U.K. Telegraph's Why The Original Godzilla Is No Joke

Above, Haruo Nakajima climbing into the original Godzilla suit in 1954. Photo courtesy of Sonoe Nakajima.

It is amazing, and gratifying to us longtime Godzilla fans, that Godzilla is getting such well-deserved recognition in today's media that he was a (giant) step above those B-movie monsters of the 1950s.

The latest is from the United Kingdom's The Telegraph. They've posted an excellent article on the beginnings of Godzilla (even though Eiji Tsuburaya was captioned as Ishiro Honda in error).

The article begins with:

Western audiences have spent more than half a century thinking of Godzilla as a joke dinosaur in a rubber suit, a Japanese trash-culture ‘King of the Monsters’ locked in endless battle with giant moths, dragons, armadillos and skyscraper-sized robots. Against this camp backdrop, then, it may seem surprising to hear Gareth Edwards, the director of this summer’s Godzilla film, declare his intention to portray the monster as “a force of nature, like the wrath of God or vengeance for the way we’ve behaved”. 

But the idea of presenting Godzilla as the harbinger of man-made apocalypse isn't simply another gritty reboot for an age in which children’s franchises have become big-budget adult entertainment. It harks back 60 years to an almost forgotten chapter in the franchise’s history: the tragic story of nuclear paranoia told by the original Gojira in 1954. 

Released in the same year as Seven Samurai, directed by a colleague of Kurosawa’s and starring one of Japan’s most famous actors, the film Gojira was a far cry from its B-movie successors. It was a sober allegory of a film with ambitions as large as its thrice-normal budget, designed to shock and horrify an adult audience.

To read more, go here.