Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 369: Godzilla, Pt. 1

Episode Date: April 12, 2021

Jeremy Parish summons Diamond Feit, Matt Alt,and Bill Mudron to help destroy (or maybe just commemorate) destroy all monsters with a look back at the cultural origins of the king of kaiju, Godzilla—a beast (and topic) too big for a single episode! Art by John Pading and edits by Greg Leahy.  Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To hear more great shows or to learn how you could become part of our consortium of independently owned podcasts, check out Greenlit Podcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, Mozilla Mo Problems. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I forgot to look up the episode number, but it doesn't matter because you're listening, so you can just look at your podcast playing device and say, oh, this is episode number X. And here to give you that useful advice is me, Jeremy Parrish, the man who knows how podcasts work, because I've been doing them. for a long time. And also with me here on this episode of the podcast, people who have also done a lot of other podcasts, so I don't need to tell them anything that's up.

Yes, it's the Chaos Boys again. Chaos Boys, please introduce yourselves, starting with the one in Portland. Oh, that's me. That's Bill Mudron. I'm just an illustrator, Internet Creighton, just general, just nerd about town. I have a podcast called Tarry of the Party just catch it at Tarry Oh, that's for the end of the podcast

But yeah, this is me I'm just a dork A movie nerd And a game nerd We're off to a great start All right And the other chaos boy in Tokyo Hi, I'm Matt Alt

The author of Pure Invention How Japan's pop culture Conquered the World And I live where Godzilla lives That's my claim to fame Beneath the ocean In a pineapple beneath the sea Exactly

I try, stay away from coastlines. You know, you never know when he's going to be coming out. You never know who's going to be stomping. Japan is nothing but coastline, though. Oh, shit. Oh, well. All right. And here to hopefully leaven the madness to rein in the chaos boys.

We have making their chaos team debut, I guess. Good morning. My name is Diamond Fight, and I live in Osaka, but originally I'm from Venus. Wow. Wow. So you are one of the bad guys. Well, just sometimes. The evil kaiju. Okay. No, so Matt, you know, we have Matt and Diamond on here both because they are much closer to the Godzilla situation.

Matt is where Godzilla originally attacked. And then, of course, Godzilla turned his attention, his baleful gaze south for Godzilla rays again to go after Osaka, which is close to Diamond. I was about to ask if we have a list of how many times Godzilla attacked Osaka, yeah. I don't think it's been that mini-based. Well, you know, actually, actually Osaka's famous because in War of the World, the Tom Cruise vehicle by Stephen Spielberg, that's the city that first managed to defeat the tripods. It was the citizens of Osaka. So, good job. Did they use Mojayaki or something?

They were just like flinging fried foods. Gross out the aliens. Exactly. What is this stuff? It's like Okonomiyaki, but it's gummy, what? I'm glad that the dumbest girl from Osamonga Dio managed to help and pitch it and defeat the Martians. That's right. All I know about Asaka is that one character.

We are bonkers for destroying the alien. All right. Anyway, so yes, this episode, this episode is about Godzilla. And it's going to be somewhat about the video games, but really about the films and specifically the Shoa era films. And that's partially because I've only seen the Shoa era. set of Godzilla, so those are the films that I know. But also because I think, you know, there are so many Godzilla films and there are really two specific eras, maybe three of Godzilla. And the Shoa era is its own kind of flavor. So what does Shoa mean? Well, that is an era of Japanese history,

which because of the way Japan sort of defines its eras, it's actually like three distinct phases of history, like, you know, in terms of cultural division, you have like the pre-war, you have World War II, you have the post-war recovery. It's kind of wild. Matt or Diamond, would one of you like to explain how Japanese eras are broken up? And what is the significance of the Shoa era? If you two want to tag team this, that'd be great. I don't know. Up to you. Well, I mean, they're named after the emperor. The emperor, they're coincidental with the emperor's reign.

So every time a new emperor comes in, a new era starts, and the Shoa era started in 1926 with Emperor Hirohito, who reigned over Japan during a very, very, very tumultuous time in history from that whole pre-war run up into World War II where a lot of bad stuff was happening to World War II where a lot of more bad stuff was happening. And then the post-war economic miracle where things started getting better. And that lasted until 89 when he passed away.

Yep. I remember Hirohito's passing when I was a wittat. It was in the news, but I didn't really get the significance of it. Osamu Tezica died that same year of Astroboy fame, and that was arguably as much of a kind of psychological shock to Japanese, I think. And that's why I think. Political and cultural. Yeah. That's why the Shoa era kind of looms so large in most Japanese people's minds. And when they say it, they're mainly talking about the post-war Shoa era. I don't think. Very many people are nostalgic for that 1926 to 1945 Showa era. There are much more in the 50s, you know, big economic boom and like cultural and, you know, baby boom, all sorts of booms going on era. So when, you know, the emperor and Tezuka died in the same year, it was really like, well, that, you know, that puts a point on it, doesn't it? And really represented this. Yep, that's a big break.

And then Hayse began. Hayse. began. And that just ended, what, two years ago? Yes, with the abdication of the emperor. That was a unique thing. That hasn't happened in a while, you know. Certainly not within any of our living memory before this. No, no, no.

So what's the current era then? The current era is Rewa. That sounds nice. Sounds a good nice, seltzer. All the eras mean some sort of peace. It's like global peace, happy peace, you know, galactic peace. I don't know. It's all like, it's always something about peace.

even during eras where there is there is not a lot of peace happening. I mean, showa was very tumultuous, as Matt said. so young. Uh, he had the longest reign in Japanese history as far as anyone can tell. Like, he was, you know, 26 to 89. So that, the Shoa era is, and partly it's so well remembered, because it's just, it's just so long. I mean, it's, it's almost, yeah, it's, it's almost three generations, you know, if you were, just happens to be coincidentally the most insane, like 70 year epoch in Japanese history at the same time. Yeah. Yes. Right. I mean, Hayse was relatively short at only 30 years, but that was, you know, that was also, that's an entire generation as well. And

Rewa, I mean, we'll see what happens. I mean, the emperor, I believe, is in his 60s right now. So, I mean, I don't think it's going to be another 30-year reign. But of course, the future of the imperial family is a entire podcast into itself because the emperor's only child is a daughter. So, of course, she's not going to take the throne because of reasons. She turns 20 this year. They're the only other boy in the family who's not in their 60s is like 11. So what happens that that whole system is in, is anyone's guess. But we're here to talk about lizards. Yes, this is a very imperial podcast.

Well, no, because when we talk about, you know, when we talk about the Shoa era, it's good to have the context. And I think, you know, Shoa means different things for different people. I was, I recently rewatched Lupon the Third Castle of Caliostra. with a more recent translation, the one that I think DiscoTech did a few years ago. And at some point, Lupin makes a remark about how Zinigata, the inspector, who's always pursuing him, is such a child of the show era.

And what I took that to mean was that he was thinking more like the hardworking salary man, industrious, like no imagination, you know, just like put your head down and, you know, work for the common good type of person. And maybe I misunderstood with that. Well, that's interesting, because he made that comment in 78, right? That's right. Yeah. So, like, with that context, yeah, I feel like he was basically saying, like, more

early Shoa, like, you know, he's, you know, because Cinnigat is probably, you know, in his 40s in that series. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's kind of how he projects himself. So he would have been born, you know, in that episode, you know, that particular movie, that would put him, you know, having been born in the late 30s, you know, sort of moving into war or maybe if he's younger like immediately post war

so yeah I think that means something different than someone who would say that now and would think like well you know maybe you're sort of airheaded and you know you think everything's going to be easy forever and you just spend money like crazy because you think you know the yen is worth everything

and it's going to be like that forever so yeah I just it's interesting because show it does mean so much but in terms of Godzilla yes showa means specifically the movies produced between 1954 and 1974, is that correct? No, no, no, Godzilla,

or 84? So Godzilla, yes, there were Godzilla's, there was Godzilla 85, and I think maybe one more that squeaked in before the end of Shoah. But those are not classified by Godzilla fans and historians and whatever or by criterion as showa-era films.

Interesting. Because basically, Godzilla 85 starts a new sort of continuity and epic, like a new approach to Godzilla. So it's now known as the Haysay films, yeah. Yeah, Godzilla 89 is a direct sequel to Godzilla 85. So rather than having this like lone straggler, everyone just kind of says, well, that was like, you know, the Haysay Zero, like the preview. A bridge. Yes, basically.

