Even if you've never seen a Godzilla movie, you know who Godzilla is. But as kaiju diehards know,
Godzilla isn't the only monster on the roster of Toho Pictures, which launched the franchise back
in 1954. Let's head to Monster Island and explore some of Godzilla's less-known friends and foes.
A perennial background player in Toho's kaiju films for more than a half-century,
Manda's long, serpentine body and facial horns and barbs suggest a connection to
Japanese sea dragons of mythology and folklore. Manda's screen debut came in 1963's Atragon,
but the snaky beast kept largely off-screen until the film's final third,
where it tangled underwater with the flying submarine Gotengo.
Atragon is essentially Manda's most substantial film role. However, a land-dwelling, physically
restructured version of the sea creature popped up five years later in the 1968 kaiju rally Destroy
All Monsters, where it laid waste to London before teaming with Godzilla to tackle New York City.
Manda was then featured in an extended cameo in 2004's Godzilla: Final Wars,
where it again battled the Gotengo before finding itself on the wrong end of a laser cannon.
Though always the bridesmaid on film, Manda enjoyed more substantive appearances in
numerous Godzilla-related video games and comic books, including IDW's Godzilla: Rulers of Earth.
Ebirah was a colossal crustacean that guarded a South Pacific island in 1966's Godzilla vs.
the Sea Monster, which was originally issued in Japan as Ebirah, Horror of the Deep. Though
a considerable threat to anyone attempting to gain access to or leave the movie’s fictional
Letchi Island, Ebirah's signature weapon — its elongated claws –- were no match for Godzilla,
who simply tore off his opponent's pincers and sent the super shrimp back to the ocean depths.
Much of Ebirah's subsequent career at Toho seems to have been left in
the planning stage. In Sea Monster, Ebirah was originally slated to fight King Kong,
but American co-producers Rankin-Bass -– the stop-motion holiday animation
specialists –- withdrew from the project, leaving Toho to replace the ape with Godzilla.
Ebirah was also slated to appear in Destroy All Monsters, but the big lobster was eventually
dropped from the script, and the monster's brief turn in 1969's All Monsters Attack
(aka Godzilla's Revenge) was simply recycled footage from Sea Monster.
Ebirah finally returned to the spotlight in Godzilla: Final Wars,
though its appearance was anything but flattering,
with the creature's attack on an oil refinery being thwarted by the film's mutant soldiers.
Kamacuras was actually the name of three stupendous praying mantises that menaced
both Godzilla and his offspring, Minya, in the 1967 movie Son of Godzilla. The
creatures -– impressive marionette creations by the film's special effects director,
Sadamasa Arikawa –- were first glimpsed as man-sized mantises on a remote island
before a radioactive storm caused them to grow to more than 50 meters in length.
Three king-sized Kamacuras, called Gimantis in the English-language dub of Son of Godzilla,
then tormented the newly hatched Minya before Godzilla arrived to
fry two of them with his atomic breath while the third was dispatched by the
island's other monstrous arthropod inhabitant, the spider Kumonga.
Single and multiple marionette Kamacuras also appeared briefly in All Monsters Attack and
1972's Godzilla vs. Gigan before a CGI Kamacuras turned up in Godzilla: Final Wars.
In this film, the creature was seen to possess the same camouflage abilities as
real-life mantises –- not that it helped Kamacuras,
as the insect was quickly sussed out by Godzilla and skewered on a transmission tower.
Kamacuras wasn't the only insect bedeviling Godzilla, Minya, and the human stars of Son
of Godzilla. Hidden inside a rocky valley was Kumonga, a 150-foot spider with an appetite for
anything that crosses its path. Once awakened, Kumonga ensnared Minya and a Kamacuras in its
thick, sticky web (which, unlike most spiders, jetted out from its mouth,
not its spinnerets) and dispatched the mantis with its creepy, stabbing stinger.
