Godzilla, My Godzilla

Godzilla and I have a lot in common. We were born the same year and are often misunderstood by the people around us. Additionally, we are both "big boned" (hefty or plus-sized as they say now), are prone to falls, and sometimes get hit in the head. Admittedly, though, for me it's not usually by skyscrapers, giant lobsters or boulders kicked by a rampaging dog-god, though Skylar did throw one of his chew toys at me a couple of weeks ago...yeah, it left a bruise. I also have not been dropped from the upper reaches of the stratosphere by flying alien three-headed dragon kaiju, but you just never know when things like that are going to happen. It's a crazy world these days.

Of course, there are differences too. Godzilla came from beneath the sea. I came from Michigan's Upper Peninsula, but still pretty close to the waters of the Great Lakes. He also has the form of a reptile, whereas I only have the emotions of one. His teeth are a lot better than mine, though I have had five wisdom teeth removed over the years...I still have three. So, while Godzilla has sturdy reptile teeth, I have the dodgy teeth of a geriatric shark, but only the wisdom teeth keep coming back. I suppose people who know me are surprised that I ever had wisdom teeth. Godzilla also has searing atomic breath that can (if the recent Godzilla vs Kong film from legendary is to be believed) burn a hole all the way through to the Hollow Earth. My breath, on the other hand...well, maybe we shouldn't go there. 

Godzilla is famous worldwide, is the subject of the longest running film franchise, has become a cultural icon (and not just in Japan), and is considered a hero by many. For all that though, his origin is very dark, rooted in destruction and death. One day, Tomoyuki Tanaka, a film producer with Toho Company, Ltd, was flying back to Japan. Gazing out the window at the waters of the Pacific, he let his mind wander. What was in the impenetrable dark depths below? The year before, he had seen The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which was based on Ray Bradbury's story "The Fog Horn." Could something like that actually survive  the ages? Maybe not, but what if there was something in the deeps that might be awakened? What would it take to rouse an avenging monster?

The Lucky Dragon 5

Also in Tanaka's mind was the fate of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon 5), a fishing vessel with a crew of 23, which was very much in the news. In March of that year, the U.S. detonated the first hydrogen bomb at the Bikini Atoll, an operation designated the Castle Bravo Thermonuclear Test. While fishing for tuna, the ship strayed near the danger zone and was contaminated by radioactive fallout. One man, the chief radioman, died later, but the other crew members recovered, at least for a while. The idea of a hidden underwater beast and the threat of the Atomic Age swirled in Tanaka's daydreams, and Godzilla emerged.

I suppose I first saw Godzilla: King of the Monsters on television, perhaps on Moona Lisa's weekly (on Saturdays) Science Fiction Theatre. Who was Moona Lisa, you ask?

Here's Moona Lisa with 
Forrest J. Akerman
AKA Mr SciFi & the Akermonster

Moona Lisa, movie hostess, was actually Lisa Clark, a newscaster for KOGO (Channel 10) in San Diego, but I did not know that then. Seated amidst a pile of rocks in a dark lunar landscape, surrounded by roiling wisps of "moon smoke," she might have actually been on the Moon. Hey, no one had been there yet, so who was to say? And she did open every show with a sultry and seductive "Hello, Earthlings." If you see it on tv, it has to be true, right? With long, straight black banged hair, stiletto heels and a black catsuit showing more cleavage than any youngster then could imagine (it was a simple, more innocent and less complicated time), she was the "heartthrob of every ten-year-old boy in the city." And I loved her also because she also showed Godzilla.

I always admired the way Godzilla faced the travails of life, never giving an inch, never compromising about anything, never bowing to any foe or surrendering to the inevitable. While I was graduating high school and preparing for the onslaught of a cold, uncaring world, Godzilla was battling Gigan, a bio-engineered killing machine with curved swords for arms and a massive circular saw protruding from his chest. Godzilla did well.

When I turned 21 and could legally drink (actually I could have had a beer or whatever when I was 19 as long as I stayed on an Army post, but I didn't), Godzilla celebrated by kicking Mechagodzilla's butt for the second time. The old trope of fighting fire with fire just did not work out well for the robot's creators, but I could have told them that.