And there was, like, there were a lot of kind of stylistic and conceptual change. changes that happened between 75 and 85. Like, when the series ended in 75, it had pretty much kind of fizzled out of popularity. You know, the movies were making like a couple million bucks at the theaters on a budget of a million dollars. So not really that

profitable anymore. And yeah, like the whole approach that they took to the concept of Godzilla changed. The creative teams changed. I think a big, a huge loss that happened at the very end of the 60s, early 70s, was the loss of

of A. G. Suburaia, the special effects coordinator, the guy who created basically the look, the technology, and the miniatures of Godzilla. Like, he passed. And so the past the last few show-era films were not handled by him. And I think, you know, you started to see the sort of phasing out of that sort of original creative group. And, you know, some of the actors and directors or, you know, like creative types. I remember reading that they were on the studio contract system with the studio Toho, and their contracts ended, so they just stopped being, like the studio let their contracts lapse. So they stopped being available for Godzilla. So there was really kind of just like this cold stop in the 70s, and then 10 years of a lull.

And then, you know, when it came back, even though the show I hadn't ended, it was still a new generation of Godzilla movies. So when we talk about the show era films, it's 54 to 75, which is, you know, that's 21 years worth of movies. That's quite a bit. Yeah. Well, I think also the Haysay films have more like inter-series continuity, even though I don't think Godzilla in 1985 or I guess as has known Japan, the return of Godzilla, even though I don't think story-wise that connects very strongly to the films that followed, still in terms of technology and yeah, everything that went into the making of that film, it's much more bonded to everything that came immediately. after than anything that came before.

So, yeah. Well, 85 felt like that. Like, if somehow in my head, it's kind of connected to the reboot of Star Trek, the motion picture, like, let's take this. Well, it's kind of the same thing. Yeah, yeah. Let's take this tired old franchise and give it a fresh coat of paint. And it definitely, 85 looked very different from the previous movies.

And it had things like the, you know, that spaceship, the super X in it. I mean, it was cool. I remember seeing it. And, yeah, it was great. It was more of a return. to the original film and was this really i mean that's the first time in the godzilla continuity where they wiped away all the old continuity and said this is the first direct sequel to the original film so it's much more dour even the they did the same thing with return uh godzilla 1985 as they

did with uh the original godzilla where they brought back raymond burr yeah but but they still managed to keep more of like kind of the dour dour dourge tone of the original film it was yeah godzilla 1985 was the first godzilla movie i ever saw as a kid Oh, wow. And so that's my idea of what Godzilla could be. And even though, you know, I love Godzilla. I'm one of those people. I will, I love Godzilla's man-in-suit stupid bullshit as much as everyone else.

But still, for me, as a Godzilla fan, Godzilla, for me, still as much as, like, the sad, Godzilla's sad as shit. And people forget about that. Well, the first one definitely was, it's very doubt. Yeah, that movie is a dirge. And to be fair, it's not, it's, I mean, It's not really America's fault for thinking Godzilla is nothing but stupid stuff because the original Japanese version of Godzilla was never really made widely available in America until pretty much like the advent of DVD. So, Billy, you mentioned that you've seen, that was kind of your introduction to Godzilla.

Diamond, what about you? What is your experience with, with the Godzilla films and the games? Hey, why not? Well, I actually am probably the neophyte of the group because I grew up... That's me. I grew up in the 80s, and I was... was very aware of Godzilla, and the character just was somehow bigger than the movies and the content that he actually existed in. So I just, I knew what Godzilla was and I knew

what it looked like, and I knew what those movies were sort of about, but I absolutely did not watch them. And I played some of the games, and I knew, oh, that looks like Godzilla. This is based on Godzilla, but I still didn't actually watch the movies until really, like very recently, after having seen the American movies, which, you know, everyone seems to agree are, you know, either bad or just not quite right. During the pandemic, I watched Shin Godzilla, which felt like a very appropriate movie to watch because it's all about the Japanese government not doing anything correctly. And then, based on that and based on the recent edition of what seems to be the entire series

to Netflix in Japan, I just started watching them from the start. I was like, well, I, because, yeah, as a young person who was interested in film, I tried to watch, you know, I figure, oh, let's try and watch this movie. And, but in America, the only one I could get was this Raymond Burr thing. And I remember I sat down and tried to watch it. And it's, to me, it was just so weird. I'm like, I don't understand. Why do we keep cutting back to this guy who is completely unrelated to this story? I don't like this.

And so I was like, well, I'm not going to watch this until I watched the real thing. So it wasn't until, like, literally this year where I was like, okay, here I am. I'm sitting in my. house in Japan, I can push a button and watch this Japanese movie. And I did it. And I loved it. I really loved that first movie. And I just started watching almost as many as I could sit through. And so I've got a pretty good base at this point. But this is very recent for me. So I don't have a lot of, I don't have any nostalgia here, but it's just kind of like, it's a thing I grew up with without knowing what it was. And now here it is in 2021. And I'm dunking my head in the bucket. I love it.

That's basically where I come from, actually. You know, obviously Godzilla as a concept is basically universal at this point. It's ingrained into popular culture, but, you know, I'd only ever seen random little snippets of the Raymond Burr adaptations, if you want to call them that, on, you know, afternoon television. So, you know, broken up by commercials, pan and scan cropped to hell, just diced up very little of the, actual original creative vision left. And I played the NES game, the first NES game. And that was kind of it until I randomly picked up that Criterion Collection show era set on Blu-ray because it was on sale a couple of years ago and said,

you know, I've been absorbing Japanese media, classic Japanese media, getting down to kind of the basics and the roots of everything. So I might as well pick this up and save it for a rainy day. And that rainy day was earlier this year. and I finally sat down and watched all of the show-era Godzilla films, and it was very educational. Some of them are very bad, but there is a lot of heart in some of them,

a lot of genuine creativity, a lot of, like, real purpose, which I had never really appreciated before. And Godzilla is more than just a cool, iconic image. It is, you know, it is a story. It has a point at its best. And that was really illuminating for me. And it got me thinking like, hey, we should definitely talk about this topic on Retronauts because, you know, it's significant.

It's so influential in so many ways. Godzilla is everywhere in pop culture. Matt, how about you? Well, I was, I think I'm a little older than you guys. I was born in 73, which is the year of Godzilla versus Megalong. Barely older than me. And, you know, kind of like Diamond, kind of like you guys. I grew up with Godzilla kind of in the background.

It was just kind of part of the fabric of life for all of this growing up. They were, they were, the movies were shown on TV, sometimes public access, sometimes Saturday morning kind of stuff, you know, when I was growing up and I'd catch him here and there. Mainly the later Showa period ones. I didn't start getting back into the early Shoa ones until I went to college and kind of fell in with a bunch of film buffs. And they had access somehow through, you know, tape trading or whatever to more. kind of harder to find stuff. And that's when I saw the first Godzilla from 1954, which is, as

we've all said, a completely different film from the remix that came out in America a couple years later. And it's really, it hit me that it was more than a monster movie. I mean, it's really about, it's literally about the lived experience of hibakshah, people who are exposed to radiation and radioactive testing. And I later found out was made. in the wake of a really horrific accident when America was testing hydrogen bombs in the South Pacific and irradiated a lot of people who happened to be in the area because they didn't realize how big the yield would be on the weapon. And so there's kind of crossovers with real life and stuff in there. And, you know, over the years, Godzilla got a little bit sillier, as we all know, but I still, I don't know,

it's just, I have a real soft spot for the guy. Even, you know, I love the pathos of those earlier ones. and I love the whackingness of the later ones. It's just, I almost feel like each individual movie is like a documentary that's been filmed like a window into this guy's life over decades. You know, where is Godzilla now? And I don't know. It took a decade off, you know? Sometimes you just got to chill out at the bottom of the world.

Exactly. Exactly. So it's, you know, it's just like you said, it's an institution. It's hard to imagine Japan without a Godzilla. And it's hard to imagine a world without it. I mean, Godzilla's like on the cover of the New Yorker. It's hard to imagine Shinjuku without Godzilla. Yes, exactly.

