Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Godzilla's return part deux

First of all thank you all for the kind words. I do appreciate it. A little background first. I was always a fan of monster and fantasy horror movies when I was young. My 3 favorites then and still now we're King Kong, Godzilla and the Frankenstein monster. All three were serious movies. King King was a stop motion masterpiece. The gorilla itself was an 11 inch clay model. Each movement was filmed frame by frame. The same goes for all the dinosaurs in the film. It's the beauty and the beast story. Kong is taken off his unchartered island where he reigned, brought to New York to be exploited and "civilization" killed him. This film was released in 1933. It's a great adventure story. The effects still hold up today and it is sad when Kong is killed at the end. A great movie.

Sure Godzilla was a guy in a rubber suit. The millitary vehicles are little plastic models but the story is really an allegory to what happened in Japan a few years earlier. The U.S. dropped  2 nuclear bombs on Japan bringing the war in the Pacific to an end. As the cliche goes the nuclear genie was out of the bottle. That is essentially what the movie is about. To a little kid it's just a enormous monster attacking humanity and all our weapons, save for the one at the end, are usless. It scared the hell out of me when Godzilla made his first appearance. His head appeared over the top of a hill. I thought, "He's bigger than the mountain!" In the film he was said to 500 feet tall. There was more to this movie than a gigantic monster reeking havoc. I didn't realize this until I was older. Technically it was not the achievement that King Kong was some 20 years before, but the story was actually more more relevant to the modern world. There was a follow up movie a year or two later but it was just a sequal to capitalize on the success of the first one. As a side note, the movie that was released in the U.S was Americanized. What they did was film sequences with Raymond Burr as an American reporter named Steve Martin (not the wild and crazy guy) in Japan and cut it into the film. Anytime Burr character was shown interacting with some of characters of the original film they were portrayed by stand-ins who were always shown with their backs to the camera. Many more Godzilla films were made as it became a popular franchise to this day, but they just got sillier and sillier.

Frankenstein is another great film. Boris Karloff was great as the monster. Essentially it was the story of man, Dr. Victor Frankenstein trying to play God by creating life by sewing together body parts from various corpses. The monster was actually innocent, naive and tormented. Misunderstood he was actually killed at the end of the film. At least until the sequal. The original film still stands up today

I was also into comic books when I was a 10 or 11 year old and collected for a long time. I do have some very valuable comics including the first issues of Spider-man and about a 200 issue run in a row. The first issue of the Fantastic Four and a nearly complete run of 200 issues plus many others. Couple all the above with my tendency to get silly and you get part two of my silly Godzilla story. It was inspired by current events. I had the basic idea and kind of made it up as I went along. I had no idea how to end it but fortunately the Charley Sheen epic is still ongoing. In fact he appeared in Boston on Tuesday evening. He's a real piece of work. All in all this whole story came together over a 3 week period. Finding all the pictures and manipulating them with my photo program. sometimes the pictures I found dictated what elements I would add. OK it's now 1:40 in the morning. I have been writing this ever since I got home from work at 10:45. I will add the rest of the story in the morning and publish the whole shebang. Right now it's bedtime but when you read it all that I am writing now will be pointless.

And now, Part two.
I'm outta here.

5 comments:

  1. I never thought about what was behind the movie, but now it makes perfect sense.

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  2. OMG I am laughing like crazy. You incorporated Charlie Sheen into the cartoons perfectly!! Will there be a part 3?
    Good job bro!

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  3. From yesterday's visit to Blogzilla: "(Why do I feel like the other shoe is going to drop, though..?)"

    I give you

    epic music plays in the background, along with the sounds of explosions, screams of terrified crowds, and howls from doomed Godzilla...)

    Marge's comment on Godzilla's Return, Part Deux:

    I knew it.
    The other shoe just dropped.


    Thanks for my second big laugh this morning, Paul! (A visit to What Was I Thinking? will tell you what brought me my first laugh of the day...)

    You're a good egg, sir.

    8 )

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  4. Loved it. I knew about what Godzilla was supposed to be like afterward..long afterward. ;-) Scared ME too. Dad threw out all of my comics. Makes me sick to think what they'd be worth today and yes, if he had not have thrown them out I would still have them..those and the dolls that command a few bucks these days. Parents! I got married (awfully young) (his permission though) and when I left, I had those up in the attic. Well..when I came back for a visit and to gather things..voila! gone.

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  5. I hope everything is OK with you?

    ReplyDelete