Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters

INTRODUCTION

GODZILLA MON AMOUR

WHEN I WAS NINE, I WANTED TO BE GODZILLA. I wanted to drag my big reptilian feet through a crowded city. I wanted to swat a helicopter with a scaly hand and crumple a commuter train with my powerful jaws. I wanted to ignite a chemical plant with my radioactive breath.

Lacking the wherewithal to transform myself into a ten-story mutant lizard, I set my heart on the next best thing: becoming Godzilla for Halloween. After a campaign of strategic whining and pouting, my mother was reluctantly enlisted. Never much for sewing, she had acceded to previous years’ requests to make me a vampire, pirate, and devil. But Godzilla was pushing the envelope of her costume-making skills. A black cape or a little be-horned jumpsuit, no problem. Dorsal fins, claws, and a prehistoric head were more of a challenge.

The construction of the costume was an epic undertaking, a virtual Manhattan Project of chartreuse rayon, foam rubber, and mild oaths. A pair of white gloves, veterans of many long-ago church socials, were procured from my grandmother and unceremoniously dyed green. Family friends with better handicraft abilities—and more modern sewing machines—were recruited and put to work. I can’t remember quite how my feet were disguised: I may have been the only Godzilla in history to have worn Hush Puppies. The pièce de résistance, however, was my snout. To mimic Godzilla’s characteristic saurian nose, a tin tea cup (courtesy of Woolworth’s on North Main Street) hung from between my eyes underneath the green fabric.

On the big night, I proudly suited up as my hero. Seeing out of the costume wasn’t easy, and breathing was a downright chore, but no one ever said being the king of the monsters was a cakewalk. I remember vamping for my father’s camera on the front lawn, a plastic model of a fighter plane—complete with Japanese rising sun insignia on the wings—grasped in my gloved claws. The drive to Davy Crockett Elementary School and the annual Halloween Fun Fair was filled with adventure and contortion, as Detroit had not thought to design sedans that could accommodate fins and a sizable tail.

It was at school that my bubble burst. My third-grade classmates and their parents either did not know who Godzilla was or did not recognize what a 4’2 light-green sack with a very odd nose was meant to represent. My mother’s artisanal labors received scarcely a compliment. James Box, my erstwhile best friend, had merely donned a rubber werewolf mask and taped some fake fur to the backs of his hands: when he roared, the girls shrieked and ran; when I roared, the kids laughed and the adults looked bemused. The ultimate insult to my pride occurred in the haunted house, somewhere between the bowls of human eyes" (grapes adrift in reddish Jell-O) and the Mummy rearing up from his cardboard casket. Someone—and to this day I think I know just who—had the temerity to step on Godzilla’s tail, ripping the stitching and revealing that giant movie monsters prefer briefs to boxers. I stormed outside to my waiting parents and demanded to be taken home immediately, my tail—quite literally—between my legs. I announced gloomily that there would be no trick-or-treating this year, to my father’s secret relief but my eternal consternation.

Godzilla in Hush Puppies. Bryan, Texas, 1972.

After that ill-fated October 31st in 1972, I never dressed as Godzilla again. The costume hung in my closet for several years, but was quietly disposed of in a later spring cleaning. I learned to be more circumspect in what I wished for, more careful in exploiting the goodwill of my parents, and more private in my fantasies. But I did not stop loving Godzilla.

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Indeed, for as long as I can remember, Godzilla has been a part of my life. I can’t honestly recall when I saw my first Godzilla movie, but I expect I was on my stomach in front of our family’s big Zenith on a Saturday afternoon, tuned to the Creature Double Feature from one of the UHF stations in Houston. It seems like just yesterday that I would run expectantly into the neighborhood Piggly Wiggly, looking for the latest issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, hoping that a new article on Godzilla would appear among the stories on Bela Lugosi and the ads for X-ray glasses and Sea Monkeys. And I can vividly remember the thrill of building Aurora’s plastic model kit of Godzilla, standing amid the rubble of Tokyo, swinging his glow-in-the-dark hands as if frozen in the middle of a square dance, polymer teeth flashing and eyes glinting. Maybe it was just the plastic cement fumes working on the soft gray matter of a preteen, but that little model—$1.79 plus tax—sent chills up and down my spine.