You know, certainly many a skyscraper here has been built with Godzilla in mind. But yeah, so that was my, you know, he's always been there, really. I mean, I can't remember a time when the Godzilla wasn't on my mind in some way, shape, or form. So, you know, what can you really say other than that? So, going back to 1954 and covering the span of the Shoa era of Godzilla,

there's a very consistent sort of creative team across these movies. It's not always exactly the same, but there is a core team that is pretty consistent. So the sort of leads here, you have Ishiro Honda, the director and co-writer

of a lot of the movies. He directed Godzilla, King Kong versus Godzilla, Mothra versus Godzilla, Guitara, the terror from beyond, or whatever it's called, Astro Monster, Destroy All Monsters, All Monsters Attack, and the Terror of Mecca Godzilla. That's eight movies. That's a lot of movies to write and direct.

He is the originator. He's the main man who kind of helmed this from the start. It's wild to think, because you look at the trajectory of the Godzilla movies, and especially comparing the first film to everything that followed, you'd think that obviously what happened was, The first Godzilla was some kind of, like, you know, thing from the hearts from somebody trying to work through their issues with, you know, about radiation and the fire bombings of Tokyo and stuff like that. And then you'd think, oh, well, then the movie just was really successful, so it got handed off to other people who turned the Godzilla into a, like, just a bonkers film franchise. And no, you do research, you can find out it's pretty much the same people who made the first movie.

We're also responsible. 20 years later, they were still. Yeah, Godzilla. Haunching the head off robot Godzilla. That's the studio system for you, though, you know? Like, these guys were work-a-day directors. I mean, yeah. So, I mean, a lot of this wasn't up to them, too.

It is the studio system. The studio system just says you keep on working on these until you retire or quit. And so, yeah, it's, it's, yeah, you can't. I think, too much as. You can't, you really can't, I think, separate the Japanese film industry from, like, you know, that kind of environment where it was in were like, they, they really turn. to movies out in Japan. They turned a lot of films out, not just Godzilla films, like all sorts of films. And, you know, it was, I've heard all sorts of reasons for this, like, you know, like, not

so many individuals had TVs at the time or that, you know, it's so hot, especially in the summer that people would, like, go into movie theaters to cool off, you know, so they kind of perform that role in society, too. And movies were just a bigger deal in people's lives. So those studios really cranked them out. And I think, you know, even though we think of somebody's Honda as like an outtour. It's a very different approach to filmmaking, I think, than like, you know, a Christopher Nolan, you know, or something who's like, I'm going to pick. Oh, no, it's, it's more Ed Wood. It's more, it's more, just crank him out. Yeah. And if you look at the other, another person who is very key to Godzilla's history and development is Tomoyuki

Tanaka, the producer of the Godzilla franchise. And I believe he produced all of them. He was a producer at Toho, but it's not like Godzilla was just his baby. It's not like, you know, it was just this thing that he really passionately believed. And if you look at his CV, like the number of movies he produced while he was at Toho. If you look on IMDB or whatever, it's like 15 or 20 movies a year. It's just some crazy number. His list, like this, I don't think this guy was super hands-on. I think he was basically just like, yeah, yeah, get it done, go get it done, you know?

It's just impossible for one person to be super hands-on with that many movies. So he would do things like, the most interesting anecdote I've read about him is that he really hated Godzilla versus Hedra. So, um, he

hated it. Like, it came back and he was like, you, you the director, Bono, you are never directing another Godzilla movie again. that was that was his involvement like at some point you know if he was if he was more hands on he would have noticed like hey this is this is going in a weird direction i don't know about this but they were making like two or three godzilla movies per year at that point and basically like well what's the guy in the rubber suit doing today yeah who cares just string him up and have them

fly across and light some sparks when he hits the tanks man how could anybody not like godzilla versus hetera it's one of my favorites it is it is absolutely my favorite Godzilla movie. Yeah, you'd think if it showed up for one day on set, he would have noticed, like, why are all these skeletons laying around the set? And, like, why are people, why are people go-go dancing around the corpses? What's this go-go-dancing going on here? Yeah, are you, like, yeah, are you filming like three different movies at the same time?

You've got, like, an Austin Powers thing over here. You've got sludge monster stuff over there, yeah. Well, the thing I love most about that movie is the meta-ness of, like, kids playing with Godzilla toys in the very beginning of the film. Like, they're the actual bullmark, soft vinyl, Godzilla toys, all of which could probably like if you own them, you could fund a movie with them now, what they're worth on the

secondary collector's market. But what a great film. It's so multimedia. You know, you have those animated interludes and stuff like that? Yes, the animated portions are amazing. There's a famous story that those were initially supposed to be animated by a really, really

amazing guy named Tsuge Yoshiharu, who's a manga cat, who's most famous for Nejishki screw style, which is this really strange, like he would do these subversive surrealist geekiga manga that were

kind of really part of the counterculture of the time and he would have been so awesome to do it, but apparently just, you know, for whatever reason it didn't work out. Well, they kind of carried that idea of having manga in the I guess the next movie or the one after that with Megalon. Guygan, Gaigan. Godzilla's it.

Guy again. The protagonist is actually a manga artist, I believe. Right. But then they kind of bring over that that animation style in the form of manga. And it feels like they were almost trying to kind of keep the sort of like creative editing and multimedia element that you saw in Hedra, but in a more distinctly Japanese way, less like kind of chasing after cool, trippy teen films of the West and more like, well, you know, this is this is the Japanese tradition. This is, you know, how we do things here. We have manga. We have, you know, word balloons over the character.

and that sort of thing. Yes. It's interesting how sometimes these movies kind of, you know, they do sort of break out of the norm. And whatever you want to say about all monsters attack, that definitely, it is definitely a movie that breaks out of the norms. Is that the one where Minya has this little voice like this? Yes, indeed. Although it's a girl's voice. It's like a kind of a young woman's voice in Japanese.

Well, that's one thing I wanted to point it out, too, is that there's also. So, obviously, the Godzilla series got goofy on its own merits without any Americans having to interfere. But then you've also got the weird layer of the Americanization, the dubbing and everything on top of that. And I always wonder if Baby Godzilla is as stupid in the original version as he was in the, exactly what Matt was just doing. Hey, Godzilla's going to beat me if I don't go. Like, just like, what the hell was like, oh, it's, it's so fantastic. It's so good. Yeah, yeah, got dropped on his head a couple times, I guess.

He was, uh, have neither of you watched these movies in Japanese? I have, you know, so I remember once mentioning that the name of that movie in Japanese is Oru Kajju Dai Shingiki, and I mentioned it to some like Godzilla fans and they looked like so horrid. It was like if I had just like, like a huge fart in the room, like they, like the look description of the movie. The look on their faces. And so I've actually never gone out of my way to rent it in Japanese because I really like

that, I'm chicken. I don't like you, Godzilla. You know, that whole, it's like, it's weird.

It's like looney tunes. Well, that's what I was going to ask you in Diamond if you guys had managed to watch these movies in the original Japanese language. I've been watched them on Netflix in Japanese and they actually don't include with subtitles here. So I'm watching them entirely in Japanese and just gambodowing my way through. That sounds awesome.

So how would you describe Manila? It's very much like a cartoon voice. You know, it's a lady doing a kid's voice, which I think probably, based on the way the Japanese business works, I'm sure there are more women doing voices of a young little boys and there are women playing women. Well, sure, like, yeah, exactly. Like Duriamon, for instance, is I think a woman doing the voice. Oh, absolutely. All those little boys in the Gamera movies. Yes.

God, the Gamera movies still play. That's a whole other rabbit hole to go down. You know, like, when you have an even lower budget than Godzilla, the... Yeah, well, it supposedly was the Gamera Movies. It was a success of the Gamera Movies that caused, because I guess, what, Destroy All Monsters was supposed to be, like, by, was it 68 or 69, when Destroy All Monsters was being made... The Godzilla movies were already kind of running out of enough steam that they were like, I guess it's time to wrap it up. It's been 15 years. So they make Destroy All Monsters.

