Alternate Titles: Godzilla King of the Monsters, Gojira
Year: 1954
Director: Ishiro Honda
Special Effects Director: Eiji Tsuburaya
In The Suit: Haruo Nakajima & Katsumi Tezuka

Min and i began our annual Godzilla marathon in the spring of 2014 and this time we decided to take some notes and preserve the fun and madness for posterity. We watch a large swath of Godzilla and related movies just about every year, but the impetus this year may have subconsciously been due to the fact that there was a new American Godzilla movie coming out that seemed to have more promise than the 1998 version. So we settled in and of course started at the beginning.

We open with the classic Godzilla roar, prompting Min to comment on how that sound was barely heard in the trailer for the 2014 movie. "I hate that movie already", she says.

I did. I totally said that.

That movie actually turned out to not be so bad, but we still prefer the real Toho movies, so let's continue.

Since she's a drummer, Min immediately starts counting out the odd time signature of the theme music, which, once it gets going, jumps from 7/4 to 11/4, back to 7/4, and then 14/4.

Despite having counted out the time signature many many times by now, i still feel the need to validate my count. I mean 14/4 is nuts. It can't be right.

This original 1954 Godzilla film, for its time period, is of higher production standards than the majority of the series will be, and it basically counts as a real movie. The special effects perhaps weren't as good as the much earlier King Kong (1933) but while that film inspired Ray Harryhausen to create a dynasty of stop-motion monsters, most other science fiction movies in general, and in the giant monster category specifically, never approached the level of the King of Monsters here. Compare this to Kronos (1957) which features a 10 story robot that supposedly rampages through Mexico, but where the camera is afraid to ever pull away further than the top corner of its head (except for the scenes that feature hilarious cartoon animation showing its legs move up and down as it glides across the screen). Or to Beginning of the End (also 1957) which achieved its giant irradiated locusts by filming ordinary grasshoppers and poorly superimposing them into the movie's scenes. The Godzilla film, by contrast, features incredibly elaborate and detailed miniatures. And yes, they're smashed by a guy in a rubber suit, but the camera work keeps the creature looking realistically menacing most of the time.

Some scenes use an animatronic model, sometimes with beady eyes...

...and sometimes with googly eyes...

...and they admittedly don't look so good. And there are some scenes with men in vehicles that are very clearly little toys in toy trucks. But there's also a pretty elaborate scene with airplanes attacking Godzilla, complete with nice fiery explosions (even if all the missiles miss) and for the most part, from a special effects point of view, it's looking really good for its time and it was pretty groundbreaking in that regard.

Say what you will about men in rubber suits, but that is exponentially better than what they did in The Giant Gila Monster (1959). That movie had endless close-ups of a lizard (that isn't even a gila monster) moving around so slowly, it barely made it close enough to the model cars to half-heartedly step on them. Even the lizard looked bored. I'll take a guy in a rubber suit flipping over model bridges any day.

Thematically, the movie is also on solid ground. Filmed less than a decade after the end of World War II and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the film is clearly a metaphor for the war in general and the horrors of nuclear weapons specifically. Godzilla is awakened (so to speak; more on that below) by nuclear testing, and throughout the film there is commentary from ordinary citizens like "The shelter again? That stinks." when they realize that there's no way to stop Godzilla, plus scenes of people evacuating their homes with their lives on their backs, and kids giving off radioactive readings on Geiger counters, all of which surely would have had resonance with people that had lived through the war. And at the end of the film, one of the main characters, Dr. Kyohei Yamane, looks at the camera and says that while this Godzilla may have died, he's sure that there's more, and if we keep performing nuclear tests, another one could appear.

By the way, Dr. Yamane is played by the perpetually sad-faced Takashi Shimura...

...who is ubiquitous in (somewhat weirdly) both Toho giant monster films and Akira Kurosawa films. I first came to know him from Kurosawa's Ikiru, a very poignant and artistic movie, so having him here in the first Godzilla film adds to its respectability, at least for me.