When I was eleven years old or so, I went to Japan for a summer with my parents. One day we ventured out to Chiba, an unremarkable bedroom community east of Tokyo, to visit one of my father’s high school buddies, now the owner of a gleaming local department store. While he and my father reminisced, one of the store’s flunkies—sporting rudimentary English and a blue polyester suit—was assigned to take me down to the toy floor and let me pick out whatever item I wanted as a gift. This was, of course, any young consumer’s acquisitive wet dream, and images of radio-controlled sports cars and gargantuan model kits—the battleship Yamato in 1:32 scale, a Panzer tank as big as a twin bed—danced through my imagination. Arriving in the promised land of the sixth floor, I headed straight for the back counter, behind which—well away from the grubby hands of the average schoolboy—stood the most elaborate, most sought-after, and most obscenely expensive toys. But before I made it back to what I thought I wanted, I saw something else, just out of the corner of my eye. There in a display cabinet was Godzilla, twelve gorgeous inches of richly painted tin with row-upon-row of plastic fins and a cord sprouting from an unmentionable spot at the base of its tail. I was smitten and immediately selected it as my free bounty. A remote-control Godzilla that walked (after a fashion), opened and closed its jaws, and howled in a grating, metallic kind of way: this was better than a puppy, a swimming pool, or a week’s excuse from P.E. class. My minder from the department store was dumbstruck. Are you sure you would like this? he asked, politely leaving off the words 600-yen piece of crap. I nodded and grinned, and we were done.

When I walked back into the owner’s office, Godzilla tucked tightly under my arm, the relief on my parents’ faces was obvious. No apologies, no scenes, no discipline were necessary. In latching onto one of the cheapest toys in the whole emporium, I had, it seems, shown great politeness, dignity beyond my years, and restraint betokening a good and proper upbringing. My parents never understood—indeed probably never wanted to understand—that manners had nothing to do with my behavior that day: the tin, growling Godzilla was my deepest desire. The very next morning, my mother took me shopping in the Ginza and, as a reward for my maturity, bought me a stack of expensive plastic models two feet tall. Never, I think, in the history of childhood has such blatant self-interest been rewarded so generously. Thank you, Godzilla.

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My regard for Godzilla made the transition to adulthood far more successfully than any of my other childhood obsessions. The GI Joes were donated to Goodwill one summer when I was in high school; the baseball cards were sacrificed when I left for college and my bedroom was redeveloped into a study; my Star Trek collection (with all those autographed stills of James Doohan) simply disappeared in shame. As I grew older and strayed farther from the relatively Godzilla-poor confines of Bryan, Texas, I discovered that Godzilla was not just my personal passion. I was not alone. Lots of people, I came to realize, were closeted fans of Japanese science fiction, some far more lunatic in their devotion than even I was. Almost everyone in America—and certainly the vast majority of those in the long baby boom generation—seemed to know who Godzilla was and have impressions (positive or, more often, negative) of the Godzilla films. Godzilla was not just the perverse delight of one Japanese-American kid from central Texas; Godzilla was—and is—a global pop culture icon.

In 1985, a New York Times/CBS News poll asked fifteen hundred Americans to name a famous Japanese person. The top three responses were Hirohito, Bruce Lee, and Godzilla. The American public earned full credit for identifying Japan’s emperor, but fell wide of the mark in tapping a Hong Kong martial arts star and a fictional movie monster as prominent Japanese. At the time, media pundits had a field day, excoriating American parochialism and brandishing the survey results as a stinging indictment of America’s deficient knowledge of Japan. In an era when U.S. industry was in a funk and every warm-blooded American’s dream was a Sony in the rec room and two Toyotas in the garage, such apparent ignorance of Japan led to much public handwringing and lamentation. How could America compete in the world when its knowledge of an economic archrival dead-ended at a giant radioactive lizard?

