Godzilla Raids Again Aka Gigantis: the Fire Monster

Information technology was disheartening to sum upward the recent Godzilla anime trilogy, the only Japanese Godzilla films I never plan to rewatch. Even with the Hollywood mega-millions epic Godzilla: King of the Monsters only a few months abroad, the feeling of deflation within my favorite pic franchise made information technology necessary for me to plug a flake of hope into my schedule immediately. Non by watching a bang-up Godzilla moving-picture show, listen you, merely by watching a mediocre Godzilla film. Why? Because it'south the best way to recollect how fifty-fifty lesser entries in the series can offer some enjoyment. Like watching Godzilla really move. This is a radical concept the anime filmmakers let slip past them.

Thus I nowadays Godzilla Raids Again , a eye-of-the-road G-movie that's mostly faded into obscurity despite its prime position every bit the showtime Godzilla sequel.

To engagement, Toho Studios has released xxx-ii feature-length Godzilla films. In any serial with such longevity, a few installments sideslip off the pop culture radar. But information technology's most never the second movie that suffers this fate. The get-go sequel to a boom hit, regardless of quality, is a major outcome. The many films that come after are where the gray of oblivion sets in.

All the same Godzilla Raids Once again , released in 1955 only half-dozen months after the original, is 1 of the least seen of the Showa Era Godzilla movies. Many viewers outside Japan are unaware information technology exists. If they are, they may not know it'southward a Godzilla flick at all because information technology was released in the U.s.a. and much of the rest of the world equally Gigantis the Fire Monster . Godzilla'southward proper name not only vanished from the title, information technology vanished from the dubbing. Not until 2006 did a Due north American DVD containing both the Japanese and U.s. versions bring the motion-picture show out with the classic monster's name reattached. The DVD producers digitally superimposed the title Godzilla Raids Again over the spot where Gigantis the Fire Monster once appeared … although the dubbing with the name "Gigantis" remained.

How Godzilla became Gigantis then pulled a cultural vanishing act is quite the tale. But let's first wait at the actual Godzilla Raids Again, which is its own strange story and a stopgap moment in the early history of the Japanese giant monster (kaiju) pic.

Godzilla Raids Also Quickly and Cheaply

Yep, Godzilla Raids Again premiered in Nippon a mere six months after the original. If that sounds like too fast a turnaround, you're correct. Iwao Mori, head of Toho Studios, told producer Tomoyuki Tanaka to beginning prepping a sequel after Godzilla had been in theaters for simply a week. The Toho brass wanted a quick greenbacks-in on the popularity of Godzilla and didn't foresee a long-running flick series.

With a rushed schedule, reduced budget, and key artistic personnel missing, the film that arrived in theaters half a yr later was … not fantastic. To be generous, information technology'south as good equally could be expected given the limitations. The box role receipts matched the picture: assisting, only unremarkable. Toho dropped Godzilla until 1962 and turned to other giant monsters and SF films, Rodan and The Mysterians , which were huge hits in 1956 and '57.

Few fans have much regard for Gojira no gyakushu ("Godzilla's Counterattack" or "Godzilla'due south Revenge"). The second and final Godzilla pic shot in black and white and i.33 aspect ratio, Godzilla Raids Again doesn't have much passion. The nuclear metaphor that made the original picture so memorable is dampened, and the human being story is poorly woven into the monster activity and trite on its own merits. When the monsters aren't on screen, a pall of ordinariness falls over everything.

On the plus side, this is the kickoff Godzilla motion picture to feature the famous monster fighting information technology out with another behemothic monster (Anguirus, a quadruped saurian with a horned shell), and some of the special furnishings sequences from Eiji Tsubaraya and his squad are impressive. The VFX department may have had less time to put together their effects, just they already had feel overcoming the difficulties of creating giant monster magic.

