What The Original Godzilla Looks Like In Modern Tokyo

Above, Godzilla peers over Shinjuku rooftops. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Godzilla fans have been aware for the last 30 years or so that the need to bump up Godzilla's size was due to the modern high-rise skyline of Tokyo.

Originally, Godzilla stood 50 meters tall. But, but today's standards, that is puny in comparison to the buildings of the metropolis.

Godzilla was beefed up to around 80 meters, and later to 100 meters in the Heisei series (1984-1995).

RocketNews 24 has an article with photos of what the original Godzilla would look like in modern Tokyo.

They begin with:

When Legendary Pictures gave Godzilla an American reboot in 2014, it also made him bigger than ever, as he stood 108 meters (354 feet) tall in that film. Then, when original owners Toho announced they were bringing the King of the Monsters back to Japan for the just-released Shin Godzilla (also known as Godzilla Resurgence), he grew yet again, with the world-famous creature being 118.5 meters tall in his latest outing. 

This might seem like a bit of a friendly rivalry between production companies as they try to one-up each another in creating kaiju on the grandest scale, but the truth is that Godzilla has been growing progressively larger for decades. See, while Tokyo has been a large, bustling city since Japan’s feudal era of the 17th century, architectural and economic limits meant that it wasn’t always as studded with skyscrapers as it is now. When Godzilla made his screen debut in 1954, the capital’s skyline was far lower and less dense than it is today, and as such the movie’s star was smaller in stature as well, with a modest (by modern kaiju standards) height of 50 meters. 

Granted, that’s still pretty huge, as far as atomic fire-breathing lizards go. But while that height would have enabled him to peer over the buildings of 1950s Tokyo, Godzilla would find his lines of sight severely impaired by the city’s present-day urban jungle, as demonstrated in this tweet from @FUKUBLOG.

Size does matter.

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