Showa Godzilla Part 1 (1959-1964): A Monster in the Making
All of the movies are labeled and organized in order, so if you want to read or skip a particular movie you can go straight to it, although most of this is written in retrospect of the previous film in the series, and obviously all of them contain spoilers.
Godzilla Raids Again (1955) - Godzilla vs. King Kong (1962) - Godzilla vs. Mothra (1964) - Ghidorah, the Three Headed Monster (1964)
The Godzilla series currently stands as the longest-running movie series ever, spanning back to 1954 and continuing on even today with Godzilla vs. Kong set to release in early 2021 as of writing this unless its release date gets set back yet again, and has quite an interesting history, starting with the Showa Era that spanned from the original film in 1954 to 1975.
Godzilla movies, and early monsters movies in general, were specially made. Since computers weren’t advanced enough to handle a movie’s special effects, and building scale models of certain parts of a monster was both costly and not particularly good looking, yet, filmmakers had to instead build tiny, detailed sets and have people in suits (or in some cases, such as the work of Ray Harryhausen, claymation) depict the monsters, using the sets to make the monsters look much larger than they actually were. While this method was a lot cruder in the 50s when it hadn’t quite been refined yet, with films like The Beast From 10,000 Fathoms, The Giant Behemoth, and Gojira itself, it sparked a new subgenre called Kaiju movies (which literally means ‘strange beast’ in Japanese and originated in a Chinese book, but now refers specifically to giant monsters).
The first film in the Godzilla series, 1954’s Gojira (a film I’ll eventually talk about in more depth on its own) directed by Ishiro Honda is a political horror movie at its core. The story of a hibernating dinosaur irradiated and awakened by the bombing of Japan just 9 years earlier as well as nuclear tests, Gojira proved incredibly popular as it deeply connected to Japan’s people at the time, still feeling the effects of World War II’s end. With a budget of $175,000 and grossing around $491,000 ($1,685,601.30 and $4,729,315.65 respectively with inflation), it was a massive success, and Toho, who produced it, immediately set to work on a sequel produced less than a year later.
Godzilla Raids Again/Gigantis, The Fire Monster (1955)
The sophomore film is oddly enough often forgotten when talking about the classic Godzilla movies. Godzilla Raids Again, or Gigantis, the Fire Monster (as it was localized in the United States), was released in 1955, directed by Motoyoshi Oda, who studied under Ishiro Honda as well as legendary director Akira Kurosawa since the studio didn’t want to wait for Honda to finish working on another project. While it was financially a moderate success, it has always lived in the shadow of its predecessor for many justified reasons. Raids Again is a weird movie, because while it introduces a staple of the series: monster fights, it doesn’t really do anything particularly special. It tries to capture a lot of the emotional moments of the first movie but doesn’t have the same strong horror and political undertones, feeling watered down in comparison.
It has a solid enough story, following two pilots who accidentally stumble upon an island where a second Godzilla (the original was killed in the first movie) and a new monster named Anguirus, a similarly irradiated ankylosaur, and report it to the government. The rest of the story then follows the Japan Air Self-Defense Force (JASDF) trying to get the monsters away from the city and figure out a way to either kill it or trap it, since the weapon they used in the first movie was used, and the only man who knew how to make it died along with Godzilla. They first try to use flares to steer it back out to sea, but an accidental fire attracts it back to shore, where Godzilla and Anguirus fight, Godzilla quickly winning and breaking Anguirus’s jaw rather violently.
After the monster returns to the sea, the military tracks it to a small island covered in ice, and a final dogfight breaks out. Conventional weapons have no effect on Godzilla, but, after one of the pilots dies distracting the monster, the other manages to start an avalanche that buries Godzilla, silencing the threat for the time being and avenging his friend in the process.
The effects of the movie aren’t terrible for the time either, being comparable to the first movie, but definitely not as iconic or shocking in its imagery. One of the issues of using a giant rubber suit for your movies is that they’re often damaged during shooting mostly due to the combination of pyrotechnics and the obvious need for physical interactions between actors, constantly tearing the suits and wearing off the paint. This led to a lot of differently designed suits being used from movie to movie, sometimes with parts being mixed and matched between films (some movies used the same suit but with a completely redesigned head if the head had been heavily damaged, but the body has been kept relatively unharmed). As such, there was no real defined Godzilla designed, and almost every film in the Showa era is different, even the second film.