The tight production schedule meant a key figure in the success of Godzilla wasn't bachelor: managing director Ishiro Honda. Honda brought immense personal vision and earnestness to the first film, but he was already busy directing Love Tide for Toho. The studio had to find a replacement, and they picked journeyman manager Motoyoshi Oda. Information technology wasn't the right pick. Oda had trained in Toho's managing director program nether some of the greats, including Akira Kurosawa and Senkichi Taniguchi. But Oda's career was mired about entirely in programmers. Toho may have chosen him for Godzilla Raids Again considering he directed The Invisible Avenger in 1954 and had some feel with special furnishings. Oda didn't have Honda's investment in the textile (the rushed script didn't assistance) and he handled the direction with the same blandness equally if it were any other assignment from his undistinguished filmography.

Too AWOL is Godzilla composer Akira Ifukube. In his place is one of the great composers in Japanese cinema, Masaru Sato. However, Sato was early in his career, and remarked after in life that the score to this moving-picture show sounded like "a kid trying to learn." He'd later exercise great work for the Godzilla series, such equally the groove of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla and the tropical fun of Son of Godzilla . Just his music here is bearding and doesn't bring the commodities of energy or boom of doom the motion picture desperately needs.

The monster side of the story is easy to summarize and requires nigh no reference to the characters in the human being storyline. Another Godzilla (played once again by stuntman Haruo Nakajima), belonging to the same species every bit the one that perished in Tokyo Bay, is sighted on an island about Nihon. This second Godzilla is battling with another huge prehistoric monster, a spiked carapace beast called Anguirus, which has a phonetic similarity to the Japanese pronunciation of the dinosaur Ankylosaurus. (In some English sources, the monster'south name is spelled Angilas because of the ambiguity of the "R/Fifty" sound in Japanese; the difficult "R" sound doesn't be as a distinct phoneme in the language.)

Godzilla heads toward Osaka, and the metropolis braces for an assault. The military, after consulting with scientists who feel in that location's no hope to halt the monster, uses flares to distract Godzilla away from the populated port city. But three convicts escaping from a paddy wagon (a sequence that seems to phone in from some other movie) drive a gas tanker into a petroleum plant, igniting an explosion that lures Godzilla dorsum to shore.

As Godzilla makes landfall, so does Anguirus, and the ii monsters commence their titanic tussle while leveling the middle of the urban center — including its beautiful sixteenth-century castle, one of Japan's peachy landmarks. (Don't worry, it got rebuilt in fourth dimension for ninjas to railroad train there in You Just Live Twice .) Godzilla kills Anguirus with a vicious seize with teeth to the cervix and and so roasts the corpse with a radioactive smash. Satisfied with the victory, Godzilla wades dorsum out to sea, leaving Osaka a smoking ruin—although a much less impressive ruin than the wreckage of Tokyo in Godzilla .

The monster moves toward the northern island of Hokkaido. Japanese Self-Defense Force jets assail the monster on a snowfall-covered islet with high peaks. Unable to destroy Godzilla straight, they switch tactics to employ missiles to trigger an ice avalanche, which eventually buries the monster in a deep freeze, immobilizing it until King Kong vs. Godzilla seven years later.

The chief draw of Godzilla Raids Once more is the battle betwixt Godzilla and Anguirus — the first confrontation between two monsters in the history of Japanese movies. Information technology's a thrilling fight that holds up well confronting many after Godzilla spectaculars. The VFX crew was new at this type of action, but hurled themselves into making the battle as devastating to the models of Osaka as possible.

Anguirus is a wonderfully designed creature that exudes every bit much personality every bit Godzilla, a bit similar an aggressive but friendly domestic dog. This helped to turn Anguirus into i of the most pop supporting monsters in the series, usually as 1 of Godzilla'due south allies ( Godzilla vs. Gigan , Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla ). Katsumi Tezuka, the stunt performer in the Anguirus costume, had to walk on his knees when Anguirus moved on all fours, simply the staging and camerawork hide this, something the 1970s movies would handle far less adeptly.

