2 or 3 Things I Know About Godzilla
The box cover for Frankenstein Conquers the World promised a colossal mutant offspring of Mary Shelley’s creature, clutching an ocean liner in one fist and a smashed jet fighter in the other. “He rolled the Seven Wonders of the World Into One!,” screamed the graphics.
Pretty cool, but hold on.
The ad art for Godzilla vs. the Thing pictured the radioactive Lizard King locked in mortal combat with a titanic mass of spiked tentacles, coiled around the film’s title. Under the words “the Thing” was a mysterious giant question mark and a topper of a tagline: “SEE the BIRTH of the world’s most terrifying monster!”
Which infernal vision of death and mass destruction, both created at Tokyo’s Toho Studios, would be more fun? It was a tough decision for a monster-crazed boy who’d been twelve for less than twenty-four hours.
My parents, prone to their own epic battles, stood beside me at the Kmart camera counter, behind which towered a spectacular display of Super 8 films. The old folks were in a good mood and promised their birthday boy a new movie digest for his growing collection.
“Digest,” you ask?
In the age before home video, and long before DVDs, streaming, and on-demand were an inkling, movies screened at the local theater, then disappeared. The only ways to see them again were in rerelease, on television, at film festivals, or via studio-sanctioned home movie editions.
Initially offered for private use in 16 mm
(think schoolroom movie projectors), studio films were later made available in
the smaller 8 mm and Super 8 formats. While some collectors purchased full
sound features, more economical consumers—especially kids—opted for condensed
versions of their favorite films, called digests or cut-downs. Available in
reels of 200 feet (about twelve minutes) and fifty feet (three minutes),
digests were sold in department stores and camera shops, or through mail order
from home movie distributors like Ken Films Inc. and Castle Films.
“I was among the millions of American kids who grew up watching the first generation of Godzilla movies on TV in the final decades of the twentieth century.”
Though VHS had debuted by the dawn of my puberty, it was still pretty expensive, and only a few kids I knew had families who owned a VCR. Besides, I loved Super 8 and found both inspiration and empowerment in the curation of my own film library, which I kept boxed in the bedroom closet, between my GAF Model 1666Z Duel 8 movie projector and back issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.
Anyway, I went with Godzilla vs. the Thing.
By the time we got home, my parents’ mood had soured and their fighting began. I retreated to my room, a private planet insulated with movie posters and populated by books, homemade comics, a terrarium crawling with anoles, and clay puppets for the stop-motion films I’d begun making.
Quick with excitement, I closed the curtains, set up my projector, unboxed the new reel, and threaded the black-and-white film (color digests were more expensive). Sounds from the outer world melted away in the 1666Z’s sweet churn. I had no screen and simply projected my little movies against a white bedroom wall. I liked how the swirling Sherwin-Williams paint patterns intermingled with the grainy images of villainous Godzilla clashing with the Thing, which turned out to be Mothra—a colorful hybrid of moth and peacock butterfly with an 820-foot wingspan. This benevolent nature goddess was inspirited by a dream that possessed Eiji Tsuburaya, the genius behind the film’s visual effects and one of the creators of the Godzilla series.
“The ‘Thing’ moniker had nothing to do with cashing in
on Howard Hawks’s The Thing from Another World (1951),” says August
Ragone, author of Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters. “Following the
film’s Japanese release as Mothra vs. Godzilla, it acquired U.S.
distribution through American International Pictures (AIP). However, Columbia
Pictures handled the stateside release of the original Mothra (1961)
just two years prior in 1962. So, AIP simply nixed the use of ‘Mothra’ in their
title to avoid potential legal problems. They then built a marketing mystery
with a giant egg and that question mark—‘What THING Is Inside The Egg?’
”
August and I were among
the millions of American kids who grew up watching the first generation
of Godzilla movies on TV in the final decades of the twentieth century. My
introductory G-film was also the first one made. Sort of.
Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), which once targeted child-friendly dayparts of U.S. television on a regular basis, was the extensively re-edited and Americanized version of Toho’s Gojira (1954), whose titular monster evoked the nuclear horrors of both World War II and the then current U.S. H-bomb tests in the Marshall Islands.
“After all the years and hours of Toho monsters I’ve consumed, it’s that Godzilla vs. the Thing digest that still haunts me”
