Godzilla: Lizard of Peace

If you grew up with a taste for schlocky science fiction and horror flicks with creatures so laughably silly and so obviously a human in a rubber suit, then you'll be familiar with the Japanese import: Godzilla. Actually, you'd have to be a real cultural hermit not to have at least heard of this mutant lizard. Think Godzilla and you'll probably imagine bad dubbing and cheesy special effects--just the very formula that has made him a lovable lizard and added to his longevity.

As a celebration of this scaly guy scaling to the heights of true low culture icon, surviving fifty years of celluloid, the uncut Japanese version is showing on the. art house circuit. You'd think you'd know a lounging lizard after 50 years, but once you take a look at his silver screen debut you see just how low the lizard has slithered

You might think, that's what can happen when the original is followed by an industry of endless sequels. Does anyone want to see another Rocky? In this reptilian case, so many sequels were churned out that the character of the monster has changed, the quality hasn't been an obstacle and there were even alternative realities.

But when Takeo Murata and Ishiro Honda wrote the script for the 1954 movie, the official American Occupation of post-World War II Japan had just terminated in 1952. Tokyo and other areas of Japan had been extensively fire bombed and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were recovering as the first two cities ever demolished by atomic bombs.

While Americans were celebrating the awesome power of the A-bomb and practicing duck-and-cover drills as if such a bomb were no more than a slight 3.0 tremor of the earth, the Japanese were uneasily watching the development of greater weapons of mass destruction, uneasily situated close to both China and the USSR. They felt the chill of the Cold War and had, perhaps more than any other country, a concept of the terrible force unleashed when one splits atoms. In November of 1952, the first H-bomb dropped at the Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands. And by 1954, another H-bomb was detonated at the Bikini Atoll.

Article Author: Purple Tigress

Former theater critic for the LA Weekly and Los Angeles Times . For the last five years, an editing slave at a dot-com but recently laid off. Currently an under-employed freelance writer and artist.

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