The fight is choreographed in an animalistic mode much different from the later anthropomorphized monster battles. Godzilla and Anguirus lunge at each other in a fury of biting and clawing. At some points, the fight snaps into hasty hyper-move, apparently a fault by an inexperienced effects cameraman who set his camera at a lower speed. It ends up working surprisingly well as it comes as such a shock when the creatures appear to get fully ballistic vehement at each other

Effects main Eiji Tsubaraya devised ingenious camera angles to picture the fight, and the opticals mixing fleeing people with the destruction creates a tangible sense of the monsters' size. There'south one superb effects shot of the fleeing convicts consumed with h2o rushing into a train station tunnel that's almost seamless. The model of Osaka Castle is the almost impressive miniature, and the animated shots of information technology starting to crevice before Godzilla smashes Anguirus into it build tension every bit the fight reaches its climax. The castle demolition must take thrilled Tsubaraya, since he knocks down feudal castles in the next ii films, King Kong vs. Godzilla and Mothra vs. Godzilla .

The avalanche set on on Godzilla at the end is nearly as impressive effects piece of work, although it doesn't have the same rush. It's 1 of the well-nigh creative ways of destroying a giant monster to appear in whatsoever film of the genre, and Godzilla composed against the massive ice-crusted cliffs makes for a number of stunning shots. It's unfortunate the screenplay paces the attack in a way that it breaks in the middle while everyone goes to re-load their planes at the base. The build of the suspense gets hacked downward when information technology's set up to elevation.

The human story is soap opera piffle about the employees of a fishing company in Osaka whose lives intersect in unbelievable ways with the monster matter. Heroes Tsukioka (Hiromi Koizumi) and Kobayashi (Minoru Chiaki) pilot planes to spot schools of fish to guide the company's trawlers. It makes sense two pilots might detect themselves on a distant island with the monsters, but later their discovery they don't have much else to practise. In other movies, the focus would shift to the scientists and military machine men who take to halt the titanic dangers.

Only after a debriefing scene — which contains the but advent of a character from the first film, Dr. Yamane (Takashi Shimura) — Kobayashi, Tsukioka, Tsukioka's girlfriend Hidemi (Setsuko Wakayama), and the other employees at Kaiyo Fishing Industries proceed to hang around the moving-picture show through contrivance. For example, after the massive wreck in Osaka, the visitor decides to send the chief characters north to Hokkaido — then they but happen to become in the style of Godzilla's movements. They also accept a few good laughs continuing in the demolished function in a leveled city, which feels incorrect on many levels.

Virtually of the cast's interaction is dull. If it sometimes seems somber, that's probably the fault of the pacing, repose soundtrack, and gloomy blackness and white photography. Later the shift to Hokkaido, the movie almost grinds to a stop for a ten-infinitesimal scene of a dinner party and Kobayashi looking for love. The supposed "cede" of Kobayashi during the final strafing run on Godzilla is supposed to exist the emotional capper, but Kobayashi only dies in a foolhardy accident, and that the Japanese Self-Defence force Forcefulness gets the thought for the barrage from his crash is also an accident and nada Kobayashi planned. Tsukioka's final words to his dead friend afterward Godzilla's icy burial is the merely moving moment to come out of this character death.

The other moment that stands out amid the humdrum soap suds is Hidemi watching the city of Osaka burn from her hilltop house. The matte painting of the flaming city, made to resemble a mushroom deject, is beautifully unsettling. We can imagine what thoughts are going through Hidemi's caput knowing that her beloved is downwards among the horrors. It's a brief moment where Godzilla Raids Again embraces the nuclear metaphor that made the offset film so powerful. It needs more of this and fewer jokes near matchmaking.

All the same, it'south always a pleasure to meet 1 of Toho'due south slap-up scientific discipline-fiction faces pop upwardly: Yoshio Tsuchiya, also a favorite of director Akira Kurosawa, appears as a fellow member of the Cocky-Defence force Force who pilots the final attack on Godzilla. Tsuchiya appeared in several Godzilla films, nearly notably as the Controller of Planet X in Invasion of Astro Monster , a.k.a. Monster Zero (1965), and as the saurian-worshiping Earth War II veteran in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991).