I love this guy! We should do a Whoodwin on the main blog with a picture of him happy and one of him sad and then not label them and make people guess which is which. You have to give me a dollar if you guess wrong. We really could just use the same pic for both...

And of course being the first Godzilla movie, there are a lot of historic firsts, including (der!) the first appearance of Godzilla (or, at least, a Godzilla; more on that below again). The movie also establishes the Counter-Godzilla HQ, which has an Anti-Godzilla Frigate Fleet. And Godzilla's defeat is due to the Oxygen Destroyer, which will later play a role in the origin of Destoroyah in the Heisei series as well as the Kiryu-Mechagodzilla in the Millennium series.

All that said, there's still plenty in this movie to goof on.

The movie starts off well enough, with a classic set up involving ships mysteriously getting destroyed, and then an island fishing village reporting torn fishing nets, and then a devastating hurricane accompanied by the first glimpses of a giant monster's legs. In the aftermath of the storm, the village reports lost cattle and pigs. If you're familiar with Godzilla from later films, this all might seem a bit inexplicable: Godzilla doesn't normally blast ships from below, i don't recall him stealing cattle outside of this movie, and he doesn't sneak around under the cover of a storm. In fact, the storm seems to be caused by the emergence of Godzilla, and that's not something that ever happens again. If i were looking to create a continuity fix for this, i'd say that this unusual behavior may be caused by growing pains. Perhaps after getting bombarded with radioactivity for the first time, he was simply lethal to be near initially (I'd say it's lethal to be near this Godzilla always. He's kind of a big jerk in this movie.), and he might have even still been growing during the early parts of the movie, which is why he's able to sneak around on the island and also why a meal of cattle and pigs would be enough to satisfy him. But mostly the reason for this is to put Godzilla into a more traditional movie monster role for this first film even though he's really too large for this sort of thing.

Godzilla gets named by an old man on the Odo Island fishing village. He says the creature must be Godzilla (or Gojira), and that in the old days, they used to sacrifice girls to him when the fishing was bad (WHAT! ritual sacrifice? how old is this guy?). If that's true (and it's entirely possible that this is just a case of conflating the old legend with this new creature), that would again suggest that Godzilla used to be smaller, since i can't imagine even a raft-full of measly little girls appeasing the big guy.

In a remnant of the rituals from the old days, an exorcism is performed on the island, complete with Tengus.

As an aside, the idea that Godzilla was a smaller dinosaur that grew due to nuclear bombs is something we'll see in the Heisei series, although in that origin he's pretty clearly a land dinosaur to start with.

And that brings us to his origin here. Weirdly, after the events on Odo Island, the immediate response is to bring in a paleontologist, Dr. Yamane. Why the first thought was to bring in an expert on extinct dinosaurs to investigate exploding boats and a destroyed fishing village is beyond me, but obviously the authorities are smarter than i am because that turns out to be exactly the right move.

Dr. Yamane's initial reasoning is that we've all heard about the alleged footprints of the abominable snowmen in the Himalayas, so clearly there must be a dinosaur lurking in the sea around Japan. Again, if that reasoning seems odd, it just shows how wrong you are.

We then have a very elaborate launch party for the paleontological expedition, which includes Dr. Yamane's daughter Emiko and her not-so-secret boyfriend Hideto Ogata (played by Akira Takarada who, like Takashi Shimura will appear in quite a few more Toho films as different characters) while Emiko's eye-patched fiance Dr. Serizawa (played by Akihiko Hirata, another reoccurring actor) sullenly looks on from shore. In the US version, reporter Steve Martin (played by Raymond "Perry Mason" Burr) is also on board. More on him below, but i wanted to note that he refers to the Emiko/Hideto/Dr. Serizawa relationship as "the usual triangle".

This is the laziest love triangle ever. Emiko and Serizawa never spend any time with each other. I don't think it even qualifies as a relationship. Which is a good thing cause apparently, nobody thinks it's wrong that she's affianced to one guy and going out on dates regularly with the other guy. Everybody knows Emiko's seeing Ogata. Her dad knows. Ogata's at the house all of the time. Even Serizawa knows. But nobody is saying anything. Where's the moral integrity, people?!

