The Dai Pool at Toho Studios has been demolished and an era has ended. You probably don’t recall this huge, shallow pool, but its pop culture rating is somewhere between 50 and 400 meters high for this was the frothing sea that birthed Godzilla, that ill-used avatar of nuclear apocalypse. The terrible “Whale-Gorilla” captured the popular imagination at a time when life had proven appallingly fragile on a massive scale.

In 2004, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first Godzilla film, Toho Studios released Godzilla: Final Wars and announced that it would be the last movie to feature the great and powerful Godz’. Even on the off chance that the monster would return at some future date, a man in a rubber suit would no longer portray the beast. Whether cinematic luddite or CGI geek, we should all mourn the day that an actor can’t make a decent day’s wages by sweating profusely and stomping his way to heaven.

‘Zilla (real name: Gojira) began busting blocks and taking names in 1954, when Steven Spielberg was less than knee-high to Mothra. American distributors fretted that domestic audiences would not appreciate such a film without sympathetic American characters, so Raymond Burr was hired for a day’s work and the character of American reporter, Steve Martin, was added to the U.S. version, turning a tragic horror story into a disturbed and fractured tale.

After showings at a smattering of West Coast monster movie festivals and little else in North America, the DVD for Godzilla: Final Wars is due on July 22. Many, many sequels were produced during the preceding fifty years. As Marcel Proust once said, “Everyone needs to eat madeleines and watch Godzilla at least once in their life.” The original Godzilla from 1954 is worth seeking out. Under no circumstances should the American-made Godzilla of 1998 be considered a reasonable substitute. Almost thirty sequels are available to the undiscerning viewer. Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla is representative. On the other hand, Godzilla vs. Bambi ends predictably, but has high entertainment value.

July, 2005