N.Y. Times: Godzilla In His Many Incarnations

Above, Godzilla finally did turn green in Godzilla x Megaguirus in 2000. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

With Godzilla now six days away from opening in theaters in the U.S., more articles on the great beast are being generated by the media.

This time, the New York Times has joined the G-party with an article looking back at the many incarnations of Godzilla.

The article begins with how the designers of the Legendary Pictures/Warner Bros. approached Godzilla's design for the movie:

After 60 years of crushing, fighting and roaring, Godzilla shows no signs of stopping. The oversize lizard that has attracted generations of fans returns Friday in a film that harks back to the creature’s roots. The filmmakers behind the latest iteration mainly used the 1954 original, from Toho Studios, as a template for fleshing out the monster’s looks and the movie’s narrative. 

Gareth Edwards, who directed the new version, told his designers to imagine Godzilla as an animal that had really existed and that, 60 years ago, some people saw rise from the sea off Japan. They didn’t have a camera, so they described the creature, and Toho made its films based on those accounts. “In our film, people are going to see the original animal that those people witnessed back then,” Mr. Edwards said, speaking by phone from Los Angeles. So his design, to some degree, was a reverse-engineering job: building the creature that inspired the Toho movies.

This is, indeed, an interesting and novel approach to designing Godzilla.

Above, Godzilla was redesigned again and went back to his gray color in 2001 for GMK. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

From there, the article goes into how Godzilla's features changed over the years with some assistance from William Tsutsui ("Godzilla On My Mind").

And, they rehash the look that Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich introduced in their 1998 debacle of a movie.

To read the full article, go here.