After an investigation that finds a living trilobite in a giant footprint, and a shocking disregard for the dangers of radiation, we get our first look at Godzilla, who surprises everyone by popping up over the hill.

Oh, hi guys. Sorry! Did i startle you?!

After that, the expedition heads back to the mainland so Dr. Yamane can give his report. He starts by explaining the dinosaurs...

...and then says that there were some dinosaurs that were a missing link between terrestial and sea dinosaurs. He seems to be referring to the likes of the plesiosaurs, but those creatures weren't actually dinosaurs. And Godzilla looks nothing like them or any other prehistoric sea reptiles, of course. But the theory is that Godzilla was this aquatic dinosaur that continued to live and feed on deep sea life until nuclear testing wiped out his ecology and forced him to come to the surface to look for food. It's a little unclear if it's meant to be that Godzilla himself has been around since the Jurassic period or if he's from a species that continued to live on. The US version initially seems to offer some clarity by saying that a "rare phenomenon of nature" allowed this breed to reproduce, but then it confusingly continues by saying that the experiments with H-bombs "resurrected" the creature. Neither version explicitly states that Godzilla was in any way mutated by the nuclear testing, but the point is definitely made that he's absorbed a lot of Strontium-90 and is now radioactive.

The Japanese version of the film puts Godzilla at 50 meters (150 ft), while the US version first says he's over 400 ft tall and then later as tall as a 30 story building (which would be closer to 300 ft). The US version pushes Godzilla's size to the top of the size chart, but comparing Godzilla to the buildings in this film, 50 meters seems more accurate and i'm not sure why they decided to inflate it for the American film. King Kong's size varied a bit in the different scenes of his 1933 film but he never got beyond 70 feet, so you'd think Godzilla being 50 meters would be big enough.

Anyway, Dr. Yamane's explanation that hydrogen bombs are responsible for the emergence of Godzilla immediately gets everyone nodding in agreement, and it's inflammatory enough that a debate breaks out between two unnamed factions, one of men that argues that they should keep the involvement of nuclear testing a secret lest it hurt international relations, and one contingent of mostly women that demand that the truth be released to all. The men tell the women to "be quiet" and oh boy does the leader of the women get angry. Min's reaction was "She is going to eat him".

And he would have totally deserved it. I find the contrast between the members of the Women's League with their aggressive behavior an interesting contrast to the meek and almost non-existent presence of Emiko Yamane. She spends the majority of the movie either serving someone drinks or about two seconds away from bursting into tears. Looking at Emiko alone, one might assume this was the expected behavior for women in Japanese society in the 1950s, but coupled with the scene of the women in the townhall meeting, it just makes me want to know what the hell is wrong with Emiko.

From here there's a lull in the giant monster action as we explore the human drama of the story. With no explanation, the Yamanes have adopted a boy that survived the initial Odo Island attack, and they also seem to have adopted Ogata because he's always hanging around the house. Ogata kind of passive-aggressively accuses Emiko of falling out of love with Dr. Serizawa only because he was wounded during the war, and while that doesn't seem to offend Emiko, it certainly offended Min.

Grrr...

Emiko goes to Serizawa's house to finally break off the relationship (and only because of the weirdly forward request by a reporter that wanted to get an interview with the reclusive scientist) but she's unable to bring the subject up and instead gets a demonstration of his experimental Oxygen Destroyer. In the movie, we don't get to actually see that experiment until Emiko has a flashback later in the film, but we don't have to wait that long for the purposes of this review. Serizawa has come across a compound that destroys oxygen...

...which asphyxiates all the creatures in a fish tank (why so many exotic fish had to be sacrificed for the experiement isn't said). In addition to asphyxiating the creatures, it also immediately eats off their flesh. I'm not so sure about the science of any of that.

