NPR: How 'Professor Godzilla' Learned To Roar

William Tsutsui is a name that hardcore Godzilla fans should be familiar with. He wrote a book on his fondness (or obsession) on Godzilla a few years ago (2004, to be exact), Godzilla On My Mind.

For various reasons, many fans did not like Tsutsui's book. I have to admit, it was different, but it was an interesting read. Many, I think, just didn't understand it.

In the interests of "full disclosure," Tsutsui used some quotes from articles I had written and he also used my photo of a fan-made Mechagodzilla costume.

National Public Radio's (NPR) website has a new article on William Tsutsui. He is about to take the reigns of Hendrix College (not named after Jimi Hendrix, in case you were wondering) in Little Rock, Arkansas.

They wrote:

Hendrix College, a small school outside of Little Rock, Ark., is about to get a new president. His name is William Tsutsui, a Princeton-, Oxford-, and Harvard-educated economist, but he's best known for a certain expertise that has landed him the nickname Professor Godzilla.

A friend sent me an email with a link to the article. In reading the title of the piece, "How 'Professor Godzilla' Learned To Roar," I initially thought it was about how composer Akira Ifukube created Godzilla's roar with musical instruments.

A photo of Tsutsui with some of his Godzilla toys is included with the article.

To read the full article, go here.

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.

College Professor Obsessed With Godzilla

An article appeared at The Dallas Morning News online website on a college professor who has a "monstrous obsession with Godzilla":

Along his torn-up trail, the menacing brute also has created some major Godzilla geeks. One of them is Dr. William Tsutsui, the recently appointed dean of SMU's Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, whose obsession with Godzilla goes beyond campy special effects.

As he was growing up, his childhood fascination gave way to scholarly interpretation – and Tsutsui came to see the globally recognized monster as cultural ambassador, the therapeutic creation of a postwar Japan.

"I realized there was something more there than just a guy in a rubber suit," said Tsutsui, 47.

Tsutsui wrote the book, Godzilla On My Mind several years ago and appeared last summer at G-FEST.

To read the full article, go here.