Right. Turns out that's actually a huge hit. When you take all those monsters and glue them together, it's a huge hit, makes a ton of money. So then Toho's like, no, you got to keep on making more guns. Godzilla movies. And I guess, oh god, who's the writer who wrote like most of those middle-aged Godzilla movies? Shinichi Sekizawa, it's in the notes. Yeah, he just goes, I have no idea what to do. Why don't you guys just grab a bunch of stock footage from the other movies and gloomed together

because, like, and they were inspired by the fact that Gamma movies had just started coming out. And those movies were outperforming Godzilla at the box office, and Gamera had started by just appealing to kids. And so after Destroyer All Monsters, they were like, Well, we don't know what to do. Gamera seems to be doing okay. They're beating us by appealing to kids. I guess it's time to go all in and just let's give Godzilla a kid who's going to be Godzilla's going to beat my head off if I don't make him some suit. It's interesting to learn that though because when I saw All Monsters Attack, it did give me like Gamera vibes because I have seen a lot of gamma movies on Mystery Science Theater. I was about to say that. And, yeah, like, you know, those are all about the little kid, and, you know, the kid's always wearing shorts that are way too short. They just look uncomfortable. Tiny little pants.

Yeah. And, like, this just, yeah, that movie really has the feel of a gamma movie minus the actual gamma. And that's how you end up with, was it Megalon with Jet Jaguar? Because that's them going like, whoa, that Ultraman thing seems to be doing pretty well. So let's put knockoff Jack Nicholson Ultraman and R. So speaking of Ultraman,

another person, I've already mentioned him before, but I just can't emphasize enough how absolutely essential he was to this process, to this franchise, and that is A.G. Suburaia, who would spin out into his own production companies, Suburaya Productions, that is the company that created Ultraman and a bunch of other Kaiju and Tokusatsu type stuff. Like, if it's, if it involves costumes and things growing to prodigious sizes in Japan, he, you know, from the 60s, he probably had a hand in it. He was, he was everywhere. He launched the kaiju boom in Japan, which started in 19, well, when he went into television,

when Suburai went into television with a show called Ultra Q, that like kind of democratized Kaiju had brought them out of movie theaters in the living rooms. And then the sequel to Ultra Q, which is Ultraman, just like kicked off this huge fad to the point where like 1967 in Japan was completely defined by Kaiju. Like it's like the year of the kaiju there. There's like every company is rushing out with a huge. its own kaiju-related entertainment, all of these different TV shows, all these different movies. They've figured out how to merchandise them by making kaiju toys.

You made Bouska? Busk, exactly. When like the emperor's son, who became emperor later on, is spotted by the paparazzi buying kaiju merchandise. Oh, you know, it's like a society-wide phenomenon. Like, kaiju-related words start to enter the lexicon. Like, instead of saying helicopter mom, they'd call the mama-gones. Like Baragon or something. And in fact, Mama Gone, I think that word actually comes up in Godzilla versus Gaigan, I think. Yep, that's the kaiju that the main character creates based on his girlfriend.

Yes. Or maybe it's his agent. Maybe it's his agent. What a wonderfully open-minded gentleman he was. So respectful of the fairer gender. Well, you know, that casual sexism is, you can't really talk about the Godzilla movie. I mean, they're products of their era. But, like, the casual sexism in them is just, even as a kid, I remember there's a scene in, oh, God, what is it?

There's like, the movie opens with, like, a UFO watching club on the roof of a building in Tokyo. And a female reporter comes up, and they're like, you're a woman, you couldn't possibly like UFOs. And I was like, wait a second. Why? Is that a stereotype in Japan? Like, yeah. Women and aliens, the mix lady, get out of here. It's like, no, there's no way a woman could like a UFO, you know, and that kind of stuff is, yeah, I don't know.

Some of these movies, when you see women in kind of lead roles, you have to think, oh, this was actually kind of like a little edgy at the time, like, oh, hey, there's a woman, you know, who is a professional and she's kind of like the charismatic lead here. Of course, eventually, like, there's a male character who steps in as is the hero or whatever, and she swoons for him. But, like, they, you know, you can definitely see this kind of, I wouldn't say the sexual revolution the way it was in the U.S. and the U.K., but definitely some changes in Moray is happening. You know, if you compare Godzilla 54 to the stuff that was happening in the 70s, there's definitely, definitely a big change. But anyway, back to Subiraya, because I just feel like you, like I said, you can't have Godzilla without Superaya's work. And, you know, he did a lot of stuff with television and everything. thing, but the pioneering work he did with what he

called suitmation was this really amazing, like there is great artistry to his work because he oversaw the creation of these tiny scale miniature sets and, you know, they were

all scaled to like vehicles and buildings and, you know, natural areas, dams, you know, just all kinds of stuff. Scaled to a person wearing a rubber Godzilla costume or wearing a rubber rodon costume or whatever. Like the idea being that someone wearing this costume would just go smashing through these meticulously created miniatures, just destroy, absolutely annihilate all this careful scale miniature work.

And it would be filmed with a very high-speed camera and then played back at a slightly slower speed. to create the impression that, you know, these are not just dudes in suits, stomping around tiny little miniature sets, that these were, you know, behemmous. They were titans, 50 meters tall, who were smashing up high-rise buildings and destroying the same mobile gas station over and over again, just nuking the hell out of that number one LP gas tank. It just explodes every time. Every time there's Godzilla comes out of the ocean. It doesn't matter where he is. there's always the LP gas tank. It's got to explode.

They did a lot of reusing stock footage in these movies, but... If I might, I had the rare, very rare privilege of actually being able to be on a Kaiju movie set a couple of years back. Nice. It was the set of Death Kappa, which is a kind of parody Kaiju movie filmed by Tomol. Is that the sequel to Maniac Kappa? It's actually, it was on the sushi typhoon label, and he, like, they recycled the, they recycled the, the kappa suit from, like, a yoki movie that Harguchi had made earlier. I think it was called Kibakichi or something like that. And, like, the budget was so low that he had to, like, reuse this suit that had just been kind of like a side, you know, just some kappa walking around in another film and he made it this giant monster. But he invited, like, I actually, I know him. I'm friends with him. He's been. kind of in my circle of friends for a while here in Japan.

And I was at the time field-producing segments for National Geographic, and I convinced them and him to, like, we should film a segment about kaiju movies, how they're made. And so, you know, I went with my crew to film his crew, and he's like, yeah, come on this day, we're going to destroy a building. And I figured what, you know, what's this going to take, like an hour or something like that? You know, get the guy in the suit, and then, you know, he throws himself at the building, and it's done. No. No. And just to cut to the chase, I didn't leave for like 13 hours. It was one shot. It was a kaiju smashing his fist through the corner of a building. And this is one of the last films, I think, in Japan that did this. Haraguchi was kind of bringing all these guys out of retirement because they knew they'd never get a chance to do this again. And first of all, the building is there. The kaiju is there. And they filmed it up until the point the fist is kind of up against the building. And then they stopped. And they kind of marked where he was.

And then they went in with hammers and smashed the building. And then they rebuilt it from all of those little bits and pieces and plastered it up so you couldn't see the cracks. And that's why when the kaiju eventually hit it hours and hours later, because you're waiting for paint to dry, you're waiting for this to dry, you're working on this, you're working on that. When he hits it, it doesn't just like fall over like a milk carton that you punched. It like literally like chunks come flying out of it, you know, like the properly appropriately sized. And I wasn't aware that's how it worked. They look so natural. Like, people are always like, oh, these films are so cheesy.

They're so, they're so cheap. Like, they're not. Like, when you actually look at the way the buildings are destroyed, a huge amount of effort goes into it. I mean, it's unbelievable. Yeah, and considering how vast those models are, because it's a whole fit, they fill a whole soundstage with that stuff. And they were making one of those practically almost one, one of those at least every 18 months. And they didn't have a lot of, like, because a lot of that stuff was like, you couldn't do a lot of second takes on that stuff. No.