The suit used in the film isn’t as refined as the first either, looking a lot more goofy and rubbery as compared to the (still retrospectively goofy and rubbery) much more monstrous, dead-eyed Gojira suit covered in radiation scars. The suit is also much more thin and anthropomorphic, while the first suit was distinctly stocky and low to the ground. Assumedly the leanness of the Raids Again suit was so that the actor could move around a lot more easily, as the suits could get upwards of 140 degrees inside, along with being well over 200 pounds. Disgustingly, this means sweat was regularly emptied out of them. Regardless, Haruo Nakajima (who passed away in 2017) played Godzilla for 12 movies, up until 1972 with Godzilla vs. Gigan, expressing his love for the role regardless of its hardships, and forever immortalized as the original King of the Monsters.
The suit, and the monster, get a lot more focus than they did in the original film. Godzilla, oddly enough, only has about 8 ½ minutes of screentime in both movies, but because Raids Again is 15 minutes shorter than Gojira, the monsters take up a decent percentage of the runtime comparatively, and about 2 minutes is taken up by Anguirus and Godzilla battling it out. This footage, which was sped up due to the fight being more sluggish than intended when it was first shot, was the first in the entire series. While the fight isn’t exactly choreographed very well or particularly exciting, it must have still been an exercise and a half for the suit actors, so the thinner suit makes a lot of practical sense, despite not looking quite as good.
Not much can really be said about the film otherwise. The film’s musical score is good on its own, with a lot of beautiful, but haunting orchestral pieces like “The Quiet Peace” and “Osaka in Ashes” and all around it does capture the dark tone of the movie, it just happened to come after one of the most iconic, hauntingly beautiful soundtracks of all time. So, like the rest of the movie, it pales in comparison. Godzilla Raids Again is the perfect example of a forgettable sequel to one of the greatest films of all time, despite being a fairly serviceable movie on its own. It tries too hard to be the first movie instead of building on it or going somewhere else with the series, being dark, but without the same conviction against nuclear warfare that Gojira has. That being the case, the following films would follow up in a completely different direction.
The four movies after, Godzilla vs. King Kong, Mothra vs. Godzilla, Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, Invasion of Astro-Monster, are all some of the best Showa era Godzilla movies, showing the development the series would go through to become what it truly is today. Starting off, Vs. King Kong, released in 1962, was a crossover between America’s most iconic monster, King Kong, and Japan’s, Godzilla, since both were very popular at the time, and Toho made a deal with RKO Studios (who owned Kong) to make a few films with the American kaiju, the first of which was Godzilla vs. King Kong.
Godzilla vs. King Kong (1962)
Vs. King Kong is, first and foremost, a fun and hilarious movie. It follows a greedy corporation discovering Kong on an island, where the people treat him as a god. The corporation, however, wants to ship Kong off to the mainland to profit off of him as a tourist attraction, which is a common plotline in the Kong movies and would soon become one in the Godzilla series. They manage to knock out Kong with berries found on the island and get him on a raft. At the same time, however, Godzilla has been freed from the iceberg he was frozen in and begins attacking Japan once more. Kong soon wakes up and swims to the mainland, confronting Godzilla for the first time. Attempting to first chuck very fake looking rocks at Godzilla that has absolutely no effect, Kong soon retreats after being set on fire by Godzilla’s atomic breath.
The JASDF tries completely in vain to defeat Godzilla, first luring him into a trap laced with explosives and poison gas, which have no effect whatsoever. Next, they try to charge up power lines with 1,000,000 volts of electricity, which does manage to turn the monster away for a while. Kong is instead powered up by the electricity, feeding off of the power line, and breaks through, storming Tokyo. The JASDF manages to knock Kong out again with a gas version of the red berry juice, and airlifts him to Mt. Fuji, where Godzilla is headed, hoping to have the two kill each other.
The final battle is something to behold and is truly indescribable in full. There are dropkicks, attempted cremation, thunder charging, trees being comically shoved down throats, and the two monsters tumbling into the ocean over a cliff; it’s absolutely something that needs to be seen to be appreciated. Ultimately, only Kong resurfaces, and swims back to his island, while Godzilla is nowhere to be seen, but the army guesses it won’t be the last time they’ll see the monster.
