Over the past four decades he has laid waste to most of Japan’s major landmarks. So far, New York has been the only U.S. city to feel his wrath, but this weekend it could be curtains for the Sears Tower.
Godzilla is approaching Chicago.
Actually, it will be hundreds of Godzilla geeks, rather than the monster himself, who will come from across the country to stomp through the Radisson Hotel in Arlington Heights Friday through Sunday at the first convention in North America honoring the world’s favorite radioactive mutant dinosaur. With Godzilla collectibles, lectures on Godzilla lore, and even a Godzilla role-playing game on the agenda, “G-Con 95” is a Godzilla lover’s dream come true. But more important, many fans say it’s a vindication for the behemoth, who, despite a career spanning 41 years and 22 movies, still gets short shrift from the science-fiction community.
In his native Japan, Godzilla is a cultural and commercial icon of Disney-like proportions. His likeness appears on thousands of goods ranging from toys to compact discs to computer screen savers. In recent years, Godzilla-mania has seen a resurgence in this country, too: His movies still play regularly on TV stations everywhere; hundreds of thousands of “Godzilla” videocassettes have been sold; TriStar Pictures’ big-budget American “Godzilla” may get on track later this year after several delays; Trendmasters, a Kansas City company that will be a featured guest at “G-Con,” has sold more than 3 million Godzilla toys since 1994; and you can get the latest Godzilla info on the Internet.
Perhaps the biggest indication that Godzilla’s star is rising in the West is G-Fan magazine, the bimonthly publication of the Godzilla Society of North America, a Manitoba-based fan club whose goal is “international understanding through Godzilla.”
Though Godzilla’s creator, Toho Co. of Japan, has not officially endorsed the magazine, G-Fan has become the Godzillaphile’s bible. Each issue has the latest monster dope, straight from Tokyo, submitted by well-connected fans. It also helps fans across the world exchange information.
And those fans aren’t just children.
A poll conducted by G-Fan found its readers fall into all age categories and have occupations ranging from lawyer to elevator repairman to auto mechanic, said J.D. Lees, G-Fan’s publisher and editor.
“We found out that Godzilla fans are hard to define. We even have at least two Ph.D.’s,” Lees said. “Most people who responded were fans in their 20s or 30s who had this interest in Godzilla as a kid, and it stuck with them over the years. It may have faded away for a while, but now they have formed the core of a very dedicated following. Then you’ve got the other kind of fans, the kids who get a kick out of it much like the Power Rangers.”
Lees concedes there is one constant in Godzilla-land: Fewer than 5 percent of the fans are women, the poll showed.
In Japan, it’s a serious subject
Like other sci-fi cliques, Godzilla fandom has its hard-core devotees who take their city-smashing giant reptile for more than a mere hobby. These fans learn to speak and read Japanese, collect expensive imported toys and laser discs, and even fly to Tokyo to catch the latest Godzilla movies.
Chicago resident Ed Godziszewski’s Godzilla travels have taken him to Japan 10 times. He has met and interviewed several of Godzilla’s creators, and he publishes an authoritative fanzine called Japanese Giants.
“I had always loved dinosaurs,” he said, “and I when I was 9, I saw a preview for `King Kong vs. Godzilla’ and I thought, `Wow, this is the greatest dinosaur I’ve ever seen.’ I was first in line when it opened the next week at the Portage Theater.”
Godzilla (whose name in Japanese is Gojira, a combination of the words for “gorilla” and “whale”) first leveled Tokyo in his 1954 self-titled debut. Directed by Inoshiro Honda, the movie was released just nine years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and at its center was a dead-serious statement against nuclear weapons. Godzilla himself, an eons-old dinosaur awakened from suspended animation by American H-bomb tests, embodied nature’s rage against man for playing with the atom. As he cut his destructive swath through Tokyo, he acted out Japan’s greatest fear: It could happen again.
American audiences flocked to see the film when it was released here in 1956 as “Godzilla, King of the Monsters.” But by then its anti-nuclear edge had been gelded by producers who made the film more digestible with new inserts of Raymond Burr playing a reporter who gets caught in Godzilla’s path during a layover in Tokyo. Today, Japanese film critics consider the original one of the top 20 or 30 domestic films of all time, but its American cousin is regarded strictly as a camp classic.
Godzilla was created by Eiji Tsuburaya, a special-effects wizard who honed his craft by intricately reconstructing military battles in miniature for the Toho studios’ elaborate war films of the 1930s and ’40s. For Japan’s first giant-monster epic, Tsuburaya erected whole sections of Tokyo in 1/25th scale and built a rubber suit that was worn by an actor who stomped through the metropolis. The technique was cheaper and looked smoother than the stop-motion trickery devised by Willis O’Brien for “King Kong” and other films and–combined with the movie’s eerie night scenes–produced a convincing effect.
Several Godzilla sequels are memorable, including “Godzilla vs. the Thing” and “Monster Zero,” which features spaceships and aliens wearing Latex suits. But none quite measures up to the original, and after Tsuburaya died in 1969, the series went downhill fast. Unfortunately for Godzilla, many people know him best from this period, when he was cast as a punch-drunk, Earth-saving lizard in films like “Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster,” in which he battles a fearsome heap of sludge, and “Godzilla vs. Megalon,” in which he and a robot named Jet Jaguar fight a tag-team match against a giant cockroach and a cyborg-bird with a rotating saw in its stomach.
