For those who were children and adolescents during the sixties and seventies of the last century there is nothing more normal than a man dressed as a monster sweeping the huge model of a Japanese city.Special effects almost naive than today in instead of calling laughter they cause nostalgia, and many dividends to the producers of Hollywood and Japan who have taken up the issue with everything and 3D.
In the television series like Ultraman , Space monsters or Ultraseven , accustomed us to beings vaguely similar to reptiles or inspired by dinosaurs, although with attributes such as the launch of rays or electromagnetic pulses, which obviously did not have the great saurus.
These super monsters have received the name of Kaiju , and thrived in a Japanese film genre called tokustasu , which literally translates as "special filming", and which includes both television series and movies where many special effects are used.
This genre came up with a movie, Godzilla (1954), and today is very present in world popular culture, as recent versions testify with this same kaiju as the protagonist, and others like Pacific Rim ( Pacific Titans , 2013).
Godzilla or Gojira
In the version of this kaiju where Jean Reno and Matthew Broderick (1998) perform there is a scene where a survivor Japanese exclaims terrified " Gojira , Gojira " , which is how the name of this monster is pronounced in Japanese.For this time the mistake was not of the Americans, who sometimes dismiss or distort the pronouncements in other languages, but of the Toho studios, producers of the 1954 version, and that when transferring the name of the beast from the Japanese alphabet to the Roman or Latin turned it into Godzilla.
Godzilla is so present in Western culture that it may not merit foreign word italics; This monster has been the protagonist of almost thirty film productions , of several animated series, comics and video games, although its origin is still involved in the mists of myth, or radiation.
From Hiroshima to San Francisco, from villain to hero
It is not known if the story is completely true, but it is said that producer Tomoyuki Tanaka was inspired by two classics of fantastic cinema: The World Lost ( The Lost World , 1925) and King Kong (1933), to which I add the nuclear terror created by the launch of the two atomic bombs in Japan in 1945, Hiroshima and Nagasaki , that the nuclear experiments of the Americans in the Pacific kept alive and present in the Japanese people.
Godzilla is also a result of the combination of two words: gorira (gorilla) and kujira (whale) , and like King Kong, he's not completely a villain, although in the first movie he attacks Japan, in the following will become an defender of the archipelago against other monsters or kaiju.
In the last two American versions this duality is seen again: in the first the creature attacks New York and is eliminated by airplanes of combat; while in the second, held in 2014, he defends San Francisco –California– from two other kaiju.
In this way Godzilla perhaps expresses the fear and attraction that the human being feels for energy Atomic and by other powers liberated by science, less benign than the great Godzilla.
If you are interested in Japanese mythology, we invite you to read about other creatures of this country.
Images: Chuck Coker , Hannah Swithinbank , Tom Simpson , Yusuke Umezawa
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