He creates a chemical reaction that is so deadly, it destroys oxygen, but is easily contained in a fishtank. And only works on oxygen in the water, but not any of the oxygen in the air. And requires no energy added to break any bonds. I am extremely unsure about the science of that.

And let's talk about the fact that Serizawa in no way prepares Emiko for his flesh-eating discovery. If you're going to show me fish getting dissolved, i expect a warning. He's just all "Hey, you want to see what i've been working on?". No wonder she's afraid to tell him she's dumping him for Ogata.

It's said that a handful of Oxygen Destroyer could turn Tokyo Bay into a graveyard. And that is exactly what they'll do with it in the end, although we never hear about the implications of using the stuff on the Bay after it's done. Maybe Serizawa was exaggerating since they do have to go underwater and deploy the substance right in front of Godzilla to make it work?

But for now Serizawa is afraid of releasing his discovery to the public, and he asks Emiko to swear to secrecy. She returns home, depressed, in a house where her father is also depressed because of the government's plans to kill Godzilla instead of studying him. Ogata doesn't win any points telling Dr. Yamane that he agrees with the government. When Emiko tells Ogata that she hasn't yet broken up with Serizawa, she gets a silent shoulder clasp.

And then we're back off to Godzilla, who is on another rampage. There's a scene where Dr. Yamane tries to get the army to understand that lights will make Godzilla angry, something that he seems to have learned via secret radio waves to his brain and which will actually play no part in the rest of the movie (and indeed the line is cut out of the US version).

Scientists in Godzilla movies always just know everything about whatever monster it is they're talking about. ALWAYS.

After that attack, the government sets up a huge fence of electric wires, hoping to repel Godzilla. We'll be looking at Godzilla's reaction to electricity in anticipation of the events of Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster (wherein Godzilla actually draws power from electricity due to reasons involving a swap with the Toho King Kong that we won't get into here); in this movie electricity possibly bothers him, but only a little, and he's soon past that and on his major devastating rampage through Tokyo. Director Ishiro Honda includes this odd shot from the perspective of a bird cage.

That is either a ginormous birdcage or the teeniest birds ever.

A really important new development happens here: Godzilla starts breathing fire, or at least a kind of steam that heats things up and causes fires. His spinal plates also glow while he's blasting.

Later it'll be said that he's actually breathing a kind of radioactive energy, but not in this film. In fact, frustratingly, the fact that Godzilla has a breath weapon goes completely without comment in the film. To my knowledge, dinosaurs didn't breathe fire, and you'd think the sudden revelation that this giant monster also can burn down the city with his breath would be new and terrifying information that people might react to, but no, not at all.

If there can be abominable snowman footprints in the Himalayas, then obviously dinosaurs can breathe fire.

Despite previous requests that people evacuate their homes (and further announcements with the most calming special bulletin chime ever) (i want that chime for our doorbell.), there are still lots of people running around and in the buildings of Tokyo. And this Godzilla is a real killer. He's not on a mindless rampage or just misunderstood, he is evil and malicious, brutally targeting random civilians and laying waste to the entire city.

In the aftermath of this destruction (where Emiko tells a young girl in a clinic that "your mother will be ok" after her dead body is carried away), Emiko and Ogata convince Serizawa to use his Oxygen Destroyer. He resolves his concern about the technology getting into the wrong hands, and also the love triangle, by burning all of his notes and then killing himself in the deployment. The ending focuses on the human drama and is not a big battle. Godzilla just kind of wakes up in time to be destroyed, and the soundtrack is tranquil and sad.

It's worth noting for future continuity purposes that the Oxygen Destroyer seemingly skeletonizes Godzilla and then even the skeleton disappears. But we'll see in the Millennium series that the skeleton survived to form the basis for Kiryu-Mechagodzilla.

