BW Media Spotlight

Well bless your hearts Toho for making an official Godzilla YouTube channel in English as well as in Japanese. The English one seems a bit sparse because it’s newer, but it also allows me to show you the Godzilla cartoon I grew up with legally and that makes me happy.

I know there are G-Fans casual and diehard alike that hate this show because kids suck or something but this is not only nostalgia but I’m the guy who saw Santiago Of The Sea for the first time this week and thought it was a pretty cool seagoing adventure (even if they continue the trend of not realizing what a pirate actually is) so obviously I don’t follow trends. Sadly I don’t set them either. So let’s go over the alleged issues:

• Why is Godzilla shooting eye beams instead of his radioactive breath: Yeah, fair enough. I know HB likes their monsters with eye beams. And yes, Hanna-Barbera was making giant creatures long before Godzilla. They just had to fight superheroes and Frankenstein Jr (Gigantor as a superhero basically) before dealing with the King Of The Monsters. They know how to do the job. They just really like their eye beams, but occasionally Godzilla does breathe fire. Back then we chocked up the stream of heat to special effects, not realizing they were actually depicting how it works. Which leads to….
• Why is Godzilla helping people instead of stomping small villages and minor cities on the way to Tokyo?: Remember that this show was made in the classic (Showa) era of Godzilla some time after Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster. That movie started Godzilla’s slow transition from threat to guardian monster, a status well in place by the time this show started. Coming out in 1978 and lasting for two seasons it missed Godzilla’s reboot in 1984 (or 1985 for us in the US) so this was Godzilla at the time. He just saved more trains in the show.
• Why did they give him a nep....you know, I’m going to stop you right there. Godzooki is never referred to as Godzilla’s relation in any form. He’s just another monster that might one day grow to Godzilla-size (and actually does in a season two episode for a while). And before you go off about useless mascot characters Godzooki is able to summon Godzilla when the signal device is broken, flies the humans out of danger, and does other things to actually help. He isn’t just the show’s comic relief.
• Okay, but what’s with the same four humans?: You must of hated the recurring characters of the Heisei period after Godzilla Vs. Biollante. It’s a Saturday morning cartoon, which is also why nobody was eaten or killed except the monster of the week. Captain Majors, leader of the group and captain of the Calico, the scientist Quinn and her assistant Brock, and Quinn’s nephew (that’s the actual nephew in this show), Pete–who for some reason was also the ship’s cook and could operate the boat and yes I do wonder why Quinn brought her nephew into such dangerous situations and why the writers didn’t just make him her son, were consistency for the audience as they travelled the world tracking down kaiju and other weird scientific phenomenon.

Anything else just chalk up to being a Saturday morning kids show from the 1970s and try to enjoy yourself. Usually I like to break out the first episode, which in this case would be “The Firebird”, but all that’s really established there that you can’t get from any other episode is that Pete doesn’t so much understand what Godzooki is saying so much as interpret what he’s thinking generally as he has a stronger bond with the big monster than the others. Instead, to show off the defenses I just made in action, it’s episode two, “The EarthEater”, in which a monster from the underground starts eating up San Francisco. Guess he decided Rice-A-Roni wasn’t enough. Enjoy…though for some reason the Godzilla channel splits this into three parts, making shorts like the rest of the content on the channel. Not a fan of the idea, but with the DVDs long out of print and only having the first season I’ll take what I can get…if we also get season two online at long last.

Continue reading →