The undisputed champions of the Daikaiju genre, Toho Co. LTD, are most widely known for creating the Godzilla franchise, a series which has lasted for over fifty years, and boasts twenty nine feature films to date. Whether you've seen the movies or not, just about everyone has heard the name, “Godzilla”. I could go on for several paragraphs, talking about how innovative the films are, and leak all kinds of gooey fanboy trivia all over the floor, but that wouldn't be polite.
Godzilla is indisputably Toho's most popular franchise, but several other giant monsters have been churned out by studio over the last five decades. Rodan, Mothra, and King Ghidorah are nearly as recognizable as Godzilla, having been featured in many of the movies and spin offs that have made the King of The Monsters famous, but they make up only a small fraction of Toho's stable of rubber suit-powered juggernauts. I watched three of the more obscure films this week, and now you get to read about 'em.
1. The Mysterians – 1957: The Mysterians is your typical 60's-style alien invasion flick. A tokusatsu film in the truest sense, much of the screen time is alloted to the elaborate miniature dioramas which are a hallmark of the genre. The plot is fairly straight forward: Aliens, seeking refuge from their used-up planet, take up residence on earth. The Mysterians are a strange looking lot, clad in dayglo capes and crazy motorcycle helmets. Their request is a simple one. A small plot of land where they can park their mothership, and permission to mate with earth's women. In my opinion this is a reasonable request, but the earthlings will have none of it, and immediately declare war on the technologically superior Mysterians. Seems to me like they could have negotiated a bit longer before they started launching firecracker-rockets, but then we wouldn't have much of a movie. The Mysterians really isn't a giant monster film, as the only monster to be seen is a robot controlled by the Mysterians called Mogera. He only gets a few minutes of screen time, but it's a fun movie, and the special effects are great.
FACT: Mogera wasn't seen on screen again until Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla, which was released in 1994. He was given an updated design, and renamed MOGUERA, which is an acronym for Mobile Operation Godzilla Universal Expert Robot Aero-Type. No really. That's what it stands for.
2. Dogora – 1964: Dogora is an interesting film, and an original one at that. This movie relies more heavily on plot than most films in the genre. I've heard it called, “A mystery movie with a giant monster at the center, not a really giant monster film” but I tend to disagree. The film is indeed a giant monster movie, and while the titular creature doesn't get as much screen time as one might think he should, his appearances are pretty spectacular. Dogora is a single-cell space life form, mutated by the atomic radiation in the atmosphere above Japan (!?!?!). He grows into a crazy jellyfish looking thing, and starts flying around the world, eating coal, stealing diamonds, and dropping multicolored boulders on populated areas that look like they belong in a fish tank. Unfortunately, much of the screen time is devoted to a band of diamond thieves trying to pull of a major heist, and their token good-guy counterparts. Dogora himself takes a back seat to the mystery and intrigue, which aren't all that interesting in and of themselves. Nevertheless, this is a good movie, with some pretty decent special effects. Images of Dogora appearing in a blue-and-green cloud over Japan are nothing short of doomsday-awesome (think Hellboy 1), and the shots of him flying (likely created by submerging a marionette in a tank of water) look great. Worth watching if you're into this sort of thing, but by no means one of the best in the genre.
FACT: Robert Dunham, who portrays the character Mark Jackson in this film, also played Antonio, the emperor of Seatopia in Godzilla vs. Megalon. A professional stunt driver, Dunham also lent his talents to the frequent car chase scenes in Megalon, and decades later, became a contributing writer for Car and Driver.
3.Yog – Monster from Space/Space Amoeba – 1970: This was the first such film released by Toho after the death of special effects master, Eiji Tsuburaya. It is known by multiple titles, though the two listed here are the most common. I won't spend too much time commenting on the plot, because that's not what you're here for, but suffice to say it involves aliens. Again. The special effects in this one are just awesome, and monster screen time is generous. The monsters in this one have been scaled down as well – they're only about twenty to thirty meters, which makes their interactions with the human characters more compelling. This movie features three Kaiju: Gezora, the squid, Ganime, the crab, and Kameoba, the turtle. There are some fantastic scenes in which the humans, stranded on a small pacific island with the three giants, take the antagonistic beasts on using guns and gasoline, salvaged from a derelict WW2 munition dump. There are of course the stereotypical natives who fear and worship one of the monsters, believing it to be some sort of angry god, and a corporation that wants to exploit the island for it's own benefit. While this movie may not be very original, particularly to fans of the genre (the prayer song sung by the natives sounds suspiciously like the one used in King Kong vs. Godzilla), it is a lot of fun, with plenty of action and eye candy to keep you interested throughout it's hour and a half. Well worth the twenty or so dollars you'll pay for it on eBay.
FACT: This is the only movie ever to feature Gezora and Ganime, but Kameoba does make a brief cameo appearance in Godzilla: Tokyo SOS (2003). He is discovered dead, washed up on a beach, with a horrendous gash in his neck. It is implied that the creature was killed by Godzilla. One character also alludes to this Kameoba being a prehistoric survivor, which indicates that any connection to the original monster's appearance has been severed (the original was a regular turtle mutated by the alien)
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