I'm not entirely sure when or how I was first introduced to Godzilla, but through what I can get out of my family and what little I can piece together myself, I have a general idea. As a kid, I had my obsessions, not much has changed on that front, these obsessions come and go but can often become quite intense, one of the quirks of being autistic, I guess. Somewhere around the mid 2000's, I was obsessed with something the vast majority of kids get obsessed with, dinosaurs. I loved dinosaurs, I loved watching films with dinosaurs in them, playing games with dinosaurs in them, and playing with toy dinosaurs. I assume then that at some point, someone in my family, probably my grandparents or dad, saw that a Godzilla film was on the TV and recorded it for me, after all, I love dinosaurs and Godzilla is just a big and especially cool dinosaur, so I watched Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster on a scrappy little tape. I doubt that whoever made that tape knew that they were opening Pandora's box because Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster immediately became my favourite film in the world. I soon found myself scouring the burgeoning internet for anything and everything I could find about the film, quickly finding myself falling down the rabbit hole of Godzilla; it turned out that there were dozens of films dating back fifty years, about which I feverishly lapped up anything I could, any pictures, videos and pieces of information about this new and exciting frontier that I'd found.
On a new and exciting video streaming platform called Youtube, I found hours of material, ranging from fan made Godzilla music videos to terrible quality, often eight or nine part uploads of entire Godzilla films, including one where he fought a giant plant, one where he fought a three headed cyborg dragon from the future, and one where his body glowed like the fires of hell itself. It was through many of those fan made music videos that I discovered a lot of my taste in music, though thanks to Youtube's copyright policies, they're all gone now, along with those shitty uploads of the films. Growing up in the UK in the 2000's, I quickly realised that liking Godzilla was going to be hard work; while all the other kids in school talked about Doctor Who, Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon, I was the only one who wanted to talk about Godzilla. In the United Kingdom, Godzilla basically didn't exist, while it was easy enough to get classic Godzilla films on DVD in the United States, they never got released here, TV channels almost never played Godzilla, and toy shops never stocked Godzilla. Not many people had heard of Godzilla and of the ones that had, they knew next to nothing of it; it was just a silly monster movie from Asia to them, making being a Godzilla fan very lonely. I would constantly seek out likeminded people, people who shared my love for the monster, but I would find none. No one saw what I saw, they just didn't get what it was about Godzilla that I was so obsessed with, or worse, they thought it was weird, a weird film series that was obsessed over by nerds and losers like me.
What they always saw was just a man in a rubber suit, stomping through a fake looking model city while fireworks went off around him, but I never saw it that way. Instead, what I saw was the coolest, most badass movie monster in the world, realised with the best special effects of the time, and with a life and character that the contemporary computer generated effects of Hollywood were still years away from fully mastering. I saw a monster that was fearless and strong, a relentless force that stopped at nothing in pursuit of his goal, a hero that saved the world from aliens and evil monsters that destroyed for the fun of it. Godzilla was a hero that fought bullies, he never gave up and he always saved the day, and he just so happened to be a giant dinosaur that could breathe fire. As a kid, I imagined Godzilla going on adventures on Monster Island with his friends; Anguirus, Mothra, Rodan and Jet Jaguar, fighting and protecting each other from villains like Ghidorah and Gigan. For long periods of time, Godzilla would dominate my imagination, he was one of my heroes, but while I've changed a lot as a person over the years, that hasn't. As frustrating as it was for me though, having such a strange and niche obsession, I can't even imagine what it was like for my mother, who always did her best to find me the things I wanted. The problem was that I wanted Godzilla, and since online streaming was in its infancy and Amazon didn't exist yet, finding Godzilla films and toys became a sort of treasure hunt, as we constantly kept our eyes out for Godzilla media.
I eventually found a handful of Godzilla toys and a few films on VHS while scouring local car boot sales with my grandparents, while my mother kept an eye out online, putting up with the inconvenience and absurd import costs for the handful of Godzilla toys and DVD's she could buy me, only to have to deal with the added inconvenience of the DVD's all being region locked. A huge problem during this time was that after 2004, no new Godzilla media was coming out, which only made the frustration of the hunt worse. New films weren't being made and old films still weren't getting UK releases, I couldn't get enough of Godzilla, but as the years dragged on with Godzilla always just out of my reach, my excitement became harder and harder to sustain because it felt like I was getting nowhere. Eventually, I entered high school, big kid school, where everyone played Call of Duty on their Xbox 360's and where obscure and niche interests made you the target of bullying. I was changing too, suddenly I had all of these new thoughts and feelings, I started caring less about the things that had defined my life up until that point and caring a lot more about what people thought of me, I needed to make new friends and to fit in because sticking out was a guaranteed way of getting the wrong kind of attention. I turned out to be really bad at fitting in though, I wasn't like the other kids in many ways, a quiet, autistic kid that didn't share many of their interests, I was a weirdo who was obsessed with weird things, an outcast, a loser.