So they had to do their best with the first take they could get. And so even in the 80s, people were already making fun of that stuff. I mean, that's that. I remember Godzilla in 1985, I was like, yeah, now introducing more realistic special effects with a cyborg robot animatronic Godzilla. But it was still, all things consider, and well, it's funny, especially now living in the CGI-filled movie world, like, there's even more of a charm. Even more than we were growing up, there's even more of a charm to that stuff, where it is just like little matchbox car. cars. And everything looks like the Gizmonic Institute that

that Godzilla's stop at his way through. But you know, if you actually look at the vehicles and the, you know, the military tanks and things like that, there's a lot of effects and practical elements to these things like headlights and, you know... It is dismissive to say it's all matchbox cars

too, because exactly. Some of the later, yeah, some of the later stuff that Subaru Ria worked on was just, I mean, you know, some of it was cheap, sure. But some of these, like, they really put a lot of work and detail into creating these kind of practical effects, and they got

really good at doing multi-exposure shots with green screens or whatever, or rear projection or whatever, to create the impression that... Yeah, I'm reading about Subaru Raya right now, and he wasn't just a rubber suit model guy, but he was inventing optical printers and stuff, too. So

he was an actual visual effects guy as much as he was just like, let's put a guy in a rubber suit guy. And so, yeah, so they, like, yeah, you forget about that. Like, they do a lot of great effects in those Godzilla movies where they'll try to do crazy stuff with scale. Well, they'll have people kind of like on a green screen set against some models or against some guys in a suit just to sell the idea that that guy in a suit is actually supposed to be 100 feet tall. I mean, they do some great stuff. And maybe their ambition outstripped what they could actually do.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You were on it. You were on it. Don't say that because Japan was actually the, they were the cutting edge and special effects around the planet in the late 60s and early 70s. we only like everybody who says godzilla movies look cheesy is generally making that statement with the benefit of hindsight being beyond the kind of event horizon where star wars transformed how americans started making special effects movies yeah like until that happened well that's just a lot of stuff that's not even specific to godzilla but that's just pretty much movies anything made even up until the mid 80s when they were slotted like roger corman and those guys were still pretty much using 1960s and 70s technology yeah Yeah. I just want to point out... Sorry, I had to defend Japan.

No, I hear you. I just want to point out, it's funny for me as a viewer, how the journey I've taken, because you go back to the... You go back to 1985, and Peewee's Big Adventure, you know? Right. He goes through the movie studio, and one of the sets he runs through is a kaiju movie, and he just rides his bike through there and ruins the shot and everything. But the whole point is, even before he enters the shot, you're looking at it, like, oh, look at this.

Look how silly it is. Look at these toy tanks on a wire. And to me as a kid, even though I didn't know the movies very well, I saw that. I was like, okay, I get it. This is kind of a silly thing. And oh, he rode his bike through it. Oh, look at that. But for me in 2021, watching these movies and watching, yes, you see these scenes.

And you can tell it every, every ounce of their effort to me comes through on the screen as a viewer. I'm completely captivated by it. my kids have sort of been walking through the living room a little bit, watching me, watch these movies. They have not been sort of fully immersed into them as I have, but they've been on board. They've peeped in from time to time. And they look, they see it.

They're not laughing. They don't look at this and think it's ridiculous, even though they've grown up with, you know, CGI that can melt their faces. It's like they're, they're just as a maze. And so for me, these movies, decades later, the craftsmanship holds up, the work holds up, these effects, because they are real things,

people broke, it absolutely holds up. Well, they were really good at creating their own, even though everything is obviously so obviously fake, they put so much work and effort into it. They create their own reality, though. Sure. And maybe even if it's not,

Not always consistent with it's own reality, but still just the Herculean effort put into that stuff, unless you're a total, just cynical bastard, you can't help but kind of be swept up a little bit. Even if half the movie you're watching is this dumb human melodrama, which you really don't care about. But when does come to the monsters, the willing suspension of disbelief you want to disbelieve, you're rooting for the movie to trick you into being emotionally invested as whether or not Godzilla can fight this like dog thing with spikes on its back. There's a great Roger Ebert review of Godzilla 85 where he pans that movie but not because like oh Godzilla how cheesy but he makes an interesting statement

that movies are they require a certain suspension of disbelief and you can't always compare apples to oranges in films because different movies want to be different things when you look at the classic Godzilla's they are movies that are kind of cheesy and kind of flimsy and don't have necessarily a ton of artistic merit,

but they're earnest. Like, they believe in themselves. Whereas his complaint about Godzilla 85 was that it was cheesy and it knew it was cheesy and that it leaned into that. I don't know if I agree that I haven't seen Godzilla 85, so I can't say, but I did think that was interesting because... I don't think the Japanese saw it that way. Well, it could also be because if he's talking about Godzilla 85,

he maybe also be talking about some kind of like self-awareness that the American dub brought. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you can never underestimate how orientalist and casually racist, you know, America was back then and even now. Oh, or even now. Boy, let me tell you about the news. Yeah, definitely now, too. I was reading a review.

It was like the review of a Godzilla movie from, I can't remember. But they were talking about how, oh, this movie isn't as, I think there was a review of, like, one of the more recent Godzilla movies. And they were talking about how the movie didn't have the goofy charm, the goofy charm that the original black and white guys. had. And it's like, well, you wouldn't be saying that if you'd actually see in the original... Yeah, that's not a goofy film at all. This might be someone who grew up with a, yeah, with the Raymond Burr version. But still, it's a little bit like, oh, if you really know Godzilla, it wasn't that goofy at the start. But, I mean, it was goofy because it was a hand puppet.

But still, yeah, it wasn't meant to be a hand puppet, yeah. There's nothing too cool for school about that original 1954 Japanese version of guys. That's a tough film to watch in a lot of ways. I mean, it really is the scenes of the, because they linger on the scenes of destruction much more than they do on the kaiju and that is something I think that a lot of kaiju movies don't do and the ones I think that do it the most effectively were the Haysay Gamera films

which I was blown away when I first encountered those in the 1990s because Gamera had been made for little kids and then these 90s remakes come back and they're just brutally dark a lot of them like you know they focus on these like people whose lives have been shattered because they've lost family members and kaiju attacks and things like that. And it's true.

I mean, Kaiju are basically a manifestation of, in the Japanese mind, of these natural disasters that befall the country. And sometimes man-made ones and sometimes both. Like the Fukushima, you know, dual tsunami and then the reactor is blowing up. Like, it's not a joke and it's not belittling to say that Godzilla is like a symbol of that in people's minds. So that kind of trauma is what birthed it.

And it's something that's missing, I think. think from rah-rah America, you know, you watch it, you know, we didn't, especially in the 60s, you know, the 70s, this is coming out, didn't have the experience of losing, you know, our cities in the way Japan did. And it's actually kind of amazing that a nation that did lose all of its cities back in the 1940s, literally, except for Kyoto, managed to turn the destruction of cities into a form of entertainment. Yeah. So, you know, I was, I was really struck, you know, I saw the original Godzilla for the first time a few months ago. And I was really struck by the thought that I feel like to a certain degree, this was, you know, nine years after

the atom bombs being dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, I feel like there was an element of catharsis to this. Like, enough time had passed. The wounds had started to heal, like, you know, the collective, you know, emotional, psychological wounds had started to heal. Like, it still lingered in everyone's minds. The, the signs, you know, were there. but the country was starting to recover and I feel like this was you know a way to almost like exercise

that that stress that that you know just that the horror by by turning it into escapism by turning it into entertainment and watching you know basically what had been inflicted upon the country translated into

popcorn entertainment and you know there it is a pretty heavy movie But, you know, it reminded me of, obviously, Americans living in America have never experienced anything like Hiroshima and Nagasaki or just the fire bombings that wiped out the, basically the entirety of Japan in World War II. But, you know, I would say the closest thing that we have to, that sort of collective traumatic experience would be 9-11. And, you know, my wife lived in Manhattan during 9-11 and was, you know, lived kind of midtown, like within sight of the towers. Her father actually worked in the towers and would have died if his train had not been delayed that morning on the way into the office. Wow. So, you know, whenever for the longest time when we started dating, you know, we started dating in 2005.

And for several years, any time there was some sort of movie that. that basically showed New York City getting all messed up. Like, she really couldn't watch it. I remember we saw Cloverfield together, and she was just like, I can't do this. She came away from it, not very happy. But, you know, then almost, I guess, like 10, 11 years later, we watched Avengers, and Avengers is all about New York City getting totally messed up.

