Or...
A Whole Lotta Shakin' Going OnThe following originally appeared in G-Fan
magazine, issue #70, Winter 2005
One evening in the late 1960s, in the small town of Martinsville,
Virginia, Mr. and Mrs. Carl Rainey took an evening out for dinner and bridge, as
was their occasional habit, leaving my little brother and me in the care of a
teenage babysitter (a fine young gentleman named Mike Combs; in later years it
would be his sister Sherry, with whom I would fall madly in love…but that’s
another story). On this particular night, it just so happened that
Godzilla, King of the Monsters was
playing on TV, and Mike could not have been a better choice of sitter for us
because he was something of a dinosaur and daikaiju enthusiast. By age eight, I
had already seen
Godzilla three or four
times,
Gigantis at least twice,
and
Godzilla vs. the Thing once; I had
already hit a few mileposts on the road to becoming a diehard. Mike, on the
other hand, though a monster movie buff, was still a layman, and like most,
looked to me to provide background information that would help him understand
the movie.
“What the heck is a HEELIE-copter?”
“That’s
just Perry Mason’s way of saying ‘helicopter,’ Mike.”
“Oh.”
Now,
before you throw up your hands, I have to tell you…yes, I had been baiting him,
for I knew that Perry Mason was a fictional character portrayed by Raymond Burr.
Sadly, by not correcting my intentional gaffe, Mike proved himself unworthy of
being called a true Godzilla fan. Still, I had to admit he offered lots of
spirited advice to the fleeing citizens of Tokyo (“Run to the side, you idiots,
not straight in front of him!”), and anyone who could get so worked up over a
Godzilla movie was okay in my book.
The movie ended at eight o’
clock, and a critical discussion immediately ensued.
“Yes, his eyes
were made of plastic!”
“No, they were actually marbles painted to
look like eyes.”
“Who told you that?”
“None of your bees’
wax.”
“You’re a moron.”
“No, you are.”
“No,
you.”
In the middle of all this, I thought I heard a roll of thunder.
What a cool coincidence; on the screen, Godzilla had first shown up during a
raging storm. But then the light fixture began to sway, and the windowpanes
behind the couch took to rattling. This was no ordinary thunder! By now, Mike’s
eyes looked a lot like painted marbles popping out of his skull, and my little
brother, who had the audacity to sleep through the movie, began to plaintively
scream and holler.
After about thirty seconds, the rumbling stopped.
But Mike and I were charged up. We spent the rest of the evening peering out
windows, surveying the neighborhood from the front porch, even braving the
spooky stairs to the attic because the upper windows afforded a panoramic view
(even if it was pitch dark outside). I bitterly rued the fact that, at the time,
I didn’t own a tape recorder so I could leave behind some kind of verbal record
for Mr. George Lawrence, United World News, Chicago, USA, should the worst
happen.
Only when my parents came home around ten o’ clock did I
learn that Martinsville, Virginia, had experienced its first sizable earth
tremor in over 150 years. Now, to most, an earthquake might have been a
stimulating spot of news; to me, however, it was anticlimax exemplified because,
for a little while there, I had completely repented of my heretical hypothesis
that Godzilla’s eyes might be made of plastic. As far as I was concerned, his
eyes—as well as all the rest of him—were far more real than plate tectonics.
That
incident might not have been the beginning of my love affair with Godzilla, but
it was certainly the one to most impress an impressionable young lad. (Some will
say I’ve hardly changed; that again is another story.) To this day, the booming
footsteps and roars at the beginning of
Godzilla inspire a twinge of excitement
unlike any other. If I hear Raymond Burr’s voice in some other show or movie—be
it Perry Mason, Ironside, Rear Window, you name it—lines from the original
Godzilla inevitably flood my memory. Of
all the tape-recorded monster movie soundtracks I memorized word-for-word during
my teens (I bet some of you reading this did the same thing), the
English-language soundtrack to
Godzilla, King of the Monsters is
easily the one I recall best.
I imagine I was around ten years old
when the fact that I had always seen an “Americanized” version of
Godzilla truly began to dawn on me. And
at that moment, the original 1954 Japanese version hit number one on the
“must-see-before-I-croak” list. On subsequent viewings of
Godzilla, I scrutinized every frame of
film, assiduously looking for telltale signs of tampering with the original
material. Suddenly, my eyes were opened. Holy cows—that wasn’t Dr. Yamane, but a
look-alike, and not a particularly convincing one. And looky here! “Emiko,”
whose back seemed to be her most prominent side, was dressed a tad differently
from camera angle to camera angle. How could I have ever missed such blatant
cinematic blunders?
Anyway…I spent a good portion of my adolescence
convinced that American audiences had been robbed, and that the perpetrators
deserved to be punished with extreme prejudice—sans the benefit of a Perry Mason
defense. Without having seen a frame of the original, unadulterated Japanese
movie, I became one of the most vociferous detractors of the American version in
the western hemisphere.
Of course, all it took was one more viewing
of the American release, somewhere around age 13, to convince me that, well,
maybe Raymond Burr in Tokyo wasn’t really that big a stretch. Hey, it was still
Godzilla. And Godzilla…good. (Fire is our friend, and all that.)