Minya appeared next on the menu until Godzilla came to the rescue. The ensuing brawl was one
of the film's best displays of special effects and, undoubtedly, one of its most challenging,
as the Kumonga marionette required two to three technicians to operate the wires on each of
its eight legs. Eventually, a combined blast of atomic breath from father and son brought down the
spider, but it –- or a close relative — was back in 1968 for Destroy All Monsters, where it teamed
with Mothra to coat King Ghidorah in webbing during the film's concluding battle royale.
Kumonga's final screen appearance to date was in Godzilla: Final Wars, where it displayed
a new talent — a web that expanded from a single strand to a net. This did little to
stop Godzilla, who simply grabbed hold of Kumonga's web and hurled him out of sight.
One of the hardest-working monsters in Toho's stable of kaiju, the burrowing,
flame ray-breathing dinosaur Baragon has appeared in numerous features and television
series over the past half-century, though it's been incognito for some of those turns.
Baragon made its debut in 1966's Frankenstein vs. Baragon (or Frankenstein Conquers the World,
as it's known in the States). The monster served as a replacement for Godzilla,
who was initially intended to face off against Toho's take on Frankenstein's monster
before production changes necessitated a change-up.
Baragon then returned to Toho for 1968's Destroy All Monsters, though its screen time was limited.
Why? Well, according to some accounts, it was due to the monster's most distinguishing feature — its
long, floppy ears. The movie's special effects team was concerned that this particular aspect
of the head design would make it difficult to execute the monster's showcase sequence,
in which it tunneled under and destroyed the Arc de Triomphe in Paris,
so Baragon was relegated to the background while Gorosaurus,
a dinosaur from 1969's King Kong Escapes, got the big scene instead.
In the ensuing decades, Baragon remained a popular figure in countless Godzilla-related manga,
novels, and video games, but it wouldn't return to feature work until 2001, when the creature
helped to defend Japan against a rampaging Godzilla in Giant Monsters All-Out Attack.
Gabara is the Nelson Muntz of Toho's roster of monsters –- a mean-spirited
bully with a distinctive mocking laugh and a penchant for pounding on smaller creatures.
"Are you alright, man?"
"Uh, I think so."
"How about now?"
Gabara is featured in just one film, the truly eccentric All Monsters Attack (aka Godzilla's
Revenge), and even that's not 100% real. As it turns out, he was part of a daydream about
Monster Island concocted by the film's protagonist, a young boy named Ichiro.
A latchkey kid plagued by a grade-school goon he nicknames "Gabara," Ichiro escapes from reality
by imagining himself on Monster Island, where he's befriended by Godzilla's offspring, Minya.
The pint-sized kaiju also has to contend with its own tormentor, similarly named Gabara,
who's a reptilian/amphibian jerk of a monster with the ability to transmit an electric shock to his
victims. With Ichiro's help and some tough-love encouragement from Godzilla, Minya is able to
best Gabara, which gives Ichiro the strength to take down his own Gabara back in the real world.
As Godzilla grew in power to a seemingly indestructible force of nature,
some of his onscreen opponents tapped into his
incredible mutated biology in order to create a means of defeating the creature.
As a result, several monsters have been directly spawned from Godzilla's cellular structure.
For example, there's the colossal plant monster Biollante in Godzilla vs. Biollante,
the extraterrestrial clone SpaceGodzilla in Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla, and Orga,
a creature formed from DNA data stolen by alien invaders in Godzilla 2000: Millennium.
In that latter film, the overly complicated premise involves extraterrestrial visitors
known as the Millennians that see Godzilla's regenerative properties as
the key to adapting to Earth's environment and, eventually, overtaking the planet.
The absorption of Godzilla's DNA allows the aliens to combine their form into a single,
towering squid creature, which then undergoes a mutation into a hideously deformed replica
of Godzilla called Orga. Since it possesses both Godzilla's strength and indestructibility,
the new creature is able to not only fend off the King of the
Monsters but also grow large enough to attempt to swallow his opponent.
