G-Mania, Day 8: Son of Godzilla

For the first time in this retrospective, I’ve truly dipped back in time in order to watch a movie. I mentioned last time that Godzilla movies were often difficult to come by in the States, aside from certain overpriced specialty stores, requiring the occasional VCR recording appointment to take advantage of one of the films randomly popping up on TV. One would think we’d have advanced beyond this situation these days, but one would be dead wrong. The rights for the various Godzilla movies over the years are held by different entities in different countries for different purposes, so a few films remain fairly elusive on the American home video market. I’ve gotten what I can on DVD and Blu-Ray, but some just plain haven’t been released on those formats here yet. Alongside the original Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla and Rebirth of Mothra III (which, if memory serves, is available, but still strangely rare compared to the other films of that trilogy), one entry that has evaded disc formats has been Son of Godzilla. As such, in order to own a proper copy of my own, I reached out to EBay, where I found a VHS collection I remember from my Suncoast trips back in my mall-visiting days, which, thankfully, included a copy of both Son of Godzilla and Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla. Plus, it looks pretty cool on my shelf, eh?

So, once I got my still-working VCR hooked up to a TV set that’s probably bigger than the format ever thought it would be played on, I was ready to go. Ooh, that vintage feel!

Just like the previous outing, we find ourselves on some Pacific island in order to keep costs down. Here, some scientists are doing research with a weather-altering machine, when they’re visited by a journalist, who happens upon the island via parachute. As you do. While stuck in these new environs, he and the scientists test their machine, which inadvertently irradiates some already-large mantises on the island, causing them to grow to positively ginormous proportions. A group of these mantises goes after a rock pile, revealing it to be hiding a large egg, which they force to hatch into a baby Godzilla. This Minilla (get it?) is shown by his reluctant father (the guy just wants to sleep, kid, give it a rest!) how to fight and breathe his atomic breath, all while taking on the mantises and a giant spider creature.

From the first moment we see the hideous thing, Minilla became the bane of many G-fans’ existences. The initial puppet looks incredibly cheap, but the full suit doesn’t look all that great, either. Godzilla hisself is looking very much like Cookie Monster here, a sign that we’ve struck the youth-targeting the Showa series has become known for. See, Toho wanted to go after cinema-going couples, so they went with the “cute” baby monster design. Unfortunately, the studio’s kaiju heavyweights (including director Honda Ishiro, special effects director Tsuburaya Eiji, and composer Ifukube Akira) were busy making King Kong Escapes, so the back-ups were tasked with making things work, and, boy-howdy, did things not go well. I will give credit where it’s due for the effects work on Kumonga, the spider (known as Spiga in the English dub, for some reason), which required two or three people to operate each leg, but that’s about the extent of it. Composer Sato Masaru’s score is dopey and childish, sounding like it came straight out of an early Hanna-Barbera cartoon, and the human-centered story is just ridiculous, even for this series. Minilla is just as exasperating for the audience as he is to his father, what with his using his tail as a jump rope and emitting a terrible donkey-like screech during tantrums (but those smoke rings he breathes are kinda funny, I’ll grant), and his inclusion in the series will lead to some dark times down the line. Thankfully we had the lovely Beverly Maeda as an island “native” to help us through things here, but even she couldn’t salvage this project.

I remember even disliking this one as a child, which is actually saying something, given my tolerance for garbage media at the time. But things would take something of a turn next time out, when one of the biggest kaiju rumbles of all time blessed our eyes. Stay tuned, kids.