The Volcano Monsters and The Burn Monster: The US Version

What happened that caused Godzilla to be changed into Gigantis in North America and so end upward in obscurity? Buckle in, this is a lengthy ane.

The same group of U.s.a. financiers who purchased the rights to the original Godzilla also bought the rights to the sequel. Two of the financiers, Harry Rybnick and Edward Barison, made a deal with a fledgling product company, AB-PT, to re-craft the pic using merely the special furnishings footage and shooting a new story effectually it with English-speaking actors. Danish author Ib Melchior, who later on directed Angry Cerise Planet , and his roommate Edwin Watson created a screenplay called The Volcano Monsters to use the Japanese effects footage. Toho fifty-fifty sent an Anguirus and Godzilla costume to Hollywood so the coiffure could shoot a few new furnishings to stitch together the story. As an example of how this new picture show was going to bend itself in order to squeeze the Japanese footage into a supposedly stateside monster movie, a radio announcer mentions the monsters are fighting in the "Oriental Section" of San Francisco. That totally explains the behemothic Shogun-era castle sitting in the centre of a Californian city!

Equally clumsy, inane, and borderline insulting as all this is, The Volcano Monsters did come close to starting production. But and so AB-PT'due south backers pulled out of the project. After releasing only two films, the company was shuttered and The Volcano Monsters passed into limbo. Considering the similar butchering the Japanese giant monster film Varan (1958) underwent to get the English-language Varan the Unwatchable — uhm, The Unbelievable — nobody mourns the loss of The Volcano Monsters.

Godzilla Raids Once more went back on the marketplace. Paul Schreibman, Edmund Goldman, and Newton P. Jacobs purchased the rights in 1958. They made a bargain with Warner Bros. for distribution in a bundle with the archetype Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie Teenagers From Outer Infinite . The new owners didn't attempt a re-haul in the manner of The Volcano Monsters . Schreibman settled for a cost-effective (i.due east. cheap) route, just 1 that still radically contradistinct the film — starting with stealing the star monster's name.

The large question: Why did Paul Schreibman rename and redub the film to erase Godzilla and replace it with the uninteresting Gigantis? Schreibman's original reply was that he didn't want the picture to be confused with a re-release of Godzilla, King of the Monsters! That makes no sense; why would a producer looking for a fast buck not desire people to connect his new pic to one of the about successful monster movies ever fabricated?

It appears Schreibman just fabricated a miscalculation of the marquee appeal of Godzilla and idea he could pass this off as a "new" monster. It was a mistake and a clumsy one, which he later admitted. The few viewers who got out to see Gigantis the Burn Monster in theaters weren't fooled by the ruse and were annoyed instead. "It'southward clearly Godzilla! Why are people calling it 'Gigantis'?"

The picture show was dubbed at Ryder Sound Services with a script overseen by Hugo Grimaldi. Grimaldi, not a native English-speaker, filled the dubbing script with unintentionally hilarious tin-eared dialogue, such equally the infamous "Banana oil!" line, a bit of slang that was out of appointment when the Volstead Act was repealed. I of the scientists, while attempting to explain the existence of Anguirus, claims to take gotten his data from a new book called Anguirosaurus, Killer of the Living. Grimaldi also crammed the script with nonstop voiceovers from Kobayashi (voiced by Keye Luke) that are literally a play-past-play of what's on screen. ("I picked upward my microphone." "I started to wave.") Grimaldi may have gotten the idea for the voiceover narration from the King Brothers' version of Rodan , which reached the US a twelvemonth before Gigantis .

