G: minus 13 days

Gojirathon is me just writing up some thoughts about the movies I see while I conduct my little marathon of Godzilla-movies in anticipation of the new Hollywood retooling. Why Gojirathon and not Godzillathon? Well, because Rolfe already did his Godzillathon as part of his Monster Madness, and I don’t want to steal his work. I’ll be using the terms, G, Big G, Godzilla and Gojira somewhat interchangeably… since I can be a bit lazy at times, when it comes to these things.

Godzilla vs Gigan(1972)

Oh, dear. Oh, dear. This is simultaneously both silly beyond measure and yet somehow strangely appropriate.

Apparently. According to imdb trivia . When Tomoyuki Tanaka, the guy in charge of the Godzilla series production at the time saw the Hedorah film, he was so angry that he said that Yoshimitsu Banno had ruined the franchise with his directorial approach to that film. Of course that’s not what I mean by silly and appropriate. Because that came in this entry… Godzilla and Angirus (I never knew they were that bestest of pals) communicate with each other… Through speech bubbles.

Yes. That was mr Tanaka’s solution to rectify the damage of the Smog Monster. To make Godzilla and Angirus speek. And according to a comment in the same movie-bible… The english version featured “what sound like two elderly chain-smoking Jewish wrestlers. “ as the voices. Luckily I saw this film in it’s original japanese version. With strange record-scratching goofy sounds as voices and Japanese speech-bubbles.

The film itself is kind of standard godzilla film fare. Strange people build a theme-park for children as a front for their nefarious ways to bring peace to the humans. Because of course they aren’t human themselves. They are hyperintelligent cockroach-aliens from the M-nebula who only use the skins of recently deceased humans as uniforms to fool them into believing their ruse. How many alien races have we encountered by now? Let’s see. There’s the princess from jupiters moon. The X-people from the same vincinity… Oh and the Kilaakians from Destroy all monsters. And now there’s the cockroaches.

And yet again King Ghidorah finds himself under the control of these aliens. Poor Ghidorah. Never can he get a break and just get to attack the earth under using his own plans. And with him we get Gigan from the title. Not really one of my favorite of monsters. Giant claws for hands. and a buzz-saw on his chest. A device that I always found strange because he would basically need to get into reaching-distance for it it to work. Oh well. The humans bust up the aliens in the Godzilla Tower on the themepark (because of course that’s where they would have their HQ). And Godzilla and Angirus proceed to beat Ghidorah and Gigan into submission until they flee back into space.

Yeah. If it weren’t for the speech-bubbles this movie wouldn’t really have made that great of an impact in my marathon. Oh, and yeah. Now it starts to get a bit gritty, as when Gigan  attacks, we see actual spurts of blood. And Godzilla spends the latter half of the final fight with his face drenched in his own blood. Now let’s see what’s in store for us in the next one… Godzilla vs Megalon!

Be seeing you!