This proves to be a fatal mistake for Orga,
who's blown to smithereens when Godzilla unleashes a nuclear pulse from inside his maw.
Toho's giant monster films began to falter at the box office during the 1970s,
due in part to the wealth of science fiction and fantasy series on television like Ultraman. So,
moving its own fantasy and sci-fi titles to TV was the next logical step, and in 1973,
the studio introduced the world to Zone Fighter.
Hewing to the template established by Ultraman and other series,
Zone Fighter's heroic family of aliens battled an army of "Terror-Beasts," which
involved one character morphing into the show's titular champion, the colossal Zone Fighter.
And when things got tough, he would get an occasional assist from Godzilla.
The King of the Monsters made his series debut in the fourth episode
and would return for four additional episodes.
Zone Fighter also featured two guest villain shots by King Ghidorah, though surprisingly, the space
dragon didn't fight Godzilla in either episode -- not that Zone Fighter really needed his help.
If the name of this giant man-beast isn't ringing a bell, that's because
it never appeared in a Godzilla movie.
Yetrigar was featured in Marvel Comics' Godzilla,
King of the Monsters comic book, which ran from 1977 to 1979. And during the series' 24-issue run,
writer Doug Moench and celebrated Incredible Hulk artist Herb Trimpe created an entirely new
universe for the radioactive monster to trample, complete with a fresh, terrifying rogues' gallery.
Some of Godzilla's comic book opponents came from Marvel's existing bullpen.
Godzilla battled the Avengers, the Fantastic Four,
Spider-Man, and even Devil Dinosaur and Moon Boy over the course of the series.
Others, however, were created specifically for the title, like Yetrigar, a Sasquatch-styled
behemoth freed from an icy tomb in Canada by atomic testing, which also boosted his height to
over 100 feet. Godzilla battled the monster over the course of two issues before it was defeated in
a climactic battle deep inside the Grand Canyon, but that wasn't the end of Yetrigar's Marvel run.
The hairy creature would tangle with both the Avengers and the West Coast Avengers
before being transported to the super secret maximum security prison known as the Vault,
where he apparently sits, biding his time, to this day.
The 2007 video game Godzilla: Unleashed offered players their
choice of more than 20 of Toho's monsters to take control of for the sake of, well,
unleashing chaos. The developers also padded out the game's roster
of classic creatures with two new entities designed specifically for the game itself.
One of them, a bipedal mutant monster called Obsidius that was created from
magma and minerals, was included after being
selected from a group of four possible kaiju by readers of IGN in a 2007 poll.
The faceless brute of a creature was given a wide array of abilities, including a lava beam,
which is fitting given his original name of "Magmouth." In the Playstation 2 version of
the game, Obsidius was also granted the ability to absorb some of the life force from his opponents.
Obsidius was the only new monster to appear in both the Wii and Playstation
2 versions of Godzilla: Unleashed, which also remains his sole showcase to date.
And that's a shame because this bizarre creature is pretty awesome. It'll probably never happen,
but here's hoping we'll see him on the big screen someday.
Perhaps the best thing to come from the much-maligned 1998 Godzilla movie was Godzilla:
The Series, an animated sci-fi adventure that ran for 40 episodes between 1998 and 2001.
The show's Godzilla –- the sole surviving offspring of the one
featured in the TriStar film –- was closer in both temperament and ability to the Toho kaiju,
possessing both an aggressive attitude and the ability to spew an fiery atomic breath.
The show also featured an impressive array of beasts for the junior Godzilla to fight,
including the Loch Ness Monster, the Aztec feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl,
and numerous mutated creatures, including giant squid, rats, bees, worms, snakes,
bats, jellyfish, lizards of all types, and even a king-sized hummingbird that could spit acid!
The cartoon Godzilla also enjoyed a romance of sorts with another colossal lizard –- a
giant Komodo dragon called Komodithrax –- and briefly attempted to play house with
the creature and its giant egg before their love nest was spoiled by a giant turtle.
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