Most of Masaru Sato's music was replaced with wall-to-wall library music meant to make the picture seem more urgent, just it quickly turns irritating. Schreibman besides heaped a load of stock footage into the movie to boost the activity, which of course means it opens with a lengthy montage of rocket launches while a vox-of-doom narrator (Marvin Miller, who played this part a lot) explains the dangers of nuclear testing, blah, blah, apathetic. The re-editing of the sound furnishings creates a funny error, where Anguirus'southward roar is dubbed over Godzilla's, even further robbing the monster of its identity.

The result is a ludicrously funny B-motion-picture show, and it leaves no doubtfulness why people ignored the picture show on its original 1959 release. Although altered less than Godzilla when information technology was Americanized equally Godzilla, King of the Monsters! , Gigantis the Burn Monster retains far less of the spirit of its original. But it does merit watching for weird amusement. Several famous vocalisation-over artists lent their talents, including George Takei and the ubiquitous Paul Frees. Only all plow in hammy, cartoon performances, probably at Grimaldi's insistence, and the delivery of the already baroque lines amps upwardly the camp value.

Specially entertaining is the flick that Dr. Yamane shows to the quango of generals and scientists to explain Godzilla's threat. In the Japanese version, the footage is from Godzilla's rampage in the kickoff film, played silent except for the eerie sound of the projector. It fits with the gloomier tone of the motion picture, and even if it isn't that exciting (cheers, I've seen Godzilla), it makes an impression. The version of this scene in Gigantis the Burn Monster contains constant music, redundant explanations from the player voicing Yamane, and best/worst of all, additional footage lifted from children'southward educational strips explaining the loopiest theory of the evolution of the World ever foisted onto a '50s SF flick.

The Fire Monster Today

I enjoy Godzilla Raids Once more more I once did. I never saw the The states version on television when I was a child — it was almost a lost motion picture afterward the early on '60s because its owners never tried to sell information technology to TV. My first viewing was of the Japanese movie on an imported VHS tape. Information technology didn't hold my involvement, feeling similar a poor version of the original motion picture and also drab to watch regularly. These feelings are widespread amidst Godzilla fans.

Seeing it a few more than times on superior quality DVD and comparison information technology to the craziness of Gigantis the Fire Monster has given me a greater appreciation for what does work: the special effects. Once I maneuvered around the bland state of the rest of the movie, I can thrill to the big set pieces of Godzilla vs. Anguirus and the avalanche assault, both of which have some jaw-dropping visuals. The The states hack-job tin't mess this up, fifty-fifty with the unnecessary music and Godzilla forced to borrow Anguirus's roar.

My greater fan appreciation still tin can't make me recall Godzilla Raids Again is anything but the weakest of the start half dozen Godzilla films. Accordingly, it's the only of the six without director Ishiro Honda. On one side of it is the bleak masterpiece of Godzilla , and on the other are the colorful thrills of the full-blooded Japanese science-fiction miracle. The Fire Monster is the poor middle child.

Godzilla Raids Again is one of several Toho SF pictures whose North American rights the Criterion Collection currently owns. They have even so to release whatsoever on DVD or Blu-ray, but they're currently streaming them on Starz. Although Benchmark has stated they have plans to release their library of kaiju films (which includes Rodan , Mothra vs. Godzilla , Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster , and War of the Gargantuas ) on physical media, no official proclamation has come up in over a year. Come on, Criterion, step it upwards! At least these films have been liberated from Archetype Media'south stingy grip.

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Ryan Harvey (RyanHarveyAuthor.com) is one of the original bloggers for Black Gate and has written for the site for over a decade. He received the Writers of the Future Laurels for his curt story "An Acolyte of Black Spires." His stories "The Sorrowless Thief" and "Stand at Dubun-Geb" are available in Blackness Gate online fiction. A further Ahn-Tarqa adventure, "Adieu to Tyrn", is available as an east-volume. Ryan lives in Costa Mesa, California. Occasionally, people ask him to talk well-nigh Edgar Rice Burroughs or Godzilla.

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Source: https://www.blackgate.com/2019/01/19/godzilla-raids-again-gigantis-the-fire-monster-1955/

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