G: minus 11 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 Mechagodzilla(1974)

Ok, I might have said in the last post that Megalon was one of the laziest of the enemies. But finally, today I witnessed the silliest of them. King Ceasar!

First time I saw anything of King C was in Final Wars where he had his ears flopping around like a silly dog and was using Angirus as a football against Godzilla. I burst out laughing then and was on the brink of laughter when I saw that he made an appearance in this film.

But the title isn’t Godzilla vs King Ceasar. It’s Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla. The G-series first entry in the fine japanese tradition of taking a popular entity, making it robotic (or cyborg as they say in the dubtitles here) and slapping “mecha-” in front of its name. So what is Mechagodzilla when you get past it’s obviously derivative name? Well. It is the product of ape-men from Black Hole Planet 3.  Yes, another strange race of aliens wielding a giant foe for the big G. And they modeled their own creation on the greatest fighting force on earth they could find. And made it a robot. Because, of course!

So, after brutally breaking the jaw of Angirus (holy crap!) it encounters King Ceasar who is basically a humanoid version of Mothra. He even has his own cult of islanders who need to wake him up by singing pop-songs on the beach. After his musical needs are pleased with the performance he teams up with Godzilla to take on the mechanized menace. And the brutality continues as Godzilla spurts geysers of blood as he is hit by MechaGodzillas weapons. But the forces of good prevail. King Ceasar goes back into his cave and Godzilla returns to the sea until the next film with MechaGodzilla, called simply Terror of Mechagodzilla and then the Showa era came to an end out of sheer exhaustion.

Oh, and there’s the human plot involving scientists, agents of Interpol, and a pipe that can conveniently destroy electronics. Yes, a smoking pipe, electronics worst foe! But who really cares at this point. It’s the aliens and giant monsters that we came to see.

Be seeing you!

PS/

Oh, and this marks the halfway point of my marathon. At least if I don’t count  Always: Sunset on Third Street 2 [2007] Wohoo!