Sixty years ago, a sweating young man named Haruo Nakajima put on a 220-pound lizard suit and trounced a miniature version of Tokyo. Today, Legendary Pictures’ irradiated Godzillasaurus, three times the size of the original, is crashing through Hawaii and San Francisco on screens across the country. This is the story of how $1.5 million and a rubber suit launched a billion dollar franchise.
History
It was 1954 and producer Tomoyuki Tanaka’s film project had just fallen apart. Toho, the studio signing his paychecks, wanted to move forward on a project, any project. While searching for ideas, Tanaka read about Lucky Dragon 5, the tuna boat that was contaminated by nuclear fallout from the United States’s Castle Bravo thermonuclear test on March 1, 1954. The boat captain died, fallout contaminated the islands of Rongelap and Utirik — and Tanaka had his irradiated monster.
KILLER LIZARD TRIVIA
1. While kidnapped in North Korea and forced to produce films for the government, South Korean Director Shin Sang-ok made Pulgasari, a film heavily inspired by the original Gojira
2. Not finding animal noises that matched the monster, composer Akira Ifukube made the famous roar by rubbing a leather glove covered in pine-tar over the strings of his double bass.
3. In Germany, the titles of many Godzilla films were changed to make Frankenstein responsible for sending the monsters who fight Godzilla. (For example, Godzilla Versus the Sea Monster becomes Frankenstein und die Ungeheuer aus dem Meer, or Frankenstein and the Monsters from the Sea.)
4. Gojira was the most expensive movie ever made in Japan when it was released.
5. For his 50th anniversary, Godzilla was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
6. The original received a Japanese Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, losing to Seven Samurai.
7. Mystery Science 3000 heckled Godzilla vs the Sea Monster and Godzilla vs Megalon.
8. On March 17, 1992 someone stole the 13-foot Ghido-Goji suit from Toho’s special effects department. It was found washed up on the shore near Tokyo by a terrified old lady, and was used in two more scenes before its retirement.
9. Comic books write Godzilla’s roar as “Mrawww” or “Skreeonk”.
10. Godzilla isn’t a lizard, he’s a dinosaur. Zilla (Godzilla from the 1998 movie) is a lizard.
Godzilla (Gojira in Japanese, a combination of gorira, meaning gorilla, and kujira, meaning whale) was first storyboarded as a giant octupus, then an ape creature with a mushroom head, before finally becoming a hybrid of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, an Iguanodon and a Stegosaurus. Radiation acted like steroids, beefing the monster to 150 feet and endowing it with atomic breath and an affinity for screaming Japanese and their easily crumbled infrastructure.