The suits have very different designs from both monsters, Godzilla being much more heavily-built, and much more reptilian facially, as well as having much larger eyes than the former incarnations, as well as losing the small ears the last two had. I really love this design; I think it’s a great evolution of the monster that still makes him intimidating looking, but not as horrifying and reflective of the dark nature of the last two movies, which works for the much lighter tone the film goes for. As for Kong’s design, as compared to his original design from the original film from 1933, like Godzilla, he’s much less monstrous, with a comparatively more cartoonish face than the purely gorilla-based face Kong originally had, allowing for a lot of expressiveness during the fights. He’s also covered in brown fur as compared to his mostly black coloration in the original and has much more lanky proportions.
Kong was, of course, scaled up significantly to be even close to the size of Godzilla, being only about 50 feet tall at most in the original film, while Godzilla stood at 50 meters (or about 164 feet) tall throughout the Showa Era. Kong is 145 feet in this film, which, while still enormous compared to both reality as well as the original film’s Kong, is still visibly shorter than Godzilla. In almost every way, Kong is outmatched in this fight and would have most certainly lost had it not been for a combination of his only two advantages: intelligence, and creative liberties.
See, if you’ve seen the original King Kong or really any other incarnation of the character, you would know that Kong doesn’t have lightning powers, and most certainly never fed off of it for a supercharge, and that’s one of the most entertaining things about the Showa Era: instant-win powers are just made up on the spot for plot convenience but in the best way possible. We’ll get to them, but this would especially apply to Godzilla in some of the later movies. There is no way that Kong would have won if he hadn’t started biting into apparently 1 million volt power lines as a quick pick-me-up, and he would never do it again, which is hilarious.
Godzilla vs. King Kong, while extremely cheesy, is still a fantastic and thoroughly entertaining movie, and I’d say is probably the perfect starting point for people looking to get into this era. It’s also fairly quick, running at only about an hour and a half, and has a good amount of monster screentime with genuinely funny scenes in between the fights, intentional or not as they may be. The film was, of course, a success financially, and despite the obvious backlash from Godzilla technically losing (which infamously led to the Mandela Effect-like rumor that there was actually a cut in which Godzilla won, which has been disproven and denied since), the film was also a critical success at the time and is set to have a spiritual remake release in 2021 with Legendary Studios’ Godzilla vs. Kong.
Godzilla vs. Mothra/Godzilla vs The Thing (1964)
Following the success of vs. Kong, another movie in the same vein was inevitable. Ten years and two movies after the original and the original’s dark themes and horrific undertones had practically been abandoned, but one could argue it was for the better. Godzilla vs. Mothra (or Godzilla vs. The Thing, as it was localized), released in 1964, is considered by many to be one of the best Godzilla movies ever, and I can’t say I completely disagree. Around this point, the Godzilla films had struck a tonal goldmine; vs. Kong, while still being a funny movie, is still easy enough to cheer for during its fight scenes because Godzilla still isn’t really a hero or a villain, just a very angry monster. It walks a near-perfect line of being fun to laugh with, in retrospect, without feeling like you’re just laughing at it. Following up on this relatively hokey tone, I believe Vs. Mothra is so revered because it’s one of the movies in the series that best strikes this middle ground of still being able to take itself seriously while being a fun movie still, which defines this era.
Vs. Mothra revolves around a greedy corporation trying to exploit nature, in this case, a giant blue egg that washes up on shore after a massive typhoon. This enterprise intends to use the egg as a tourist attraction despite the main characters (a news reporter named Sakai and his photographer Junko) as well as a scientist named Professor Miura expressing their disdain at the greed presented, not believing they have any right to claim the egg. The debate only grows as two tiny twin fairies appear to try to convince them to return the egg to a place named Infant Island, claiming the egg is that of Mothra, a monster native to the island. Seeing only more profit, the head of the corporation attempts to capture the fairies before they escape.