Godzilla’s reputation as a bad-movie icon has been solidified with TV parodies on cable’s “Mystery Science Theater 3000” and NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” But fans note that his early films were among Japan’s blockbusters of the day and starred many of Toho’s best actors, such as Takashi Shimura and Yoshio Tsuchiya, who had top roles in director Akira Kurosawa’s movies. Director Honda, who helmed Godzilla’s greatest adventures, was a friend and colleague of Kurosawa’s.
Surviving the cheap shots
“What most people don’t understand is that many of the actors, composers and directors behind the Godzilla films were the same people working with the great masters of Japanese cinema,” said Stuart Galbraith IV, a former film critic for the Ann Arbor News in Michigan who, in 1993, published “Japanese Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films.”
Galbraith admitted that many Japanese sci-fi films are turkeys, but he says the genre’s merits outweigh its faults. Like many fans, he blames American distributors for sullying Godzilla’s reputation.
“The Japanese fantasy films we’re seeing in the U.S. are very different from what played in Japanese theaters. The Godzilla movies are always badly dubbed, scenes are added, scenes are removed,” Galbraith said. “And the often-gorgeous wide-screen cinematography is lost on TV.”
Toho has released a new Godzilla movie in Japan each December since 1991, but none has been released in the U.S. The last Godzilla flick to play in theaters here was “Godzilla 1985,” a half-baked remake of the original. Toho recently announced that it had “run out of ideas” and that “Godzilla vs. Destroyer,” to be released in December, will be Godzilla’s swan song. According to press releases, Godzilla has absorbed so much radioactivity that in the film’s climax he explodes, never to be heard from again.
“Yeah, sure, Godzilla’s dead,” said Henry G. Saperstein, Godzilla’s “agent” in North America and distributor of most of the Godzilla movies. “Did you ever hear of anyone killing off the golden goose? Godzilla has already died three times in the series, only to be resurrected because of the great need for him. All I can tell you is that Godzilla is not just a series of films, he’s an industry.”
Indeed, Godzilla is still a big star in Japan. “Godzilla vs. Mothra” was the top-grossing domestic film in 1993, although it still did only half the business of “Jurassic Park.” The monster is mean and nasty again, and his new movies feature updated special effects–although the beast will always be a man in a suit. Doing it any other way, his creators say, would rob Godzilla of his “Japaneseness.”
Godzilla faces toughest foe
Yet it’s that “Japaneseness” that Godzilla risks losing, now that an American studio is working on giving him a makeover.
TriStar Pictures, which in 1992 bought the rights to produce an American-made Godzilla movie, reports that the project is expected to get back on track soon, following its derailment last year after the projected budget shot up to $130 million and its original director, Jan DeBont (“Speed”), walked away.
TriStar originally planned to toss the rubber suit and create an all-digital Godzilla with computer-generated images a la the “Jurassic Park” dinos, but producer Cary Woods said the studio is now “looking at everything anew.”
He said that the studio expects to hire a new director for the film by the end of September and that although no release date is set, the ultimate goal is to launch a new series. “It’s probably as recognizable a character as exists in the world, so I imagine that if we get it right, there will be Godzilla mania.”
Still, the question remains: If it’s not Japanese, is it really Godzilla?
Many of the fans who will converge on Chicago this weekend don’t think so, especially when they hear rumors that TriStar plans to eschew Godzilla’s nuclear heritage and make him instead the protector of a long-extinct alien civilization, or make him look more dinosaur-like and maybe even replace his legendary, high-pitched roar.
A discussion and presentation on TriStar’s project is on the G-Con agenda.
A GODZILLA FILMOGRAPHY
(With dates for original Japanese theatrical release/U.S. theatrical or TV release)
– “Godzilla, King of the Monsters” (1954/’56)
– “Gigantis, the Fire Monster,” a k a “Godzilla Raids Again” (1955/’59)
– “King Kong vs. Godzilla” (1962/’63)
– “Godzilla vs. the Thing,” a k a “Godzilla vs. Mothra” (1964/’64)
– “Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster” (1964/’65)
-“Monster Zero,” a k a “Godzilla vs. Monster Zero” (1966/’70)
– “Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster” (1966/’68)
– ” Son of Godzilla” (1967/’69)
– ` `Destroy All Monsters!” (1968/’69)
– “Godzilla’s Revenge” (1969/’71)
– “Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster” (1971/’72)
– “Godzilla on Monster Island,” a k a “Godzilla vs. Gigan” (1 972/’77)
– “Godzilla vs. Megalon” (1973/’76)
– “Godzilla vs. the Cosmic Monster,” a k a “Godzilla vs. Mechag odzilla” (1974/’77)
– “Terror of Mechagodzilla” (1975/’78)
– ” Godzilla 1985″ (1984/’85)
– ` `Godzilla vs. Biollante” (1989/’92)
– “Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah” (1991)
– “Godzilla vs. Mothra” (1992)
– “Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla” (1993)
– “Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla” (1994)
– “Godzilla vs. Destroyer” (due out December 1995)