But, you know, there's this heroism element, and they save the day. And for whatever reason, not only was she totally fine with this, but as soon as the movie ended, she looked at me and said, again and made me march over to the ticket dispenser and buy tickets to watch the movie again. So, you know, I feel like it might be, you know, spurious for me to make this comparison. But that is what it reminded me of is like, you know, finally a decade had passed. And I think she was okay, you know, seeing. sort of a reenactment in a way of something that she had lived through and something that she'd experienced firsthand, uh, turned into popcorn entertainment. So, that's what happened with Shin Gojira too, right? Uh, Japan's shin gojira is the, is the 10 years after Fukushima,

basically it came out. And that's why it was such a big hit here, I think. Well, that's what, because that was made by what's his face, the, um, unknowed, he did. Evangelian guy, right? Yeah. I know. Yeah. And so he was all like, well, this movie is going to be about Fukushima. even down to like the the scarring on Godzilla as he comes out like you know he's got all the radioactive burns and stuff like that which even goes back to the original Godzilla and before we skip forward I don't know if Diamond had anything to say about this because Diamond you're from New York right I am from New York and just I don't know if you had any interesting insights with we're talking about 9-11 and Godzilla and stuff like that let me step all over you do you have no I that was a really good story but I also in thinking about the contrast there imagine So you have the disastrous personal stakes of the war for Japan, and you have the atomic bombings, and then you have this sort of narrative that comes out of that atomic bombings where a monster created by nuclear testing comes back to Japan as sort of as a reckoning, and it becomes this cultural force.

So if you make the comparison, like, what's the only comparison you can make for America? We've never been a nuclear bomb, but we did have 9-11. What happened if 9-11? Suddenly we had superhero movies. Like, there's a direct connection between the superhero movie boom and 9-11. Hyper-militarized superhero movies, too, like working with the Department of Defense, yeah. Captain Marvel says, join the Air Force. It's just the different ways our entertainment and our societies have reacted to these sort of traumas is fastened into me.

And definitely, it was on my mind watching all these Godzilla movies in 2021 where, you know, yes, there are a lot of natural disasters here in Japan. You know, as of this recording, we are, we've just barely a week. after the 3-11 decade anniversary. So it's almost funny because of the disaster sort of air of these movies, they're kind of timeless because, yeah, Shin Godzilla was actually made in 2016, so definitely a few years after the Fukushima and the massive quake. But then when I watch it in 2020, I just thought about, oh, here we are in this pandemic.

And it's, again, it's a problem that people don't know how to solve. And the government absolutely cannot get out of its own ass to do anything about. So, you know, when you watch these movies today, it's like, I'm not thinking about disaster much. There are so many scenes of people struggling to cope with problems that they've never anticipated. Yeah. And that's one more reason why I think these movies kind of, they really, they work forever because there's always, we're always going to encounter something new that we didn't, we didn't expect to happen. And suddenly here we are and it's messing all our shit up. Yeah, well, a film with heart is going to survive.

Do you know what I mean? Like a film, a film that's made from the heart, a film that's, you know, whether some people think it's cheesy or whether some people don't like it, it's going to endure. And, you know, that film was definitely made from the heart. That's one of the reasons I just, I hear so many foreign fans saying it's a terrible movie and I'm like, it wasn't made for you. What, Shin Godzilla? It was not, it was absolute, Shin Godzilla, yes, it wasn't made for you. And Godzilla wasn't made for us either. Well, there's also a thing where, a Japanese audiences.

A lot of people, Shin Godzilla could become, it was that, that was one of the first big, Japanese. Godzilla movies that really come out in the West where it was like really pushed for like this is the new Japanese Godzilla and that got a lot of people who had grown up who had never really seen a Godzilla movie before and they also didn't realize like nine-tenths of most Godzilla movies is human melodrama and so

they just weren't expecting and although to be fair Shin Godzilla has a lot of human melodrama but that's even more than most Godzilla movies that yeah like you guys are saying that is the point because the whole thing is about how the bureaucratic system is breaking down but even the first film Kaiju is almost secondary even the first film has

has a lot of, like, you know, conferences and meetings and, you know, there's politicians arguing about what, you know, what to do and, oh, we can't admit this problem. That's a running theme of these movies about how the government, you know, can't even address the problem because if we admit there is a problem, then that we'll lose face. It's like, it's a running theme. But there's something so unique about Godzilla to the, at least from an outsider looking into the Japanese psyche about how the burning heart. heart, the burning sun at the heart of

Godzilla, where it's like this thing about, it's a, it's a, it's waking nightmare about this culture coming to terms with, I hate to even make it sound like cult, because the original Godzilla was just a movie made by a bunch of people who they were just working at their day jobs, I don't want to make it sound like all, you know,

the psyche of all of Japan was poured into the creation of the first Godzilla, like, like in a huge Soron ford or anything like that. But still, there is something to be said that, like, the first Godzilla movie is like, this waking nightmare of this country kind of coming to terms with everything that happened in World War II and the fire bombings and the atomic bombings being woken up again by that lucky dragon incident that Jeremy mentioned where in like just a couple like I think it was like a year

before the first guy like the first Godzilla movie came get a movie came together really quickly because what happened in real life was how what happened in the first Godzilla movie in 1954 was like yeah the the Americans were test bombing uh setting off test bombs of the H bomb in the Pacific and the Japanese fishing vessel just wanders right in the middle of it the crew all gets irradiated and that was enough that became a huge international incident with like

the Japanese getting all kind of steely teeth at the Americans for the first time since the occupation going like what the hell are you guys doing here? He should have told us what was going on and that's that's enough just to set off all these fires and the imagination of like holy shit what if this happens again and that kind of ends up resulting in Godzilla and it's just like

but then seven years later they turn Godzilla into this big plushy toy where he's the hero of Japan and he's going to save the world and love him and hate him thing. Kids were the kids, there was a baby boom going on, you know? And even within the text.

Yeah. Nobody realized kids were, nobody realized kids were a segment, like a market segment until, you know, the Japanese were among the first to really quickly cotton on to that. And Godzilla was one I don't, I don't want to say casualty. But he was, you know, when kids

were reacting to him so strongly, you know, that was, I don't think anybody said, hey, let's take this symbol of nuclear holocaust and make him cute and cuddly. You know what I mean? Like, I think it happened, you know, naturally. Well, it was a side effect of like, what do we do with Godzilla if we do a sequel? Why, what if he fights another monster? Then it's

like, well, if he's going to keep on fighting other monsters, he can't be the bad guy every time. So I guess sometimes he's going to have to be defending the Earth against other monsters. And like that turned out to be such a great thing. And then suddenly Godzilla becomes like a fantasy empowerment thing. We're like little kids, they want to be Godzilla's stepping

on people. Like Calvin and Hobbs, yes. Like, brar, I'm a dinosaur hit. Well, how many of us didn't smash down Lego cities or stomping under matchbox cars? Yeah. I didn't actually have enough Legos for that. Oh, no. Actually, you know, a couple years back, Anno, the director of Shin Goghira, they did this, he produced this big Toksatsu exhibit in Tokyo at a art museum here.

And it was a lot of props from all sorts of live action, Japanese science fiction and fantasy movies. And it was amazing. But to exit, instead of exiting through a gift shop, they actually built a city that you had to walk through so that you could see what it was like from a kaiju or like a kaiju suit vantage point. And it was amazing. That is a good idea.

Only in Japan could they have done this and people didn't start destroying the buildings. I think if they had built it in New York or like Chicago or something, Americans wouldn't have been able to control themselves. But it was... Oh, yeah. People would have been belly flopping on that stuff with their phones. Oh, totally.

Totally. But it was amazing. It was really, it was really well done and a really kind of nice, I think, thing to give fans that ability because it's the dream of I think everybody watching, you know, a kaiju film, especially when you're a little kid, is to be that monster at some point. We invite you to join us at Polygon symphonies, an exploration of the PlayStation 2 library. Each week, myself Sam and my buddy Dylan, take a game, talk about it, and then rank it in our grand list of games. To see if you agree or disagree, join us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast.

That's Polygon Symphonies and the Greenlit Podcast Network. Hi, I'm Ray, and this is my friend Alex. Hi. And we do a show called Norman Whoppers. It could be good, but we'll never know. Don't like to talk about it, but my dad was a Dracula. We had two celebrity guests. Stephen Spielberg, Desk.