After years of pushing through the frustration of having Godzilla be just out of reach, and as the pressures of high school mounted and my priorities in life shifted, this childhood obsession of mine began to lose its lustre. After all, it was just a film about a guy dressed up as a dinosaur, it wasn't that cool, it was for kids and losers, and so I began to let go. Slowly, Godzilla became just another relic of my childhood, another love of mine that was destined to never again come out of the toybox while I moved on with my life. I made friends, found circles that would accept me, started a relationship with one of the few friends I managed to make early on, I had found a new and even more exciting frontier, leaving Godzilla to fade into memory. While in high school, I started a Film Studies class, hoping to learn more about the art of film and filmmaking with the dream of one day being a real filmmaker, but if I'm honest, the class felt very much like a waste of an A level. But in 2012, things changed. I'd been aware that a new American Godzilla film was coming, but it wasn't exactly on my radar at the time, not until a teaser video for the film that had been shown at San Diego Comic-Con emerged online, and seeing that teaser awakened something in me. The only other American Godzilla film was a film I loved when I was a kid, but I began to understand all of the things that were wrong with it as I grew up. Oddly, I've come back round in recent years and begun to find new things I appreciate about it. But at the time, a second American Godzilla was not the most exciting prospect, which goes to show you how phenomenal that teaser was because I was instantly pumped.
The teaser dripped in an eerie, apocalyptic tone, showing scenes of devastation in the aftermath of a kaiju battle, accompanied by Ligeti's Requiem and J. Robert Oppenheimer's infamous Destroyer of Worlds speech. It was short, it was simple, it was creepy as fuck, and ended on a shot of a massive figure moving in a cloud of dust and debris, the camera panning up the massive shape to reveal a row of jagged spines and a monstrous, bear like head before the shape let out a roar that became an instant classic, one of the best Godzilla roars of all time. For the first time in years, I was excited for Godzilla, though the thought of seeing Godzilla on the big screen for the first time was exciting enough on it's own, it was this teaser that really sold me. This Godzilla was going to be epic, dark and apocalyptic, a film that captures the monster at his most monstrous. It was surreal to think that soon, I'd be seeing a Godzilla film in a cinema, and there was little that could dampen my excitement for it. As the film approached, I only got more excited, just as I did all those years ago, I was scouring the internet for everything I could, every still, every TV spot, every fuzzy photo of the toys and screenshot of tie-in mobile games, because the film had them for some reason. My mother once again stepped up when the time finally came to book the tickets, it wasn't until I was in the car with my dad and some of my closest friends, on the way to the showing that I realised we weren't going to our local Odeon cinema, but to the IMAX.
Seeing Godzilla in the IMAX remains one of the best cinema experiences of my life. It was my first time in the IMAX, and seeing Godzilla in all his glory, on the largest screen I'd ever seen was unlike anything I'd experienced before. While the film didn't quite live up to that amazing teaser, I didn't care, I adored it, it was the coolest, most awesome film I had ever watched. I'll go into more detail about 2014 and the following ten years another time, but to summarise; Godzilla was back, he was no longer out of my reach and now that all the social pressures of school life were gone, there was nothing holding me back, Godzilla once again became my obsession and it's as strong now as it ever has been, Godzilla was a defining feature of my childhood, but it remains a defining feature in my adulthood, and this time I have no intention of letting go. But after running through this story again and again, after all the things I've said and wrote about Godzilla in the past, what he means to me is still a difficult thing to put into words. It was straightforward when I was young, I loved Godzilla because he was awesome; he was a hero monster who breathed fire and fought bullies, and in a way, I think the fact that getting a hold of Godzilla media was so hard was part of the appeal, that they always stayed out of my reach only made me want them more, making those magical moments when we hit the jackpot all the more exciting, all the more special.
Now that Amazon exists and I'm an adult with my own money, getting Godzilla toys like the ones I wanted all those years ago is easy, and thanks to companies like Criterion, Arrow Video and Eureka, getting those old movies isn't anywhere near as hard as it used to be. It's incredibly satisfying to think about how far I've come on my treasure hunt, how vindicated my love of this franchise is now that I can finally enjoy these films in a way my younger self never had the chance to. Since 2014, I've very much been making up for lost time, building an impressive collection of Godzilla merch, toys, and even DVDs and Blu rays, all of which would probably make my younger self's head explode. One aspect of the Godzilla franchise that's always been unfairly ridiculed is it's special effects. Over the decades, plenty of media has made fun of Godzilla and of the kaiju genre as a whole, from Peewee Herman to Mystery Science Theatre to Jackass, and whether well meaning or not, it's led to a widely held belief that the kaiju genre is just cheap suits, cardboard sets and cheesy effects. I couldn't disagree more with this belief, naturally. While the quality of the Godzilla films' effects, especially in the later Showa films, does go up an down, I still can't help but appreciate the amount of creativity and effort that goes into these films. These older kaiju films will never look as clean or professional as modern Hollywood CGI, but that's a huge part of their charm. The effects artists of classic kaiju always had to work around technological and financial limitations, and while the result was almost always rough around the edges, the effort, skill and dedication almost always bleeds through.
