Flying Kicks on Megalon
There’s a reasonable argument that Jun Fukuda’s 1973 film Godzilla vs. Megalon defined the franchise’s reception in the United States. The 13th Godzilla movie, it opened in North America in the summer of 1976, with a larger-than-usual marketing campaign behind it. Then, in March of 1977, for the first time, an American network broadcast a Godzilla film nationally. Or, at least, broadcast two-thirds of a Godzilla movie. The film had been trimmed to get a G rating, losing a couple of minutes from its 81-minute running time; the version NBC broadcast was further chopped down to 48 minutes, to fit into an hour-long time slot and also accommodate skits with John Belushi in a Godzilla suit. Belushi had previously played Godzilla on a Saturday Night Live skit, so perhaps he had a feel for the character.
In the 1980s, a mistaken belief that the movie was in the public domain led to the release of poorly-cropped versions of the film on videotape. Mystery Science Theater 3000 did an episode riffing on the movie. It became one of the touchstones for how Americans saw Godzilla.
Look at the actual movie, and you see a typical late Showa-era Godzilla film. (The 33 Toho Godzilla movies are divided up into various eras; the Showa era, named for the reign of the Showa Emperor, includes the first 15 films, up to 1975’s Terror of Mechagodzilla.) The budget’s low, the tone goofy yet unironic, and it’s aimed at children; but it’s sloppier than earlier installments in the series. It’s fair to say that the strain of turning out a new movie every year with less and less money shows.
The final production had behind-the-scenes complications. A contest for fans to design a new character led to a giant robot that had to be worked into the action. Production began without a finished script, leading returning director Jun Fukuda to finish the screenplay, based on veteran kaiju-film scribe Shinichi Sekizawa’s treatment, right before filming started. The movie does have Teruyoshi Nakano returning to direct the special effects, but there’s a new man in Godzilla’s suit; Haruo Nakajima had retired, and Shinji Takagi takes over for him.
The result is a plot that’s clunkier than usual. The movie opens with inventor and roboticist Goro Ibuki (Katsuhiko Sasaki) playing with his little brother Rokuro (Hiroyuki Kawase) on a lake, when there’s a strange light under the surface and the lakebed splits open. Goro and his pal Hiroshi (Yutaka Hayashi) save Rokuro’s life, but back at their home agents of an unknown enemy try to steal Goro’s new creation, the robot Jet Jaguar.
After investigation of clues it turns out the lake disaster’s only one manifestation of an attack on the surface world by the three-million-year-old sunken continent of Lemuria, now called Seatopia. A nuclear test unknowingly destroyed part of Seatopia, and they’re seeking revenge. They successfully take over Jet Jaguar, and use him to lead their god, a giant beetle named Megalon, to Tokyo; the human heroes regain control of the robot, and use him to call Godzilla; the Seatopians retaliate by calling the alien bad guys from the previous movie, and bringing Gigan to Earth, setting up a four-way final battle.
Long stretches of almost dialogue-free action in the second half of the film become almost hallucinatory. Jet Jaguar grows to kaiju size by the power of his determination. Godzilla launches a flying kick against Megalon. It’s unpredictable, at least, but not in a good way.
It doesn’t help that Fukuda has to play primarily to children. When Ishiro Honda aimed his movies at kids, he showed a kind of empathy for children and their perspectives and what they wanted out of Godzilla. Fukuda doesn’t have that. His movies seem made with a simpler idea of childhood behind them, and a simpler idea of what will draw a child audience.
Add to that shoddiness in the plot and logic, with a monster flown in from outer space to provide a big climax, and you end up with something that plays as camp. You can see that Fukuda knows how to make these movies, but not having had time to fully develop the narrative means that there’s an incoherence as well. Because of the craft of the filmmakers, that incoherence looks deliberate. It isn’t; it’s not that the filmmakers don’t care, they’re part of a process that creates movies that lend themselves to being appreciated through a camp lens.
There’s what used to be called a comic-book feel to the movie that comes with characters accepting outlandish concepts with a straight face. Descendants of three-million-year-old Lemurians plotting to destroy humanity? Sure, why not. Americans were familiar with the idea from comic books—a civilization from a sunken continent almost wiped out by a nuclear test was a main element of Marvel Comics’ Sub-Mariner for almost 15 years by the time Godzilla vs. Megalon premiered in the United States.
The movie didn't do especially well in Japan. Jet Jaguar was behind the times. In 1972 Go Nagai had created a manga called Mazinger Z, later that year adapted as an anime that later reached the United States under the name Tranzor Z, in which a giant robot was piloted by a human being; it’s often pointed to as the first modern mecha. Jet Jaguar didn’t have that shock of the new. That shock might be more than you could expect from the 13th film in a franchise. But bring that film to a continent of people who have only passing familiarity with previous films in the series, and you still might end up with a success.