Michael Bay, Des. Join us every month or so on the Greenlit Podcast Network. So, wow, we've really, Wow, we've really kind of gone, uh, wow, we've really kind of gone, uh, way, way off the notes and just jumped around. But it's been a great, interesting conversation. So I can already tell, especially since Matt has to go really soon, that we are not going to get through all this, which means it's another chaos boys two-parter. Yep, that's just how they work. Yes. But that's okay, because there's a lot of Godzilla films and games and influences to cover. And I don't want to, I don't want to sell it short. It's, you know, it's. worth discussing. Too big for one episode.

That's going to be Godzilla-sized project, yeah. And we also didn't get to talk about the cartoon. Oh, yes. That is not show us, sir. That is definitely a say. Not Godzilla Coon, but you're talking about the Haniborbera thing, right? Yes, the horrific, horrific Hanibarbara thing, yes. With Guzuki, right?

Gadzuki, yes. I actually tried watching one of those again. It was really tough to get through. Yeah. I needed some edibles, I think. That might have helped the situation. The one cartoon so, well, I guess it's licensed, but I was going to say it's the one cartoon so bad that even like cartoon, adult swim and cartoon network couldn't even redeem it. Oh, yeah, no, it's bad.

It's just bad. But we're good. We're all awesome. All right. So I feel like what we should do for the last 15 minutes we have here or so is just finished talking about sort of the creative leads behind the series, the, like, the show of movies. and if we have a few minutes after that, we can talk about some notable influences on video games just to kind of make this relevant to the core topic of retronauts.

What are you talking about? So I mentioned Shinichi Sikizawa earlier. Matt, I assume you added this to the notes? I actually did not. Oh, my God. Who added that? That was me. Oh, just reading up about, it turns out he was, yeah, like I said,

he didn't write the first one, but he wrote most of, I think like pretty much when Godzilla kind of started getting along in the tooth he I think like the original

like 14 original show era movies I think he wrote like 10 of them and so if you're just talking about creative people he was the guy that the typewriter

technically even though it was more about him just super gluing all the wants and needs of the studio more than any kind of creative urges

from his own soul coming out on the page but yeah but I just fair to he mentioned he wanted a mention and not just Godzilla I mean he did

like Atragon and he did He did a bunch of other ones, Latitude Zero. Yeah. He did a lot of those Toksats. He was kind of the go-to-guy, I guess, for Toho and Toxats of films and stuff back then. But, yeah, he did a ton of Godzilla films, didn't it? I just wanted to mention him because the one story I heard about him was like, yeah, that's the whole reason for all monsters attack was him just going, I have no idea what to do.

I've already written 10 of these things. What else? Godzilla attacks, you figure it out. I don't know. So, I mean, can we credit Sekisawa with the, something you kind of mentioned earlier was, you know, like, let's make Godzilla cuddly. now he's going to fight aliens. Probably, because it sounds like, I think he started, if not King Kong versus Godzilla, but like definitely he would, I think he wrote like three-headed monster Gidora and like he was definitely.

I think Mothra was his first, I think. Okay. Just Mothra, which is kind of a cuddlier film. He wrote Mothra, he wrote King Kong versus Godzilla, he wrote Mothra versus Godzilla, then he wrote Gidara, then he wrote Son of Godzilla, All Monsters Attack, Gigan, Megalon, Megalon, Mechagodzilla, so... So a lot of the key movies there. Yeah, maybe not quite as original as the original director, Honda, but, like, still

definitely one of the head haunchers there. Or maybe not head haunches, but he wasn't there when the series started, but he definitely was instrumental during that period where Godzilla sort of transformed from horror movie to kind of a kid's movie, kind of. And some of them are very much kids' movies. laid the groundwork for Power Rangers type stuff, I think. You know, you kind of have that sort of heroic aspect to it

more than the terrifying one. They weren't, you know, Godzilla movies were always kind of shelved with the horror movies in my in the video store when I was a kid, and I was like, these aren't horror? Never occurred to me. We're a bunch of Gen Xers, but if you really want to, like, pitch Godzilla's, old Godzilla stuff to the younger, to the

younger folk, you would say, eh, it's stuff that inspired Power Rangers. Yeah. And I added the note for Akira Ifukube, who was the composer. for most of these movies. Yeah, he was, he worked on the, I think he worked on all the movies from the first one to terror of Mech Godzilla

where he, although I don't think he did every film in between, but he did most of them. And he's remarkable for being the guy who created the original Godzilla roar sound. Oh, man, yeah. Because I guess he wasn't just the musician, but he was the guy who said, oh, I guess I have to do the sound effects for this thing. So he was the bully guy also.

Every bit as iconic as like a John Williams score, every bit of iconic... Yeah, that sound? Godzilla's roar is... I don't know if you're going to have to bleep that. I hear that sound of these...

You have to bleep that. That's a... It's effed up, Bill. It's messed up, Bill. You need to bleep it with a Godzilla roar sound. Well, then, but supposedly Toho is so litigious, you'd do that. Jeremy might have to take this episode down

because, yeah, but yeah, that's... Yeah, so I guess he took a leather glove, coated in pine tar, and just rubbed it on the loosened string of a double bass and threw some echo on it and that's how you get that multi-layered I think in comics it's

transliterated as scree-onk Yes So if you have to write that If you have to text someone The Godzilla sound just type in scre-onk I guess but yeah And the other note I had was They had asked him to come back

And scored Godzilla in 1985 And he was so upset That he had heard That they had made Godzilla instead of just 50 meters tall like he had been in all the other movies. Now for Godzilla in 1985, he was going to be 80 meters tall. If Akubay said, I do not make music for 80 meter tall monster. What the hell that means?

I have no idea. That's an interesting complaint because Godzilla's size was very fluid, yes, quite variable in the movies. I mean, when he was first introduced, yes, he was 50 meters tall. but that was before Japan had really any skyscrapers. You had high-rise buildings, but within the 60s, like in the 60s, you know, a great, a game we definitely need to talk about in one of these episodes is Attack of the Friday Monsters because that is, it's so tied to this, not only the concept of Godzilla and Kaiju, but this specific era of time, the 1960s, when when Tokyo was growing from like this kind of sprangy, semi, almost like semi-rural city, you know, with lots of farmland and that sort of thing in fields to basically just, you know, the concrete jungle that spreads outward and upward. You know, by the time the show era films ended in 75, like 50 meters, like Godzilla would be

like, hey, wait, where's the sunlight? I can't see around the skyscrapers. Where am I? Like, they had to make them taller. But, you know, when they, when they translated the movie, movies into English, sometimes they would just be like, you know, oh, yeah, he's 160 feet tall. That's 50 meters. But sometimes they were like, oh, yeah, he's like 250 feet tall. Like, they just kind of made up numbers. They just threw numbers out. Like, you know, we already had the Empire State Building here.

We were, the World Trade Center was happening in the 70s. Like, you know. And King Kong is tiny compared to Godzilla. That's the big thing with each other. We're putting out this episode presumably because King Kong versus Godzilla, the new movie is coming out. Actually, no, we're just putting out this. episode because I watched these movies and was like, oh, man, this is... Oh, okay, okay, okay.

And then later, then later I realized, oh, right, that's timely. How weird. We actually did something timely, not like 40 years late. So, off-brand. But that's why, for that, the King Kong Skull Island, which is designed to lead into this new movie, King Kong is suddenly like 400

feet tall, yeah. Yes. I mean, they had to do that. I think... They had to... I get that. I think one of the fun parts about watching these movies, especially if you watch them sort of collectively, is you You can watch the transformation of Japan itself, you know, both from the background and how the settings take place. And, you know, you watch the first film.

And, yeah, Godzilla towers over everything, you know, even the cities, he's absolutely towers over everything. But then you've got the 50s and the 60s and 70s, and you see how it becomes more urban. You know, we make jokes about it, but the All Monsters Attack, part of the reason the whole story takes place is you've got this kid and this kid's by himself because guess what, mom and dad both work now. He's a latchkey. Yeah, he's a latchkey kid.

It's a different era. You know, you've got the hetero stuff, which is, you know, you're talking about pollution. You can see the factories have grown up over where. And if you go after that and then you go to the 80s, all of a sudden, yeah, you've got Tokyo. Tokyo is now this massive urban center. And yet, even with a taller monster, Godzilla is still short compared to the buildings in Shibuya. So. Well, even up to Shinn Godzilla, he's still dwarfed by most of the bigger buildings.