It's a common belief among fans of the horror genre that practical, in-camera effects are better than CGI and for many, including me, that belief extends to all genres. As someone who grew up loving shows like Stingray and Thunderbirds, there is something about real sets and pyrotechnics that no amount of shiny, photorealistic CGI can beat. Not to say that CGI is always bad, nor to say that practical is always good, just that there is something uniquely special about seeing a special effect that was filmed in-camera, to know that it was actually done and that decades ago, brilliant minds put all their effort into making it look as good as they possibly could. But on a deeper level, there is something even more special about Godzilla as a monster that is the driving factor in his longevity, it's something I always kind of understood about Godzilla, even if it's taken many years to fully appreciate it. Throughout my teenage years and into my adulthood, I've had somewhat of a passion for the history of the Second World War, spending countless nights digging through history books, websites and documentaries, as well as developing a keen interest in nuclear physics, though I'd never claim to be an expert in either field. I bring this up because I feel that my interest in War history and nuclear physics went hand in hand with my reawakened love for Godzilla, thanks to my newfound understanding of where he came from and what he truly is. Godzilla is more than just a monster, he's more than a villain, more than a hero, more than just a man in a suit.
From his sombre and profound inception in the 1950s, to his bizarre superhero phase in the late 60's and early 70's, all the way back around to being profound and sombre again in last year's Godzilla Minus One, the potential of Godzilla as a storytelling tool is only as limited as the talent and creativity of the storytellers that use him. Despite going for seventy years, Godzilla has always found ways to stay relevant and unique, be that as a metaphor for the Cold War in The Return of Godzilla, a critique of big government in Shin Godzilla, or a big, angry lizard that fights giant monkeys in zero gravity in GXK. Godzilla has been many things over those seventy years, and while not every go round has been a genre defining success, the monster has consistently proven his ability to make it work, almost always staying consistent to his character. Godzilla is whatever he needs to be, which is what makes him so unique and special, not just to me, but to the entire film industry, and it's insane to think that it started because of one film, albeit a film unlike any other. Even after seventy years, the original Godzilla from 1954 is still one of the most striking films you can watch; using the framing of a giant monster movie to tell a story of death, war and the cruelty of atomic weapons, inspired by the real world horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the tragic fate of the Lucky Dragon no.5 and her crew, commenting on the ethics and implications of using super-weapons.
It still remains one of the most fascinating explorations of war in any film and in addition to birthing Godzilla, it set him up to forever be different from the rest of the classic movie monsters, he was always bigger than them and there was always something to be said through him, that's what really makes Godzilla so special. Like the masterpiece of a film that he started out in, there is a timeless quality to him that audiences of any time and age group can latch onto. Kids can love him because he's a cool monster that fights other cool monsters, but as they grow up, Godzilla grows up with them. Those kids can mature into appreciating the deeper meanings and philosophies behind the rubber suited exterior. There are layers upon layers to the Godzilla franchise that can only start to be peeled away as you grow older and start having new ideas and experiences, explorations of humanity, war, death and the dangers and cruelties of science and human arrogance going too far, all while never forgetting the memories of that simpler time when it was just cool to watch monsters fight. Or at least, this is how I feel about it, which answers the question we started with, I guess, it explains why Godzilla has always been so close to my heart, and why he probably will stay there for the rest of my life. As a kid, I loved Godzilla because he was awesome, as an adult, I still love him because he is art, and I think aspects of this can only be appreciated by those people who were once kids who just loved cool monsters, who had the chance to mature into seeing Godzilla as art.
A God Incarnate
The answer to the question; what does Godzilla mean to me is always going to be a complicated one to answer. It was straightforward when I was a kid; I loved Godzilla because he was badass, and because wanton destruction and kaiju battles were really fun. But while many other childhood obsessions of mine faded into warm, nostalgic memory, Godzilla grew up with me as I came to understand and appreciate why this monster has endured for so long. Through him, I stoked a passion for history and found new ways of understanding the world. Through him, I opened my mind to new kinds of media and developed a passion for film and filmmaking. While that passion for film and filmmaking has waned in my adult years, my love for Godzilla has only continued to grow since he exploded back into my life in 2014, he will always have a particularly special place in my heart. Long Live The King.
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