The girls instead try to go to Sakai, Junko, and Miura, who do listen and try to convince the CEO and his 2nd in command it’s a bad idea, but to no avail. The fairies thank them for trying, explaining the egg will hatch and the newborn will cause immense amounts of destruction while it’s trying to find food, and leave back to the island. Soon after, however, Godzilla rises from beneath a beach (assumedly having washed up after the last movie in the same typhoon as the Mothra egg), and begins to terrorize the nearby city. The trio decides to try to go to Infant Island, believing Mothra may be able to stop Godzilla. After many attempts at convincing the natives and the twins (denied at first due to the refusal of returning the egg), they’re soon enough swayed after a point is made that Godzilla attacks without prejudice, killing both good and bad people without a second thought and that Mothra may just be able to help them all.
The twins convince Mothra to help, despite the creature’s old age. At the same time, Godzilla only progresses further into the city, and soon kills the CEO and his second in command, nothing more than ants in his rampage. As the monster continues on a path to the egg, seeming to be hellbent on destroying it (the monster’s connections explored further in later movies), Mothra arrives. The two battle it out, Mothra having the upper hand for a while until Godzilla manages to drag her down and burn one of her wings, finally killing her as she rests a wing over the egg. As Godzilla begins to turn away and continue wrecking Japan, the twins sing the song of Mothra and the egg hatches, from it emerging twin Mothra caterpillars. The two manage to catch up to Godzilla and wrap him up in a cocoon, and he tumbles into the ocean once more as the twins swim off to Infant Island.
Vs. Mothra is technically less of a sequel to Godzilla vs. Kong as it is a sequel to Mothra, the movie the titular monster premiered in from 1961, which makes Godzilla the second cinematic universe ever (after the classic Universal monster movies of the 30s, 40s, and 50s that share characters). Much of the Godzilla series actually features many monsters that would begin their legacies in other movies before being in a single Godzilla movie, namely Mothra, Rodan (who appeared in its own movie in 1956), Manda (first featuring in the 1963 film Atragon), Gorosaurus (premiering in 1967’s King Kong Escapes), Baragon (appearing in 1965’s Frankenstein vs. Baragon or Frankenstein Conquers the World), and Varan, starring in a movie of the same name in 1957.
Mothra herself is one of the most impressive special effects in the early series, being capable of being shown flying without any strings appearing, which was a common problem before computers could reliably be used to get rid of small, but noticeable props that were necessary to create a practical effect like a giant moth flying. She’s also fairly enormous for a prop that’s almost fully aerial and almost fully articulated in her small arms, wings (which had to realistically portray the action of flapping wings), as well as having lights in her eyes; the whole suit is over 6.5 feet long. I find her wing patterns also look really good, appearing different in nearly every movie she’s been in, based vaguely around giant silk moths, also sharing their white, fluffy fur. Her caterpillar forms also look fairly good, being much smaller but having a lot of good movement to them, especially in water (where they were pushed along by boat engines in their tails).
Mothra’s 1964 design.
Godzilla’s 1964 suit.
Godzilla’s suit, on the other hand, is a little odder looking than the last few suits, but not in a bad way; in fact, I’d say it’s probably the best one so far other than the original’s design (not as much the suit itself, which can look a bit stiff at times, although it works to the film’s benefit well enough) and maybe the Vs. Kong suit due to how unique it is compared to almost every other suit, but the two look so different I couldn’t possibly pick one over the other. The most distinctive feature of this particular suit is its face. Godzilla’s brows are very thick and defined, slanted down angrily, and his mouth has a thick upper lip, which gave him a slightly more cat-like appearance as opposed to his much more reptilian appearances beforehand. His body is also a lot more well proportioned, not too anthropomorphic and thin like the Raids Again suit but not as bulky as the Vs. Kong suit, finding a perfect middle ground between the two extremes.
Godzilla vs. Mothra, again, really finds a lot of middle ground that the last two movies couldn’t quite figure out yet, and this is where the series really found its footing after the original film. Vs. Mothra is a film serious enough to sit through without feeling like it’s stupid if you’re not into hokey older movies while being just hokey enough where it feels like you can look back on it in retrospect and laugh at how funny it is watching Godzilla get freaked out by bugs biting him.