Turning 30 was bad for both of us. Some people tell me "age is just a number," but I also know there are a lot of delusional people in the world these days. I guess I take after my mother. I remember when she turned thirty. The house was filled with weeping and wailing, and I did my best to stay quiet and out of sight. Just a number, huh? I won't say that I spent the day crying over the end of the world, but I will admit I took the day off from work. And how did Godzilla celebrate his 30th birthday? He fell into an erupting volcano. Lucky guy. Obviously, I didn't die when I turned 30. I recall what my son said to me at the time: "Dad, you had to know that sooner or later you'd be 'over the hill.' You just didn't know there was a cliff on the other side." Harsh, but he did have a point. 

Thirty years on, I turned 60 and so did Godzilla. I wanted to celebrate by having a birthday cake with candles, but we could not get a fire permit. The G-Man, however, celebrated in grand style, by staging a massive comeback in the Legendary film Godzilla, the first film by American filmmakers (we do not talk about the Matthew Broderick film) using the venerated Japanese kaiju. I had heard there might be a film in the offing as Godzilla's Diamond Jubilee approached, but I did not have much hope. Still, I wanted to commemorate it myself, so I wrote the following poem, which appeared in my collection Midnight for Schrödinger's Cat & Other Poems:

Godzilla at Sixty

The other kaiju on Monster Island look up, sigh, and shake their heads,

And King Ghidorah gives it a triple nay;

There he goes again, off to Tokyo and points west

Like some trippy day-tripping tourist,

Dressed in the loudest Hawaiian shirt anyone’s ever seen,

Picked up during that disastrous jaunt to the Big Apple,

With a new digital camera strapped ‘round his neck,

Raybans on those once laser-bright eyes,

But with back-spines not much more than a glimmer anymore;

Poor old fellow, taking off like he’s some young lizard just out of the egg,

And on Bingo Night of all times!

Rodan says he’s going senile,

And while the Old Pterodactyl is pretty flighty himself, it’s painfully obvious to all:

He wasn’t quite the same after the Oxygen Destroyer; and

He’s been hit on the head by a lot of skyscrapers; and

How many times can you put new flesh on old bones?

He ought to take it easy like all the other Old Monsters,

Play a nice game of Go with Baragon, even though he toots his own horn,

Or Canasta with Gabara, Varan and Ebirah since they’re always in need of a fourth,

Or, if nothing else, curl up with a good book like Manda,

Though when you're a giant snake what else can you do?

But he does as he wants, as he always has, and always does,

Saying, “Ain’t I the King of the Monsters?” and

“It’s good to be the King,”

Which of course makes Junior do a face-palm on the throne

And say, “Hey, Dad, what am I—chopped sushi?”

But even he knows there’s no talking sense to the Old Boy,

Telling him that the tsunamis from his walker are making a mess,

That Cthulhu has called twice to complain about the noise,

That he won’t get nearly the screen time he thinks he will,

That he’s almost out of his radioactive arthritis medicine,

And he’s probably going to be slapped with a lawsuit by the EPA;

But, you know what, he’s smiling,

And it’s been too long since anyone has seen those choppers in a grin;

So maybe none of the other stuff really matters,

Not the pain or the slowness or the inevitable retaliation by puny Humanity;

Maybe what’s important is this—that the World knows,

That the World gets reminded by a ROAR like none other,

That he’s still the King of the Monsters,

And even at Sixty it’s good to be the King.

Of all the Godzilla films, including the latest ones from America, my favorite is Godzilla vs Destroya. It shows Godzilla in dire straits, yet striving forward no matter what, ignoring his impending doom to fight the menace loosed by the rediscovery of the Oxygen Destroyer technology from the very first film. We see that Dr Serizawa's sacrifice of his life to hide the secret was the right thing to do, but that it was for naught because of human stupidity. In this film, we see Godzilla making the same sacrifice to save us from ourselves, but we also see a great rebirth. The composer for this film stated that after he finished composing the music for the finale, he felt as if had died with Godzilla. I know what he means.

I have seen myself in Godzilla and sometimes see him in me, at least a little bit. I think perhaps there is something of Godzilla in all of us, something of us in him. There is at times a yearning to roar at the world. And who roars better than Godzilla?

And now something on a lighter note, my latest model building project:

Better the second time around

 

Beagle Horror edition

It was the Sixties. As other young fellows my age were discovering girls, drugs and the realities of a changing age (and all the problems that went along with them), I was discovering the works of fantasy writer HP Lovecraft, thanks to a casual remark made by my Homeroom teacher, Mr Robert Vigil. It was a providential introduction, as it turned out, giving focus to my own writing, which had edged unknowingly into Lovecraft territory. A few days later, I found myself at Pickwick's Bookstore in the College Grove Shopping Center (before there were "Malls") and came across the Beagle Horror editions of Lovecraft's work, including "The Dunwich Horror."