A more immediate note is that this really is the death of this particular Godzilla in, i believe, all versions of the Toho Godzilla movies. As Dr. Yamane predicts, there is at least one more Godzilla and that's who will appear in Godzilla Raids Again and all the subsequent films. This original one is dead. However, that's a point that will kind of be lost on a lot of people, so i'm still tagging "Godzilla" as a Monster Appearing in this entry. I'm also adding a tag for Kiryu, which is a version of Mecha-Godzilla that is created from the bones of this original Godzilla in a much later film.

Now, we're not done yet. Because we at SuperMegaMonkey care so much, after watching the original subtitled Japanese version, we also watched the US version of this film. We won't always be doing this, but for the US release of this first Godzilla film, a significant amount of effort, misguided though it may have been, was put into making it digestible to an American audience. Frankly, i'm not sure if that was necessary, because, i mean... Godzilla! But considering how much additional content there is, it's worth a look. We've already mentioned some of the differences above, and there's a few more. Like Ogata, who was a salvage operator in the original, but is promoted to a marine officer in this one.

But the main difference is the insertion of reporter Steve Martin, played by Raymond Burr. Burr manages to appear, Zelig or Forrest Gump-like, in all the major scenes of this movie. The scenes are sometimes painstakingly set-up with lots of extras carefully matching sets, and sometimes less so, with Burr just standing in front of a blank wall.

What the hell is with that pipe?! Burr's entire acting contribution to many of these scenes is to stand awkwardly while plastering a contemplative scowl on his face as he presumably witnesses Godzilla's acts of destruction. He's certainly not up to Perry Mason quality acting at this point.

The purpose is to allow Burr to provide narration so that we don't have to listen to overdubs or look at subtitles. The other device is to have Steve Martin get on the phone to report his story back to his paper in Chicago, allowing for big exposition dumps.

Burr's narration is at times wildly overdramatic:

What has happened here was caused by a force which up until a few days ago was entirely beyond the scope of Man's imagination. Tokyo, a smoldering memorial to the unknown, an unknown which at this very moment still prevails and could at any time lash out with its terrible destruction anywhere else in the world. There were once many people here who could've told of what they saw... now there are only a few. My name is Steve Martin. I am a foreign correspondent for United World News. I was headed for an assignment in Cairo, when I stopped off in Japan for a social call; but it turned out to be a visit to the living HELL of another world.

It's an interesting approach to dealing with a foreign language film, and we know that later Godzilla films will wind up getting mocked in the US due to bad overdubbing, so i guess it makes sense that they did this. But what's weird is how often it fails. There are long periods where we wind up watching people talk in Japanese, and only sometimes after that does Martin ask someone what they were saying. One of the most self-serving of those is where, in the original, a reporting team bravely remains on Tokyo Tower, giving their final broadcast as Godzilla menacingly approaches them.

In the US version, we see that scene in its entirety, but without any translation, and then the scene is basically repeated with Steve Martin watching Godzilla approach his building (the difference is that Martin survives).

And all the main characters wind up getting overdubs anyway. The voice actor for Yamame works his way up the ladder during the movie; he also handles the narration of a television broadcast and finally becomes the omniscient narrator by the end of the film. The movie also has Burr interacting directly with the main characters of the original, and that's achieved by having stand-ins facing away from the camera talking to Burr and then switching to a repurposed scene from the original overdubbing new dialogue.

It's all entirely awkward. The stand-in scenes play as if Burr is saying his line of dialogue, pausing for what they think is the right amount of time, and then saying his next line while the stand-ins do nothing. Literally nothing. They're standing so still, i don't think they are even saying the lines just to mark the time.

We're also introduced to new characters, like an army official that seems to have nothing better to do then escort Martin around, and an assistant to Dr. Serizawa that we saw no evidence of in the original.

The US version also takes a different narrative approach, beginning in the aftermath of Godzilla's final rampage in Tokyo before flashing back to the beginning of the Japanese movie. The movie also repeats a lot of footage, showing the same scenes more than once at various points of the movie, demonstrating its Frankenstein-like creation. Of course, Godzilla fans are no strangers to re-used footage.

