Why I like...Japanese Giant Monster Movies
But these schlocky, junky movies are also pure entertainment in the same way that Soviet agitprop is pure cinema. They’re completely unselfconscious about what they’re doing. There’s a sort of weird energy that pervades all of these goofy sci-fi epics that Jerry Bruckheimer has yet to capture. You know everybody was having a great time making Godzilla or Mothra or Rodan (the latter is my personal favorite). Particularly when Toho switched exclusively to color, the tone of the means began to reflect the ends. The bright, garish palette of Toho-color and the grandeur of Toho-scope even helped to ramp up the energy. The result: geek-boy cine-crack.
On occasion I revisit one of these movies when they’re on TV (I think it would somehow being sacrilege to rent one of these movies. They have to be happened upon just as Godzilla seems to happen upon Tokyo). What I find is that all of the weirdness I remember is comfortably intact: the crazy villains, the ridiculously deformed monsters, the impotent JDF’s plastic tanks so easily crushed underfoot by Ghidra or Monster Zero. Beyond the weirdness though is the reason I was enthralled with these movies when I was a kid—they’re just so energetically larger than life. And the heroic, adventurous lives the protagonists lead is irresistible. No matter if they’re scientists or journalists or a policeman adventure awaits them around every corner and they undertake it with the same kind of spirit a kid would. When I became a journalist, I kind of half expected that I’d have to deal with a giant monster—it sure would have beat the weirdoes I had to deal with when I was covering government meetings—I’m still waiting to this day.Probably the most indelible experience I had with the giant rubber monster genre was watching “Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot.” This was a TV show that was popular in the early ‘70s, and featured a little boy—the eponymous Johnny Sokko—fighting bad guys(armed with a pistol and a giant robot no less) as part of a super secret organization, the Unicorns. I loved this show. I wanted to be Johnny Sokko. I remember pretending to be him, fighting bad guys, conducting investigations, and having the time of my life. If you’re a youtube.com watcher, you can check out clips from the show to see what I mean (I did this morning and almost got misty eyed).
Yes, the show is bad. The production values are even less “opulent” than a big-screen Japanese monster movie. The bad guys are corny. The situations are just goofy and make no sense. But that energy is there. That sense of larger-than-life action. And that’s what makes these movies in many ways a lot more fun and satisfying than the lifeless mega-budget “events” of today. I might be wrong, but it just seems to me that George Lucas and company didn’t have any fun making the second Star Wars trilogy—it was just so leaden, even if it looked pretty and had a great soundtrack. If I had my choice, I’d take the guy in the rubber suit stomping on the cardboard city any day.