One of the complaints I often hear about Lovecraft's stories concerns his writing style. Admittedly, there is nothing modern about it, not now, not even in his own time. Lovecraft wrote mostly in the early 20th Century (he passed away in 1937) so he was contemporaneous with Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Hammett. However, anyone unfamiliar with the milieu of Lovecraft's writing might think him a contemporary of Poe. Fortunately, I had been a Poe fan for many years, both of the stories and poems, and, later, the many films derived from his work. So, the form of the stories, the intricate narrative style and the breath-by-breath unfolding of the story as it worked to a shattering climax, was not a problem. What was a problem, however, was HPL's cosmic vision, his revelation of a universe inhabited by beings that cared nothing for humans, a cold cosmos we could never fathom, and the idea that humanity itself might be an accident or jape. It was heady stuff for a teenager.

movie poster, 1970

Anyway, a few years passed and I learned that a film was going to be made from "The Dunwich Horror." I was quite excited. I've been a film fan all my life starting when I was in Kindergarten and walked to the Bay Theater in National City with the girls who lived across the street...it was a different world back then. One the sayings the Kidette and I have is, "Everything I need to know about anything, I learned from the movies or TV." Another saying I have, usually stated when contemplating doing something I probably shouldn't be doing is "No, I saw that film, and it did not end well." Often, the Kidette and I will converse solely in movie quotes, which drives many people nuts.

Anyway, the film was coming out in 1970, produced by American International. I had high hopes for it because I had seen the film The Haunted Palace, starring Vincent Price and directed by Roger Corman. Though the title was taken from a Poe poem and the film is considered one of his eight Poe-related films, the plot is actually derived from Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and is very faithful to the novella, which was written in 1927, though not published until 1941 in Weird Tales. Since the film had been distributed by American International, which was producing the new film, I hoped "The Dunwich Horror" would exhibit the same fidelity to its source material. Alas, I was disappointed.

The film, directed by Daniel Haller (Pit & the Pendulum; Die, Monster, Die!) from a script by Curtis Hanson (Never Cry Wolf, LA Confidential) was deliberately recast into the turbulent Seventies. In doing so, writer and director defused much of the atmosphere of the story. Worse, they introduced a love interest (Sandra Dee as Nancy Wagner) for the loathsome and repulsive Wilbur Whateley (played by the non-loathsome and non-repulsive Dean Stockwell). It hit many of the tropes of the counterculture, including several extended psychedelic sequences, but did not include the brooding atmosphere of a decrepit town and the creeping horror that Lovecraft introduced though subtle hints and reveals about Wilbur Whateley's twin brother, who favored the father much more than did Wilbur.

The only characters in the film that struck the right note for me was Dr Henry Armitage (Ed Begley in his last role) and, to a certain extent, Sam Jaffee, who played "Old Whateley," though in the story he was "Wizard Whateley" and was a much more manic, imposing and demonic character. An interesting point to note in the 2009 remake of The Dunwich Horror (The Darkest Evil [or Witches] for the SyFy Channel), Dean Stockwell was back, this time as Dr Armitage, his adversary from the first film. I did not like the Haller/Hanson adaptation, and put it out of my mind for 52 years.

However, a few weeks ago, when I was home alone and looking for something to stream (we cut the cable years ago), I saw The Dunwich Horror offered on one of the streaming services. Things change with time, not the film, of course, but ourselves, our perceptions of things, and the times in which we live, which we have to adapt to, whether we like it or not. I found the film, for the most part, not as bad as I recalled. It was, of course, the same film, but I was no longer the dark-eyed fanboy who expected a faithful adaptation of the work.

At the time, I gave the film an F. Now, I give it a B-, a nice effort to modernize something that really did not need to be modernized. I had  greater appreciation of the psychedelic sequences as an attempt to show a reality that could not be described, and the climax in which we saw the best FX that could be had in the pre-CGI Seventies. Many of the Seventies tropes (e.g., "What do you think of sex?") have not aged well, so have gone from hip and edgy to just dull and dated. Overall, though, I think the film is fairly respectful to the source material, if not very faithful. Over the years, I have learned you have to put up with such things, and even expect them, from Hollywood.

An illustration from Weird Tales, 1929

The Arkham House edition