To my surprise upon a rewatch, though, the movie is actually surprisingly funny on its own, being genuinely really well written. The whole cast has great chemistry, and they all do feel like genuine people. I also really enjoyed a couple of the side characters, namely a guy who really loved eating eggs, and the head of the newspaper, a stern but caring man. The human villains were also quite entertaining and had a decent amount of character to them, especially the CEO’s second-in-command who despite having some amount of sympathy, is completely overcome by greed by the film’s end. All around, other than the original, this is by far the best actual plot we’ve gotten so far, even having a certain amount of poignancy commenting on the state of Infant Island, which has been eradicated by nuclear testing, keeping close with the series’ main theme.
The music is also great, keeping some of the general motifs from Vs. Kong and the original film, but going for a much more mystical approach as is appropriate for the beautiful moth deity. One of my favorite songs in this film, as well as in the series, is the song “Sacred Springs” which is sung by the fairy twins, who were played by actual identical twins, two famous sisters called The Peanuts, Emi and Yumi Ito. Their voices happen to be almost exactly the same as well, resulting in their singing sounding almost like it’s one voice with a reverb effect in perfect harmony, and this track really shows off their vocal talent. They played the twins in Mothra, Godzilla vs. Mothra, and in Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster, the next film in the series. Emi passed away in 2012 and Yumi in 2016, and will always be remembered for their beautiful voices.
My only real complaint with this movie would be pacing, which again is a problem with the first couple of Godzilla films. The problem often comes down to a series’ tradition, long scenes of showing Godzilla being completely immune to damage by the army, and Vs. Mothra is the worst offender of this so far. The battle scene (which is more like things exploding AROUND Godzilla instead of actually hitting the poor guy in the suit) begins around the two-thirds point of the movie and takes up maybe a solid ten minutes of screentime, which doesn’t seem like a whole lot until you actually have to sit through ten whole minutes of Godzilla just kind of strolling on the beach while the beach explodes. The rest of the movie from this point is kind of slow as well, with the final fight being intercut with people trying to save some kids and a teacher from the island the fight occurs on.
Weirdly, Godzilla doesn’t really feel like a part of this movie; again, this movie feels like more of a sequel to Mothra than it feels like the follow-up to Vs. Kong. Godzilla isn’t even mentioned until he appears about halfway through the movie and doesn’t really have a lot of impact on the plot other than a Deus Ex Machina way to give the antagonists a comeuppance, becoming a greater evil, and I don’t know if I really like that, because they weren’t really completely black and white mustache-twirling villains. The first half of the movie is so well-written and well-paced that the second half just isn’t as enjoyable despite being the half that contains the monster fight, which in most of these films is the best part of the film, and I think the people working on the films came to realize this.
Throughout this early part of the series, the human stories would slowly become more silly and less important, and the real showstopper would be the monsters duking it out, which sacrificed a lot of the more poignant themes of the series in order to make a more technically entertaining movie, and I think this movie mixes these two the worst. Raids Again’s fight is primitive looking, but still serious and surprisingly gory and bleak going along with the film’s still dark tone, Vs. Kong’s fight is hilarious and over the top as the rest of the movie is despite barely having a human conflict but in Vs. Mothra I just wanted to get back to seeing what the likable cast was up to in its climax. Despite all of its extreme high points in the Showa Era, and being a genuinely really great movie, I do think Godzilla vs. Mothra still had some kinks to work out as only the 4th film in the series.
In striking a perfect tone for the series, the next movie would have to figure out how to balance and blend its two completely narratives in a way that didn’t make one drastically better than the other, finally creating a perfect formula for a post-original film, and I believe Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster finally solidified that formula.
Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)
Made the same year as Godzilla vs. Mothra, Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster marks a lot of important points in the Showa Era. Before this film and vs. Mothra, the series was kind of sci-fi/fantasy in name only, never really focusing on a lot of the elements of science fiction beyond the first (and to some extent the second) film with the origins of Godzilla and the oxygen destroyer in the first film being the only real elements of scientific explanation in the films and never really going into a whole lot of depth with some of the more ridiculous plot elements, but starting with Vs. Mothra (or, technically Mothra itself) the series introduced a somewhat significant fantastical element with the twin fairies. At this point, the series firmly established its place, completely ungrounded in reality, and Ghidorah takes it one step further to the final, ridiculous evolution of the era with the introduction of aliens.
Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster’s human plot doesn’t take as central a role as Vs. Mothra, following an assassination plot against a Himalayan princess. On her plane over to Japan, on a visit, she looks out the window to see a U.F.O., which seems to possess her. She then inexplicably jumps out of the plane seconds before it abruptly explodes. A police detective named Shindo, assigned to protect the princess, hears about her plane’s explosion and thinks her dead, but later finds that a woman who looks identical to her is standing in the center of town, spouting off what seems like gibberish at first, warning of several coming threats. At the same time, a mysterious meteor has crash-landed in a valley nearby and seems to be magnetic, much to the confusion of the scientists studying it.
The princess, who no one recognizes, soon predicts the emergence of Rodan, a pterosaur-like monster, and Godzilla, much to the humor of those listening to her. Soon after, however, Rodan bursts from a volcano. The twin fairies (visiting Japan to be on TV, humorously now made into celebrities after the events of Vs. Mothra), who are just about to set sail back to their island, hear the princess and heed her warning. Later, a news report says that Godzilla destroyed the ship out at sea and has come to shore, on a collision course with Rodan.
As the two begin fighting and the cities are evacuated, the princess is taken to a doctor by Shindo but is found completely normal. Suddenly, she begins another prophecy, stating the coming of a monster called King Ghidorah, who razed the surface of Venus, annihilating all life on the planet in a mere day, having made a name for itself as a planet-killing cosmic terror. This also identifies the alien possessing her as Venusian, one of the few survivors of Ghidorah’s attack who went on to take on human forms. The princess then finally announces the arrival of Ghidorah, and, cutting back to the magnetic meteor, it finally explodes, as King Ghidorah’s three-headed, golden form takes shape, and his cleansing begins.
Authorities go to the twin fairies to see if Mothra can help defeat the monster, but they say that only the three monsters of Earth could possibly match up to Ghidorah. Godzilla and Rodan, however, are still at odds with each other, pettily fighting amongst themselves out in the countryside. Soon, a young Mothra larva comes to talk to the two monsters to try and convince them to defeat Ghidorah, but (as translated by the fairies), the monsters don’t really care about humans since they’ve only been treated harshly by them, and even after Mothra stops their arguing a second time, reminding them that Ghidorah will probably kill them too, they still seem indifferent, saying they’d rather just keep fighting each other.
Soon, however, Ghidorah arrives, and Mothra attempts to fight the monster alone but is quickly blasted aside by Ghidorah’s gravity beams (which are really just glorified lightning). The two other monsters, inspired by Mothra, soon join the fight. The princess, at the same time, is nearly shot by another assassin, but barely dodges as the bullet grazes the side of her head and falls, hitting her head and coming back to her senses, free from the alien. Ghidorah, causing massive collateral damage, creates an avalanche that kills the assassin, but the protagonists manage to get away.
Slowly, the monsters seem to get the upper hand over Ghidorah, as Mothra wraps him in silk, Rodan strikes him from the sky, and Godzilla attacks him with atomic breath and rocks. They soon get him to the ground, and Godzilla tosses him off a cliff before tossing rocks at him. Ghidorah, realizing he’s outmatched, is forced to flee, and flies off to space as the monsters watch, planning his revenge. The princess soon returns to her country, and Mothra and the twins return to their island, and everything returns to normal, the world saved from the wrath of Ghidorah for now.
The suits for this film are just as impressive as the last movie, if not more so. Another one of the firsts introduced by this film was, of course, King Ghidorah, who would go on to be Godzilla’s official nemesis. Ghidorah is enormous, significantly bigger, and with more of a presence than any of the other monsters. With three long, prehensile necks, two tails, and enormous wings, Ghidorah looks fantastic, having a great amount of movement throughout this body, although there are a few cases of strings appearing as he’s held up since much of his movement was controlled by them and it was still hard to hide when his massive size required so many. The Mothra larva is about the same as the last film, and Godzilla uses the same suit as the last film, although his face is slightly different, having a longer tongue, movable teeth, and now having his upper lip partially removed so that his upper teeth are exposed. Rodan, as opposed to his original design in 1956’s Rodan, is a lot friendlier looking, with small, but colored eyes, as opposed to his pure black eyes in the original. His beak also no longer has teeth and he’s a bit lankier, not looking quite as good as the well-proportioned original suit, looking comparatively poorly made.
