With the success of the Godzilla movies, Toho was in for a surprise: kids loved seeing the giant monsters destroying cities. I mean, it shouldn’t be a surprise. Kids love dinosaurs and here are building sized dinosaurs destroying buildings like sand castles. Of course kids are going to love it.
While the original movie had been a way to process and warn about further atomic testing, the second was just a good ol’ fashioned monster vs monster fight, like kids bashing their dinosaurs together. A franchise was forming, but if you’re going to have monsters, wouldn’t be nice to have a few heroes, since the Japanese government wasn’t going to be able to come up with a counterweapon so easily? The last one was considered so dangerous the inventor sacrificed himself not only to stop the monster but to keep a new one from ever being made.
Meanwhile there was finally a sympathetic monster in Toho’s growing library. Mothra followed a giant moth who only came to Japan to rescue her doll-sized priestesses, destroying Japan and a fictional country in the process. Hers is a tale of what happens when humans let greed overcome common sense. Nowadays the theme has transitioned to something more ecological but at the time it was just greed is bad. So in what we would now call a shared universe, Mothra would become our hero. The enemy was obvious. In his last two movies, facing Anguirus and King Kong, Godzilla was still the bad guy, and thus he would be in this movie as well.
Mothra Vs Godzilla, known in the US originally as Godzilla Vs The Thing–nowadays Godzilla Vs Mothra, shows yet another bunch of greedy morons. When Mothra’s egg is washed up in Japan after a storm, they decide to bring it further inland and build a theme part around it. The twin pint-sized princesses reach out to a pair of reporters and a scientist (because of course they do) in order to retrieve the egg before it hatches and smashes a few cities getting back to the water. However, a new problem comes into play when Godzilla, who loves smashing cities because he’s too much of a jerk to walk around, doesn’t care that Mothra’s egg is in his path. Tonight I have the original subbed via YouTube and a link to the English dub because Internet Archive is a pain to embed. Enjoy.
This would be the Big G’s lack evil act until the 1980s reboot. So why did he become a hero? The answer next week. I think. If YouTube cooperates. By the way, live streaming services are now offering a Godzilla channel and Shout Factory has a bunch of kaiju movies on their streaming. So plenty of Godzilla and friends out there to watch.
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