Exactly. So you see. And I was watching Shin Godzilla and I'm thinking, well, he's scary. but, like, he really can't destroy the whole city. And then he does something where he levels the whole day and I was like, holy shit. Whoa. Well, because that's the thing, right? The thing about him isn't his size.

It's like the insidiousness of, like, the pollution of radiation and stuff like that. Well, that's, yeah. Well, and that's why firebombing is so much a big thing in the first movie because radiation is one thing, but it's as much about the fire bombing that and, like, well, that's another version of Tokyo where Tokyo was still a lot of wooden buildings and the mid-1950s. And so that's the fear of the fire and then blah, blah, blah, blah, but yeah, exactly. so yeah man godzilla's just a messy analogy where it's just so he's throwing off radiation and he's fire and lizards and br of godzilla can be anything really is what these movies when you watch the movies you can see he can be the hero he can be the villain he can be the metaphor he can just be a guy in a

suit um i just think yeah i think these these movies hold up because because he's so pliable you know he's godzilla is really all of us the real godzilla was the friends we ate along the way Nice All right. All right. So before Matt has to go, I do want to give a shout out to one other person because as I was watching these movies,

I was like, wait a minute, I know that guy. I've seen that guy. Wait, is that, is this, like Goichi Suda's dad, who is this guy? So Akihiko Hirata, one of the actors, is probably the most prolific of the show-a-era Godzilla actors. He appeared in the original Godzilla as one of the, like, the young scientist, and then

he was in half a dozen other showa-era flicks. So he appears in all kinds of roles, because he was a contract actor with the studio, with Toho, and he knows. never played the same role twice. In the movies, there's only like, in the show of movies, there's only like two points of continuity. One of them is in the direct sequel to Godzilla, Godzilla Raids Again, which came two years later. The elderly doctor, like the kind of senior scientist, Dr. Yamane, shows up to kind of give advice like, oh, hey, we killed this guy with the oxygen destroyer, but guess what? We don't have that anymore, so I guess we're boned. And

And then in, like, I think, the final Mega Godzilla movie, the very last of the show era movies, there's also a callback to the original Godzilla and one of the scientists there. And that's pretty much it. That's the only continuity. So Herata just, like, shows up in all kinds of different roles. Sometimes he's a scientist like a good guy. Sometimes he's an evil scientist. And in the movie, I think, with Jet Jaguar, he's like an evil scientist. there's one time

there's one time in Ebira Terror of the Deep he's like a terrorist leader with an eye patch he like drives around on a U-boat and like you know jodfurs and everything It must have been fun It must have been really fun as an actor

Yeah sometimes he's a cop Sometimes he's a journalist He's just like it's almost like a game Like oh there's there's Suda's dad again Like I swear to God Like if you put him next to Suda Like Goichi Suda You'd be like

Yeah yeah that's father's son for sure no problem. Absolutely. Because he plays Dr. Sarazawa in the first one. So he's the guy, he invents the oxygen

destroyer and he ends up having a sacrifice to take out Godzilla. Oh, was that him? I need to go back and watch the original one. I was thinking the Sarizawa was a

different actor, but okay. No, Sarazawa. And actually, he was in so many movies. He's actually got an entry in the Mystery Science Theater 3,000 Wiki because he was also in

Fugitive Alien. But yeah, this guy, yeah, this is funny that the one guy who sacrificed himself in the first Godzilla movie he wound up becoming the bit, the kind of the spine of the Godzilla movies.

You know, he's like a, a spirit haunting Godzilla throughout. Yes. Oh, yeah, I was reading. He was actually invited to come back. He was going to play a character in Godzilla in 1985, but he died of long cancer right before they started. Yeah, yeah. Very unfortunate.

But I mean, yeah, that was one of my favorite things about watching these movies was just like, just like recognizing, oh, there's, there's the actress who looks just like my ex-girlfriend. And there's suit as dad, you know, like, there's like four or five actors and actresses who just, you know, pop up and I'm like, oh, it's them again. It's really great. It's like train spotting. And they're always, they're always in totally different roles. Yeah.

It's the Max Fisher players of Godzilla. Yeah, pretty much. Like that whole studio system, you know, it's kind of fun in its way. I don't really watch a lot of really vintage black and white type era movies. So I kind of missed out on that with the American side of things. But, you know, seeing it here in Godzilla is, yeah, it just added a little extra. I could just, like, they could get that flash of recognition, like, oh, I know that person. Cool.

Anyway, that's a, that's kind of a general overview of Godzilla. And I think we are sadly out of time for this episode. So, yeah, this, I wasn't really sure how this was going to go. We really didn't get to video game stuff, but, you know, consider this part one of a conversation. We'll reconvene sometime down. the road, hopefully soonish, and talk some more about Godzilla, the films, but also the video games, and then they, not just the licensed video games, but also the influence. And, you know, the way Godzilla has shaped video games and entertainment in general,

because the influence of that big guy, it's all over the place. It's a, he's a big old beast. Oversized. Indeed. Kaiju-sized. Yes. Monstrous. monstrous influence.

All right, so we're going to wrap it up here. So I will do the outroes at this point. It looks like this was going to be episode 369. That's nice. Triply nice. So, yeah, this has been an episode and episode of Retronauts. And I have been Jeremy Parrish with Matt Alt, Bill Mudronron, and Diamond Fight. And if you would like to hear more episodes of Retronauts sometimes,

with this same crew of people or some permutation thereof, there's lots of them out there at this point, go to Retronauts.com or check us out on iTunes or other show or podcatchers. Is that what they're called these days? What's that what the kids are calling them, the zoomers? Podcatchers, yes.

Or you can check us out on Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts, where every week we post every episode a week earlier than the public feed with higher bit rate quality, no advertisements, et cetera, et cetera, yada, it's very good. If you subscribe at the $5 per month or better level, which is like the cost of a fancy coffee at Starbucks, you can do that. Come on, just give up the venty one day. And if you do that, then not only do you get the early episodes, you also get exclusive episodes every other week with all kinds of topics. I would think with this one, the most recent one, was Street Fighter 2.

that's a big that's a big deal you don't want to miss that um so you get that you also get columns and mini podcasts by our friend diamond here every single weekend uh so yeah lots of good stuff if you subscribe to retronaut so that's our pitch and that's all the salesmanship i'm going to do now i'm going to throw this over to diamond actually why don't you uh tell us about the stuff you do and where to find you well thank you uh well i am working a lot with retronuts these days. But if you want to support me directly, I do have my own Patreon or Kofi. It's all Fight Club, F-E-I-T-C-L-U-B. That's also my Twitter handle. It's also my YouTube and Twitch handle. I have been streaming some games lately. And so beyond the writing and the podcasting,

I'm also streaming. So I'm keeping busy, at least until a giant monster comes up and trashes this town, which I live in. All right. And Matt, you're also over there in Japan land, getting trashed by Godzilla. I am. Yes, I'm here. I'm in Tokyo, and I'm going to be here for quite some time. So if you enjoyed this podcast, please check out my book, Pure Invention, how Japan's pop culture conquered the world and all of our brains. And see you next time. Bill? And I'm Bill Mudron. You can find me at Mudron. just M-U-D-R-1 at Twitter.com

and I am the co-host of probably the world's worst pop culture podcast, Tarty the Party podcast at Tartypodcast.com. So if you want to hear more of me screaming, barf, and just go over there. The world's worst pop culture podcast. That's a really

great sales pitch. I want to listen to it. It's not great, but we've been recording for five years and nothing can kill us now. So, yeah, we just pretty much talk to just to listen to ourselves at this point, so. All right. But thank you guys for having me.

And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, at Twitter on Twitter as GameSpite. You can find me doing stuff with Retronauts with limited run games and on my own YouTube channel. I do a lot of stuff and you can find me on the internet. I'm pretty easy to find. I feel bad for all the other Jeremy Parish is out there. I've ruined their vanity searches, but you know, you got to do what you got to do. Anyway, this has been Retronauts and this was a conversation about Godzilla.

please look forward to a follow-up conversation about Godzilla where we talk about the stuff that is relevant to the topic of this actual podcast video games. It'll come, it'll just rise from the ocean and smash up your podcast feeds. So, you know, live in dread of that day. Good night. Thank you.