsters as in Angry Red Planet. Obviously, this is done in a significantly…significantly…less thoughtful manner than in Solaris, and to be honest, it might even be less thoughtful than Angry Red Planet.

A Creature Special Report: The Gamera Gauntlet

Gamera is, of course, Japan’s second favourite giant monster, one of the staple kaiju of the sixties Monster Boom whose yearly appearance in theatres (and, in the rest of the world, on television) has given him and his films an outsize influence on pop culture. You’d be hard-pressed to find a turtle in any kind of Japanese media who doesn’t fly by spinning around in its shell, and thanks mainly to Mystery Science Theatre 3000, fans of silly movies in the English-speaking world have formed a real soft (shell) spot for the terrapin tornado. Although starting out as Daiei’s answer to Toho’s Godzilla—considering the original movie was in black-and-white even though it was made in 1965, one might say their direct rip-off—the series eventually diverged in tone, even while maintaining a similar monster fight formula. While both monsters are beloved by children in the audience, Gamera was the one that was directly positioned as the “Friend to all Children”, a playful figure who would usually star alongside young actors in increasingly goofy plots, which is a level of direct pandering that Godzilla never really engaged in (at least until it started directly lifting stuff from Gamera in the late sixties and early seventies.) Gamera was even successfully revived in the mid-nineties with a trio of highly-regarded films directed by Shusuke Kaneko and written by Kazunori Ito, which I wrote about years ago.

While I’ve seen some of the movies in the original series, I’ve never had the opportunity to sit down and soak in the entire 1966-1971(+1980) run until I found the whole series available on our old pal, Tubi TV. The experience of running through the entire Showa Gameras (most of them directed by Noriaki Yuasa) has not only provided a more detailed context for the series and its place in monster history, but also demonstrates the wild evolution the series and its title kaiju took over those five years—what you thought you knew about Gamera is only partially true (he is still really neat and also filled with meat, however.) So, in this special extra-length post, I will compactly address each of the seven sequels—yes, it’s time to fire up the old capsule review machine.