The most influential Creature Feature of the 1950s, Godzilla, King of the Monsters was the retitled Japanese film Gojira, edited and reshot to suit American tastes. The original film had been a powerful allegory on the destruction of war and the horrors of nuclear weapons, themes that resonated in the Japanese soul. As residents of the only nation to have experienced the effects of atomic weapons used in anger, not to mention the far more destructive, and deadly, firebombing campaign waged against Japanese cities by the US Army Air Force barely a decade earlier, the Japanese people had an intense, and understandable, emotional reaction to the modern concept of total war. The monster Gojira symbolized that awesome force unleashed upon the cities of Japan, just as it was during the war.

    Obviously, such themes wouldn’t play well to American audiences. To the American public, the atomic bomb not only brought an end to the Second World War without the need for an invasion of the Japanese home islands, an invasion that was projected to cost hundreds of thousands of American lives, but provided the deterrent that kept the United States safe from the Reds. They wouldn’t have been receptive to the Japanese viewpoint, and when low-budget producer Dick Kay purchased the US rights to the Japanese film in 1956, it was with the understanding that it would need a great deal of work to transform it into a movie to which domestic audiences would respond.

    Kay purchased the film for $30,000 and spent another $70,000 on editing, dubbing, and filming new footage to replace what he had trimmed out of the original film. He hired Terry Morse, best known for the 1945 film Fog Island, to shoot the new footage and edit it into the existing film. Raymond Burr, whose biggest role prior to Godzilla, King of the Monsters had been that of the killer, Lars Thorvald, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), was cast as Steve Martin, an American reporter in Japan covering the attack of the giant monster. The new footage was shot in one week, and post-production took an additional ten weeks .

    The movie opens with scenes of a destroyed city. Tokyo, Japan has been laid waste; a survivor lies bleeding in the wreckage, an American reporter, Steve Martin (Burr). We flash back to his arrival in Japan, to an intact Tokyo. He, along with all the passengers on his flight, had been detained for questioning, to determine if they had seen anything unusual in the ocean below them. The Japanese authorities are investigating a series of mysterious ship disappearances that are plaguing their maritime industry, with no evidence and no survivors. Those who have been rescued died shortly thereafter, but not before reporting that there was a blinding flash of light, and that the sea began to boil around the lost ships.

    Of course, the questioning piqued Martin’s reporter’s curiosity, causing him to start covering the story. He joins an expedition headed to Odo Island, the closest land to the location of the ship disasters. The expedition finds the Odo islanders to be primitives, believing in a giant monster named Godzilla. In the past, the islanders had sacrificed a young girl annually to the great beast, sending her out to sea in a small boat. They believe that the monster is responsible for the recent sinkings, though the authorities ridicule their beliefs despite the presence of gigantic footprints in the shoreline, footprints that are highly radioactive, and contain living trilobites, prehistoric insects previously seen only in fossil form. The doubts about the islanders suspicions cease however, when Godzilla appears off the coast of Odo.

    The confirmation of the monster’s existence puts the Japanese defense forces in high gear. As their Maritime Defense Force began scouring the seas for Godzilla, the Air and Ground forces began preparing for the inevitable attack on Japan itself. High tension electrical wires were strung around Tokyo, intended to stop Godzilla by electrocution. Martin gathers with the rest of the Press Corps to await the attack, ready to share the news with the rest of the world. They haven’t long to wait. Soon, Godzilla comes ashore in Tokyo Bay, and quickly breaks through the electrical barrier. Soon, the gigantic beast has fought his way to the heart of the city, and Steve Martin records what he believes will be his last report, as the press building collapses around him.

    More than any other “creature feature” of the 1950s, Godzilla, King of the Monsters left a lasting impression on audiences, both in Japan and in the US. As of 2024’s Godzilla Minus One, no fewer than thirty-eight movies have been made featuring Godzilla, with no end to the franchise in sight. That impact on popular culture has outweighed every other Horror or Science-Fiction franchise that originated in the decade of the ‘50s.

    Of course I had heard of Godzilla before my Kiddie-Show introduction. A faithful reader of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Forrest J Ackerman (no period after the middle initial, for some reason) had told me in a number of articles about the greatest monster in Toho’s stable. I had watched most of the giant monsters that had followed Godzilla’s success, the American ones, at least. So, by the summer of my tenth year, I was ready, even eager, to meet the Big Guy himself.

    Even though that first exposure to Godzilla on film wasn’t the classic Japanese original, or even the heavily-edited US release, with Raymond Burr dropped in to help “Americanize” the movie, it didn’t matter. I was completely captivated by what seemed to be the ultimate expression of the ‘50s Sci-Fi giant creatures that I loved so much. Even at that stage of my life, movies such as The Deadly Mantis and It Came from Beneath the Sea were some of my favorites, yet they paled in comparison to the Godzilla of Invasion of the Astro-Monster, the first Godzilla film I ever saw.

    Objectively, Invasion… is only a lower-middle tier Kaijû film, not to be compared to 1954’s Gojira. However, I hadn’t yet seen Gojira in 1974, and a ten-year-old Unimonster was blown away by the spectacle of not one, not two, but four giant monsters doing battle. Throw in aliens and spaceships, and it was as though it was designed with me in mind. I would quickly see more Japanese monsters on the screen of the Regency Rocking Chair Twin Theater. Godzilla, Gappa, Rodan, Gamera … at that point they were undifferentiated by studio. Among my friends and I, they were simply Giant Japanese Monsters.

    However unconcerned we were with the studio that produced the movies, we all agreed that Godzilla was the undisputed King of them all. As the years went on and I became more cognizant of the differences between the films of Toho, Daiei, and Nikkatsu studios, Godzilla’s supremacy became fixed in my mind. Both qualitatively and quantitatively, Godzilla reigned over the universe of Kaijû.