But the survey results also contained an important—and usually overlooked—lesson: Japanese popular culture exports have had a profound influence in America (and indeed, throughout the world) in the decades since World War II. From Godzilla in the 1950s through Astro Boy in the 1960s, Speed Racer in the 1970s, and the more recent phenomena of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Hello Kitty, Nintendo, and Pokemon, creations of the Japanese imagination have been high profile and big business in the United States. Godzilla, as the pioneering and most prominent character in the globalization of Japanese pop culture, may well have shaped American perceptions of Japan as significantly as quality control circles, just-in-time manufacturing or the once-chilling images of Honda after Honda rolling onto the docks at Long Beach. And though the Japanese industrial machine has stalled in recent years, the Japanese assault on foreign markets continues, though now instead of transistor radios, VCRs, and Walkmen, Super Mario, Yu-Gi-Oh! and the other heirs of Godzilla are in the vanguard of Japan’s global reach.

Even today, a full fifty years after the Tokyo premiere of the original film Gojira in November 1954, Godzilla remains a pervasive and enduring symbol of Japan around the world. The movies, which now number twenty-seven (not counting the 1998 Hollywood abomination or the new release scheduled for December 2004), have also become cherished icons of camp and cheese, the butt of countless jokes and parodies, cultural touchstones of cheap special effects, bad dubbing and terrible acting. Regarding the Godzilla series as a defining example of the so-bad-it’s-good genre of B-moviemaking, fare suitable only for a laugh and a kiddie audience, many Americans have forgotten that the early films were solemn, adult treatments of the costs of war, the dangers of nuclear proliferation, and the folly of humankind’s reckless disregard for the natural environment. Many who dismiss Godzilla with a snigger overlook the fact that Godzilla is the longest-running film series in world movie history. And that the Godzilla franchise of DVDs, toys, T-shirts, and collectibles grosses (by some estimates) hundreds of millions of dollars every year. And that Godzilla is ubiquitous in American popular culture today, appearing in Rose Parade floats, Dr. Pepper ads, rap lyrics, episodes of The Simpsons, and countless film and television tributes. And, last but not least, the limitless application of the suffix zilla—a universally recognized tag for the big, the outrageous, and the ornery—shows just how deeply Godzilla has penetrated into the American collective unconscious.

This book is an attempt to understand why we Americans enjoy, respond to, and, in some cases, love a halfcentury-old Japanese movie monster. How have so many people, across all the demographic dividing lines of age, sex and race, come to relate to Godzilla? Even the most diehard aficionados will admit that Godzilla is not among the greatest achievements of world cinema or one of the proudest creations of Japan’s ancient culture. It is difficult, even for a committed fan, to read too much deep social significance into a stuntman in a bulky rubber suit, lumbering through toy cities or wrestling credulity-stretching adversaries, as crowds of conservatively dressed Japanese extras run screaming through the streets. Good fun, yes. Citizen Kane or The Tale of Genji, no. Yet in so many ways, Godzilla remains a compelling and dynamic presence in American culture, an icon adored and derided, cheered and jeered, yet never—unlike so much of the elite cultural canon of our society—forgotten, ignored, or benignly neglected. Teasing out the charm of Godzilla is no easy matter, for in our embrace of the beast are entangled strands of nostalgia, the phantoms of nuclear war, the mysteries of childhood, the hard-nosed business of moviemaking, the unresolved tensions of world history, Freudian desires, fantasies of violence, and fundamental questions of humanity, spirituality, and the eternal struggle of good versus evil. Understanding the appeal of Godzilla, when all is said and done, means understanding ourselves.

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In writing this book—and putting my real name on the title page—I am outing myself as a Godzilla fan. These days, being an active fan of anything in America other than an NFL franchise, a favored NASCAR driver, or Oprah is regarded with a certain suspicion by those who fancy themselves in the cultural mainstream. Being a science fiction fan, in particular, marks one as a potential misfit and guaranteed loser. No matter how normal you might look on the surface, friends, relatives and co-workers will inevitably imagine you as an unmarried, overweight forty-something, wearing a T-shirt one size too small and sweat pants one size too large, harboring elaborate fantasies of matching wits with Dr. Who, playing tridimensional chess with Mr. Spock, or laying Princess Leia. Nanu-nanu, beam me up, Will