We all know in our hearts that Godzilla is the king of monsters, but although the towering
creature has been a fixture on our screens for decades, there's still plenty of stuff
most people don't know about the history of the franchise. Here's the untold truth of
Godzilla.
Given that he's largely known for starring in a series of cheapie creature features,
it's easy to forget Godzilla was originally intended as a heavy-handed and fairly blunt
metaphor for the dangers of nuclear weapons. As the scars of World War II have faded, this
aspect of Godzilla's character has been toned down somewhat in favor of showing the Big
G backhanding creatures from a city block away with his tail. This said, Godzilla's
roots are still subtly represented in his character design—specifically his skin.
The original Godzilla suit, which has served as the basis of every iteration of the character
since, was directly inspired by the horrific burns and scars of the unfortunate souls who
survived the nuclear blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was done to serve as a constant
reminder that Godzilla was born as a direct result of a nuclear weapons test. It also
possibly explains why he screams so much, since it suggests he's in near constant pain.
Watching some of the fight scenes in his earlier movies, you'd be forgiven for thinking that
Godzilla's entire fighting style revolves around throwing clumsy claw swipes and haphazard
tail swings at his enemies. You know, except for that one time he dominates Megalon with
a dropkick delivered at Mach 3 with the help of Jet Jaguar. As it turns out, though, Godzilla
actually fought using more grace than most would give him credit for—and in fact, technically
has a black belt in Judo.
The actor who first played Godzilla, Haruo Nakajima, became so accustomed to the weight
and limitations of the Godzilla suit that he was largely given free rein to script and
choreograph all of his own fight scenes. Nakajima, who had a black belt in Judo, spent many years
perfecting Godzilla's fighting style, basing it mainly on Judo and adapting for Godzilla's
ambling bulk and large, lizardy girth. This is why if you watch early films in which Nakajima
played Godzilla, you'll notice he seems to favor choke holds and throws, supplemented
by blasts of atomic fire breath—something we're sure would be a part of actual Judo
if it was possible.
In his original movie incarnation Godzilla stood about 164 feet tall, and has gotten
steadily taller with each reboot of the franchise, more than doubling in height to about 390
feet tall in the latest Japanese film. You're probably thinking that increasing Godzilla's
height has a lot to do with the ever-increasing size of modern buildings—and you'd be right,
but there's slightly more to it than that.
In the original 1954 movie, a conscious decision was made that Godzilla had to be just slightly
taller than every building he appeared next to. The idea behind this being that Godzilla
would be visible on the city's skyline no matter where you were, making him an ever-present
threat. To make this possible, buildings that were taller than Godzilla at the time were
deliberately scaled down further than others when constructing miniatures.
As the skyline of Japan got bigger, so did Godzilla, although this idea dropped by the
wayside for more recent movies, as making Godzilla the size of modern skyscrapers would
make him too big—a problem we wouldn't think anyone would care about until we heard that
prior to the release of the 2014 movie, hundreds of people called the new design fat.
Next to the Wilhelm scream and that stock noise of a dolphin you always seem to hear
in terrible movies, no noise in cinematic history is as recognizable as Godzilla's roar.
Initially created by rubbing a leather glove along the strings of a bass guitar, the original
recording of the roar is safely kept in Toho's offices, occasionally being used to serve
as the basis of an updated version.
Using the method used to create the original roar as a starting point, the sound designers
for the 2014 movie worked in secret to create the new, updated Godzilla roar. If you look
in the art book released alongside the movie, Godzilla: The Art of Destruction, they tell
you exactly how they did it — They used the sound of dry ice on a metal vent, some
crunching rocks and the noise made by a wooden crate being dragged across a polished floor.
When the sound engineers had the final version of the roar, they got in contact with the
Rolling Stones and asked to borrow the speakers they used on tour, then played the roar through
them as loudly as possible. The resulting noise was so loud it shook windows for several
blocks and caused a terrified executive at Universal Studios three miles away to call
and ask what was going on.
Since we've talked about the 2014 Godzilla movie, we might as well talk about the 1998
one too—and share the fact that Toho hated it so much, they changed the canon of the
franchise to erase it from existence.
As bad as the reaction to the 1998 film was in the west, in Japan it was so, so much worse.
One of the actors who actually played Godzilla, Kenpachiro Satsuma, went so far as to walk
out of an early screening, angrily telling everyone present,
"It's not Godzilla, it doesn't have his spirit."
Along with its unappealing design, many Japanese critics pointed out that it didn't make sense
that a creature birthed by a nuclear explosion seemed afraid of missiles shot from helicopters.
When rights to the franchise reverted back to Toho after TriStar wisely chose not to
try making a sequel to the 1998 movie, the company started a systematic campaign to wipe
it out of official Godzilla history. The company started by dubbing the creature "Zilla" as
a nod to TriStar taking, quote, "the god out of Godzilla," then put it into the film Godzilla:
Final Wars, where it was unceremoniously clubbed to death by the real Godzilla.
