November fifth brought terrible news. A monster would be blowing his way back into power in America.
But two days before that, another monster had celebrated a birthday. A monster known the world over. The King of Monsters some may say, despite this monster technically having no gender.
Yes, I mean of course Gojira, aka, Godzilla.
Godzilla celebrated 70 years on November 3rd, 2024. A milestone for any fictional character, but especially for an enormous nuclear dinosaur. The anniversary celebrated the release of the original japanese film Gojira on November 3rd, 1954.
It is a wildly important movie in the annals of film history and pop culture. It was important to me as well. Although I wouldn't see the proper Japanese version until college, I saw the bastardized American cut released in 1956 as Godzilla King of the Monsters, at some point in my childhood in the nineties. Several minutes had been cut out and replaced with awkwardly filmed clips of Raymond Burr as an American reporter in Tokyo during the monster’s attack.
Despite it all, I was hooked from the beginning. Many Saturdays in my rural upbringing with a single mother and as an only child, involved popping a blank 8 hour VHS tape into the VCR to record a marathon of Godzilla movies on TNT.
Commercial breaks were met with a montage to Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla”, consisting of clips from the Showa Era of Godzilla films. These are the ones made in the 60s mostly and are most definitely, the most cheesy. We are talking about the prime era of actors in bad monster suits wrestling on a soundstage and in a shallow pool for the ocean.
The english dubs for these movies were terrible and often featured the wrong titles and I’m sure the wrong dialogue. But they all ended up on my blank VHS’s and I watched them over and over.
From Godzillla VS Mechagodzilla being a favorite for its featuring of Titanosaurs, to Godzilla VS Mothra with its twin fairies and exciting close ups of miniatures in a storm with Mothra’s eggs tossed about by a storm. Then there was Godzilla’s Revenge. It was the equivalent of a clip show episode and was cut together from multiple movies, resulting in multiple different looking Godzilla suits. It featured a stellar piece of music called “March of the Monsters” as well.
My childhood continued that way, loving Godzilla and getting toys, comics, VHS tapes, and making my own drawings. In 1998, Tristar released the first attempt at a live action, big budget, star studded, American Godzilla movie. It was deeply hated.
But I loved it and I still do. It definitely wasn't Godzilla, it was just another monster named Godzilla. I watched it over and over and my mother often watched it with me. Many of my happiest memories were watching movies with her. She has often told me she wishes she could have done more for me as a child, we were poor. But I never remembered wanting more. All my memories are the quality time with snacks, monster movies and action movies.
As I went through life, being into Godzilla was a constant, but it did ebb and flow. I got married young and started a family. In 2014, the first of Legendary Pictures Monsterverse Godzilla movies was released.
The movie was sold as Walter White vs Godzilla. It starred Bryan Cranston and the marketing made it seem, anyway, that he would feature prominently throughout the movie and be the main character. Well, that wasn't the case.
I disliked the movie if I’m being honest. I loathed the actual main character and despised the filmmakers Jaws approach of “don’t show the monster”. They constantly cut away from the kaiju action as it got good. And these newly designed monsters Godzilla fought were awful.
Why wasn’t Goji fighting any of the slew of monsters built up over decades into one of the greatest rouges gallery of all time? I mean, I understood that things like copyrights existed. I knew that Toho, the makers of Godzilla in Japan, had certain rules when it came to a Godzilla movie. But still, I was really disappointed. I wrote the American film series off. Until the very next movie came out that it.
In 2019, Godzilla, King of the Monsters came out. It was everything I had wished the first Legendary movie had been, it featured classic Godzilla monsters with designs that were classic and paid homage to their Toho originals. Mothra, King Ghidora and Rodan. And Rodan looked the most badass it ever has, crawling out of a volcano like a true monster and really living up to the fire bird moniker. There were references and winks and nods to lots of classic Godzilla movies and I appreciated it. The soundtrack was a fantastic love letter to the iconic compositions of past Godzilla movies.
Of Course, before the release of this movie, another Japanese Godzilla was made. Shin Gojira. I had heard wild things about it. I had heard it was astounding, the best Godzilla movie ever made, that it was terrifying and gross. Godzilla in this movie was a truly tragic monster, more so than it had been ever before. The design of the monster was stupendous and that movie features the best destruction of a city scene via Godzilla’s atomic breath of any of them.
After Shin Gojira, the Legendary Films Monsterverse continued. And then in 2023 we got the first Godzilla movie to ever win an academy award. It was of course Godzilla Minus One. It was astounding and it put to bed the complaint that many fans, myself included had made for decades: we don’t care about the humans, give us more Godzilla! The human story in this movie was fantastic.
I saw it in the IMAX and I sobbed by the end. It came at a time in my life when things were looking down and uncertain. I had had a couple relationships end, one of which it turned out was very toxic. I was unemployed after being fired from a long time job that I hated. But here came Godzilla, to remind me that it would always be there, no matter what. It was like if instead of repeating “remember who you are”, the ghost cloud version of Mufasa in the Lion King had just destroyed everything in his path instead, but it looked really cool.