King Of The Monsters

Anton van Beek dons a Hazmat suit and delves into the cinematic history of radioactive rampager Godzilla

- Anton van Beek

THE BEAST FROM the East is back. This month sees the UK home entertainment release of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the rampaging reptile’s 32nd big screen outing in a career of trampling cities to dust and battling other behemoths that goes right back to 1954. While so many other movie monsters have come and gone, Godzilla has shown incredible longevity, and become a pop culture icon. Not bad for a creature that began life as something of a rip-off...

In the early 1950s, inspired by the successful Japanese re-release of 1933's King Kong, and the subsequent international debut of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Tomoyuki Tanaka, a veteran producer at Japan's Toho Co. Ltd studio, had the idea of creating his own epic monster flick. Originally developed under the derivative title The Beast from 20,000 Miles Under the Sea, the film was eventually named after its giant creature – Gojira – a portmanteau mixing the Japanese words for gorilla (gorira) and whale (kujira).

Where Hollywood’s monster movies had typically been more concerned with spectacle than anything else, Godzilla (the Toho-approved Anglicised title) drew heavily on recent Japanese history. Many have discussed the monster's destructive rampage in the context of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, but more direct inspiration was taken from a different event: in 1954 a Japanese fishing vessel – Lucky Dragon 5 – was exposed to radioactive fallout from a US hydrogen bomb test. The crew were treated for acute radiation sickness (all but one survived), yet some of their irradiated catch made it to market, sparking a national crisis. The incident is directly referenced in Godzilla, in an early scene where the radioactive reptile attacks a fishing boat.