Ultimately, though, the story is unchanged, except for the few things noted above (most significantly, Godzilla's origin).

In later entries we'll have a section on special or weird powers exhibited by Godzilla, but since this is his first appearance that's not really applicable. I will note that Godzilla seems somewhat more agile and fishlike a couple of the water scenes, with his tail slashing in a way i don't think we'll see again until the Millennium series. This is reflective of his "sea dinosaur" origin but the limitations of the suit will cause that to be mostly dropped in later movies.

A final note: this movie is unique in that is is considered canon for all three branches of Godzilla movie continuity. The Showa, Heisei, and Millennium movies all use this as a starting point.

Godzilla Drinking Game
	Someone thinks it's a good idea to drag a giant monster across the ocean on a raft (giant eggs count).
	Attacking planes fly directly at a monster, with no possibility of avoiding a crash even if the monster didn't swat them down.
	A submarine explodes.	Plenty of boats explode, but no submarines here.
	People refuse to believe in the existence of a giant monster even though they've already acknowledged that Godzilla exists.	Obviously not applicable yet.
	Teens have a dance party on a boat. Two drinks/head smacks if they get attacked by a monster during the party.	There's most definitely a teen dance party on a boat, and Godzilla at least surfaces and threatens them, so this is a minimum of one and a half drinks/head smacks.
	The government is completely ineffective when faced with a corporation doing something illegal.
	A humongous lumbering monster manages to sneak up on someone. Two drinks/head smacks if it's the army and they're supposedly using radar.	No radar yet, but Godzilla sneaks up on people twice. First on Odo Island, popping up over the hill, and then again in the city while the police are executing Security Command Code 129 (which, by the way, is the not-very-specific but very aspirational order to repel Godzilla and take care of all the fires).
	A scientist suddenly figures everything out with little-to-no information and explains it all to everyone.	Sure. Dr. Yamane gives an outlandish (but accurate!) explanation of where Godzilla came from and everyone agrees with it immediately. The fact that Yamane mentions radiation only gets everyone to nod their heads even harder.
	A monster suddenly grows in size just because.	Technically no, although the size difference between the Japanese and US versions sort-of counts.
	People expose themselves to major amounts of radiation with no concern.	Totally. Dr. Yamane paddles around in the water inside Godzilla's radioactive footprint and then picks up the trilobite with his bare hands. When reminded of the radiation, he nods confusedly and then gives it to his daughter to hold in a cardboard box. Later, the trilobite is passed around the assembly room and then a vial of sand is waved around while Yamane expounds on how radioactive it is.
	Everyone suddenly knows a monster's name. Two drinks/head smacks if everyone else nods appreciatively and repeats it.	I'm saying the conditions for this one aren't met. The explanation for Godzilla's name in this movie is as plausible as we could expect.
	Army missiles can't seem to hit a 150+ foot monster and instead explode harmlessly around it.	Oh yeah, big time. Not a single missile hits Godzilla. He doesn't dodge or anything, and he's facing away from them as they shoot at him. And despite that, he does manage to adorably knock a few out of the sky while doing a little punching dance. But the main point is that the planes launch a ton of missiles at Godzilla and not a single one manages to hit.
	A woman falls down for no reason.	Yep, Emiko collapses during Godzilla's head popping scene on Odo Island. She's the only one who falls, and of course she's no where near the monster. So, in what comes across to me as an example of western films feeding the stereotype of the emasculated Asian man, the US version has the Japanese army official be the one who falls down in this head popping scene, with Burr first shielding the fallen army official with his body, and then assisting him up. But that's prolly too serious a topic to bring up in a Godzilla post.
	Bad dinosaur science. You have to give a little leeway for the time period, but pretending a children's picture book is a scientific journal is always worth two drinks/smacks.	Well, this one's debatable. Those dinosaurs in Dr. Yamane's presentation sure don't look right, but that may very well be what people thought they did look like in 1954. The whole theory of Godzilla's origin is also pretty bonkers, though.

Monsters Appearing: Godzilla, Kiryu