And
finally…almost twenty years after the earthquake that loosed Godzilla upon
Martinsville, Virginia…I got my chance to cross number one off the must-see
list. Mid-1980s, Chicago, USA. A few years earlier, I had moved to the Windy
City so that I might reside near
Japanese Giants co-editors Ed
Godziszewski and Bill Gudmundson (not to mention the main office of United World
News). As some of you may recall, the technological toy of the day was the laser
disc player. Ed had one; I had one; and one day, we struck gold. Ed obtained a
catalog where we could order original Japanese laser discs.
Toho
discs.
Godzilla discs.
THE
Godzilla disc.
In those
novel days, region coding was still an unrealized bit of idiocy; and through
Ed’s ingenuity, we obtained an English script of the movie.
I don’t
think the excitement of an earthquake surpassed the excitement of sitting down
in Ed’s living room to watch the 1954
Godzilla, complete with a typed English
translation (which was admittedly a little more inconvenient than reading
subtitles). But moly hoses. A gorgeous print on a flawless LD system…it just
didn’t get much better.
Ed pushed the start button.
My
initial impression was that the movie moved faster than what I was accustomed to
(the opening scenes of Tokyo’s devastation in the American version
notwithstanding). The absence of Raymond Burr and his somber narration, which
extended each individual scene, seemed almost disconcerting. Perhaps the most
jarring aspect in the first half hour of the movie was that, on Odo Island,
Steve Martin and Tomo did not go out among the natives.
However, a
new fire exuded from the Japanese cast; especially during the conference at the
Diet Building, where Dr. Yamane dramatically testified that Strontium-90 had
been discovered in Godzilla’s wake. Dr. Serizawa had more screen time—meaningful
screen time. The triangle between him, Emiko, and Ogata took on an entirely new
poignancy. Godzilla’s rampage, shown as it would have actually progressed
through the streets of Tokyo, seemed somehow grimmer. And Serizawa’s final
sacrifice, shown in its deeper context, hit home with far more power.
After
Godzilla was over, I knew I had seen,
not just a different version of the movie, but a different movie altogether.
Certainly a better movie. A movie whose heart and soul did not revolve around
the monster, but around its characters. For years, I had considered
Godzilla, King of the Monsters and
King Kong of roughly equal stature in
the grand scheme of monster movies. No longer. Godzilla had left old Kong in the
dust.
For many years afterward, I would occasionally watch
Godzilla—even without the script, for I
had come to know it inside and out; perhaps not as intimately as the American
version, but certainly well enough to recall key dialogue. And Godzilla…well, he
spoke a language in which I was already fluent.
But as
well-acquainted with
Godzilla as I
considered myself, its well had far from run dry. In the 80s, with the laser
disc and English translation in front of me, I had wondered how it might get any
better. In 2001, I attended G-Fest, where
Godzilla appeared on the big screen (at
the Woodfield Mall Cinema, Schaumburg, Illinois—my old stomping grounds), and
now I was in a real theater surrounded by a horde of honest-to-god, diehard G
fans. There was a time—and trust me, it doesn’t seem all that long ago—that the
very idea would have seemed too fantastic to be believed. All my young life, I
was the sole Godzilla fan among many casual observers; even as an avid reader of
The Japanese Fantasy Film Journal, and
later as editor (and then co editor) of
Japanese Giants, which exposed me to
lots of like-minded individuals, I was a fan in a near-vacuum. But in the last
years of the 20th century, things had changed, and now going into the 21st…
The
environment at G-Fest could not have been more conducive to a meaningful viewing
of the original classic. Here I was, sitting next to my old friends Ed and
Bill—and new one, Robert Scott Field; the screen lit up, and the booming
footsteps and roars began. Just as expected. But something was different. I had
seen this version of this movie countless times, and yet I felt as if I were
about to witness something wholly new and remarkable.
And so I was.
The big screen; the fact that there were no obnoxious kiddies to distract one’s
attention; the absolute silence during the long, solemn passages where the
characters absorbed and reflected on the events as they happened…these things
came together to create nothing less than a transcendent experience. As the
girls’ choir sang their prayer following Godzilla’s stroll through Tokyo, I
actually discovered my eyes burning. Never in my 42 years had I been moved to
tears during a monster movie. Especially not one I had seen an average of twice
a year for well over a decade.
Damn!
There are times
nowadays, when I think it would be mighty sweet if, one day, while watching my
favorite movie in the world, the earth started shaking…and this time it wasn’t
just an earthquake.
And his eyes would not be made of plastic.
It's a multi-stage geocache — "X-tream Evil," that is (GC1AM8X). I won't be giving away any secrets by revealing that, in order to reach one of the cache stages, you have to construct a rope bridge over a ravine, which — out of necessity — makes the whole business a team effort. Our team consisted of folks with monikers like 3EaglesHigh, DLF2001, RobGSO, and Damned Rodan; we were also accompanied by the cache owner his own self, Mr. Rich "Night-Ranger" Colter, who made sure things got fixed after we broke them (or in one case, broke a stage so that it would actually work). We hit the woods at 8:00 AM, and got the quickest, easiest stages done promptly. No problems at all until we actually constructed the rope bridge across the rocky ravine. On the first test, the lower support line suffered a catastrophic failure — due to faulty equipment — which would have been bad news indeed had someone actually been out on the line. But that's why God made cache owners. In a fairly short time, he provided us with the new, necessary item to make reparations, and soon enough, a secure "Postman's Walk" spanned the ravine.
Uncle Rob on the Postman's Walk
