Godzilla On My Mind

I recently checked Godzilla On My Mind: 50 Years of the King of Monsters by William Tsutsui, a Japanese-American from Texas, out of the library. It's exactly the kind of book I yearned for as a kid going through my Japanese monster movies phase: a full-length text by a lifelong, devoted fan of the genre who knows all sorts of geeky trivia. Well, I'm enjoying it just as much now, since my Godzilla film obsession (particularly those of the Showa era, the ones following from the original serious 1954 Gojira and eventually descending into camp and self-parody) has recently made a significant comeback. (I'm collecting the films one by one off E-bay in chronological order; Godzilla's Revenge is next on the list.) There's a funny photo in the book of Tsutsui as a grade-school kid wearing a homemade Godzilla costume that he coerced his mother into making him for Halloween.

I have always found fascinating the sort of pop-cultural exchange program that's gone on for decades now between American and Japan (with a similar one between America and England). The makers of Godzilla were admittedly influenced by American movies like King Kong and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. The original Godzilla has even been referred to as a thinly veiled Japanese remake of the latter film, which came out only a year before. But in Tsutsui's words, "Compared to The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (or even, if I may be sacrilegious, to the great Kong), the message of the original Godzilla film is so much more nuanced, the special effects so different, and the emotions stirred so much more profound that any charges of cinematic plagiarism seem all but irrelevant."

The name Gojira itself (anglicized as Godzilla when the film hit the American market) is a combination of the words gorira (gorilla) and kujira (whale) despite the fact that Godzilla resembles neither of these mammals. It is said of Nakajima Haruo, the man who played Godzilla inside the urethane foam suit, that he "could spend no more than a few minutes at a time sealed within the costume" and that "technicians regularly poured a cup of Nakajima's sweat out of the suit between takes and the actor reported losing 20 pounds of weight during the shoot." Most interesting to me is that Ifukube Akira, the composer who made the soundtrack for the film, came up with Godzilla's distinctive ear-splitting roar by "drawing a leather glove across the strings of a contrabass and manipulating the resulting sound in an echo chamber."

Fascinating stuff!