You'd assume based on the fact he's destroyed Tokyo half a dozen times in his movies, creates
earthquakes with his every step and is a giant atomic lizard, the city wouldn't really be
a big fan of Godzilla. However, the city not only loves their resident radioactive reptile,
they've bestowed several unique honors upon him, granting him official Japanese citizenship
and even offering him a job as the tourism ambassador for the Shujinko district.
Though positioned mostly as a PR move, Shujinko officials nonetheless went out of their way
to make Godzilla's citizenship and job offer legitimate—or as legitimate as they can
be, given he's a big fictional lizard. Along with releasing an official copy of his citizenship
papers to the public as a souvenir, Godzilla was awarded a nice sash in honor of his contributions
to Japanese culture, which a guy in costume accepted on his behalf. Shujinko were so pleased
at Godzilla accepting the position of tourism ambassador that they built a giant statue
of him.
Although he weighs several thousand tons, is several dozen stories tall and has tiny,
almost comically stubby arms, Godzilla is surprisingly agile for his size. The exact
extent of his ability varies from movie to movie, with arguably the greatest and most
unexpected demonstration of his agility occurring in the 1971 movie Godzilla vs Hedorah.
Using his atomic breath, Godzilla can propel himself through the air at several hundred
miles per hour. Along with increasing Godzilla's aerial combat capabilities exponentially and
melting minds with its sheer stupidity, the feat raises some serious questions about just
how powerful Godzilla's atomic breath is if it can produce enough force to propel him
through the air. The folks over at the YouTube channel Death Battle actually worked this
out and figured out that his breath produced about 328 trillion pounds of force per square
inch.
With the exception of American remakes and a few scenes in Shin Godzilla, Godzilla has
almost universally been created using the tried and true guy-in-big-rubber-suit method.
Over the years, the suits worn by the actors portraying the radioactive reptile have gotten
increasingly sophisticated—which is probably a good thing, since early suits nearly killed
the men wearing them.
As recounted in the 2004 behind-the-scenes documentary Bringing Godzilla Down to Size,
it kind of sucked for the actors who've had the honor of stepping into the suit's big
rubber boots. Along with being uncomfortable, cumbersome and unflattering on the thighs,
the suit was almost unthinkably heavy, with early versions weighing roughly 220 pounds.
This made even walking in the suit an almost herculean feat, and the actors explained that
they frequently became dangerously dehydrated.
For stunt scenes, particularly ones involving water, the suit posed an especially significant
hazard; both Nakajima and Satsuma noted that they were almost killed doing water-based
stunts. Nakajima has reported that he had a particular distaste for water stunts because
he knew the other actors peed in the pool.
Godzilla is so powerful that we think of him as invincible — no matter the obstacle,
we're always seeing the same towering monster rampaging through the city and besting his
foes. One piece of less common knowledge is that Godzilla has actually died several times.
While he has come back from the grave on occasion, he's permanently died more than once. What
does this mean for the franchise's continuity? Simply put, it isn't one monster with different
designs running through the Toho series, but multiple members of the same species, all
called Godzilla. While it's known that Godzilla's species can have multiple members, it's less
commonly known that the Toho films also feature different Godzillas rather than a single character.
First and foremost, in the original 1954 Godzilla, King of the Monsters was famously defeated
by the Oxygen Destroyer weapon, killing him and leaving nothing but bones.
"People of the world, Godzilla is dead."
Characters speculate that there could be another Godzilla out there, but when Godzilla reemerges
in Godzilla Raids Again it's a brand new, entirely different member of his species,
setting the template for subsequent appearances.
2016's Shin Godzilla is the first and only film so far of its continuity, reimagining
Godzilla as a new form of rapidly evolving organism, a kind of prehistoric marine animal
whose evolutionary journey is kicked off by nuclear waste on the ocean floor. The film
depicts Godzilla as an aggressive and increasingly powerful creature who evolves rapidly into
a succession of different forms culminating in its fourth, a massive hulking monstrosity
that devastates Tokyo until, in the middle of an unfinished fifth evolution, he's exposed
to a massive amount of blood coagulant that freezes him solid.
The ending of the film starts to show the form that Godzilla had been evolving into,
his body opening to expose a number of smaller, humanoid entities. According to the Art of
Shin Godzilla book and other official publications, the fifth form was intended to have new powers
like indefinite self-division, while being able to regenerate from the smallest particle.
While it's difficult to say if there will be a direct sequel to Shin Godzilla to take
this story further, it has intriguing possibilities for the franchise as a whole.
Godzilla is the star of a multimedia empire that covers everything from film and television
to video games and comic books — including a brief stint as a Marvel Comics star that
saw the colossal creature fight a host of superheroes. Between 1977 and 1979, Marvel
Comics published 24 issues of Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Notably, this series saw
the first time he touched down on U.S. soil, and had Godzilla lock in combat with a number
of monsters and Marvel characters.
Godzilla's comics history runs through an array of companies. After the character's
stint at Marvel, publishing rights changed hands to Dark Horse Comics and, eventually,
IDW Publishing. In 2015 IDW launched a five-issue series written by multiple authors and illustrators
called Godzilla in Hell, which sees the massive beast fall into the mouth of Hell. In each
issue, he fights otherworldly original kaiju or variants of his own cast of demonic creatures.
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