The Godzilla Beeper
John Scalzi on the hows and whys of Godzilla’s multi-movie character arc.
How do we go from the undeniable terror of Godzilla in these 1954 and 2023 incarnations, to the cuddly on-call deus-ex-monster of the 1978 cartoon series? The latter does not seem compatible with the former. The answer lies in the fact that of what lies between the 1954 original and the 1978 animated series, and something I like to call, for lack of a better word (or at least, a word that exists but I can’t think of), “protagonization.”
Between the original movie and the cartoon are fourteen other Godzilla movies, from 1955’s Godzilla Raids Again to 1975’s The Terror of Mechagodzilla, and during that time a curious thing happens to Godzilla: he stops being an unknowable terror and becomes, more or less, the guardian of Japan. It doesn’t happen immediately; the first few sequels have Godzilla still wreaking havoc at will. But by 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, Godzilla has tempered his indiscriminate havoc enough to team up with two other monsters to defeat Ghidorah, and by Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973), Godzilla is shaking hands with a human robot he’s teamed up with, and no longer terrorizing Japan, preferring instead a quiet existence on Monster Island, which is essentially a retirement home for kaiju.