King Ghidorah’s 1964 suit.
The monsters also have a lot more personality, going as far as to make Rodan laugh at Godzilla when he gets hit with a rock and having Mothra being frustrated at the two when they won’t help; the fairies even mention Godzilla swearing. This is also the turning point where Godzilla becomes more of a hero rather than an unbiased force of nature, which would soon be pushed a little too far, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Ghidorah himself, as the first non-Godzilla protagonist, is fantastic. He doesn’t have motivations or any real character, and the build-up to him is great. Throughout the first half of the film, all we hear about him is the horrors he’s committed, a legendary world-destroyer. When he finally appears, it’s spectacular with the monster exploding out of his meteor and appearing first as a flaming silhouette before slowly coming into being, it’s the best monster entrance in nearly the entire series.
Whereas the human plot of Ghidorah is fairly inconsequential as compared to Vs. Mothra and the first two films, the use of the princess to build up Ghidorah as well as somehow normalizing an alien possession plotline is surprisingly effective. The small cast as just as likable as the last film, given a good amount of depth for their relatively unimportant roles, having a lot more character and nuance than I mentioned in the summary (as well as the Peanuts being back for the last time in the series), and I believe this is the way it should be: small, likable plots that build up the monster’s part rather than having them be the focus.
Due to the much lighter tone of the film (again, comparatively; Ghidorah still takes itself fairly seriously), the monsters can sort of be their own characters now without being shackled down by the legacy of Gojira, and be the most interesting part of the film without having to rely on being intimidating; as previously mentioned, they have a significant amount of actual personality that’s well-defined within this movie which makes them a lot more believable as reluctant heroes.
The monster action, I think, is still a little silly looking, but still fun to watch nonetheless. Having four monsters fighting at once can get a little chaotic, but it’s made up for but all the cool special effects and the actual reactions of the monsters, which are, again, a lot more expressive than in previous movies, expressing actual frustration, victory, pain, and humor. It lets you root for the monsters more despite their hatred of humanity, and being antagonists. Their hatred is somehow believable and understandable, and it makes the three uniting against Ghidorah a great moment, and it serves as a great start to sort of superhero dynamic with villains being turned to heroes in the face of a greater evil.
The music, while I don’t think as impactful as Vs. Mothra’s beautifully mystical sounding score is still great overall. Generally, it’s a lot more brassy and dramatic, especially this version of the main Godzilla theme, which would go on to be the main theme used throughout the series as opposed to Vs. Mothra’s slower-paced, menacing version of the theme closer to the original film’s, adding in a sort of fanfare to the end of the piece that serves as a pseudo theme for Rodan, as well as a short, but terrifying musical motif for Ghidorah.
It also includes a lot of very classically alien-sounding songs, which was created using an instrument called a theremin, which was one of the first, if not THE first, electronic instruments. It’s a sort of electronic box that usually has two antennae, and the notes you make are dependent on your distance and height in relation to the antennae. One hand controls volume and the other controls the notes and keys, and it can be adjusted in pitch and octave with switches on the side. Basically, the first thing sound you’d think of as a classic U.F.O. noise is the sound it produces, a sort of ghostly, supernatural sounding cry, which can sound beautiful if played by a talented player, but for now, remains a cool musical way to show the extraterrestrial nature of the film. It also has some beautifully sung tunes, the last we’d hear from The Peanuts in the series, in a song called “Let’s Try to Be Happy”, which has two parts. They were a powerful musical aspect of the films that were never quite replicated, and their contributions to the introduction of Mothra solidly cemented her theme as that of the Queen of the Monsters, escorted at all times by two talented twins.
All around, Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster is a fantastic movie. It keeps the tonal perfection of Vs. Mothra, still serious and tense but filled with humor and fun moments in a way that doesn’t feel intrusive, it introduced Ghidorah as the Big Bad of the series, and we finally get the first monster team-up in the series. It’s one of the greatest films in the whole series, let alone the era, and I believe it’s the point that cemented what Godzilla would be for years to come.
Continued in Showa Godzilla Part 2 (1965-1969): Decline of the King.
