How 'Godzilla: King Of The Monsters' Draws From The Tradition Of Toho's Creature Features

At 8:55 a.m. on a Friday in the Tokyo suburbs, I sat down at my local Toho Cinemas multiplex to watch Godzilla: King of the Monsters. It was a fitting location to be in: first, because Godzilla destroyed landmarks from this very city in his first movie appearance back in 1954, and second, because the Toho chain of theaters is a subsidiary of the company behind Godzilla. Its theater in Shinjuku — the last stop on the train line where I live — is even situated in a building that is topped with a life-size Godzilla head. A couple of days later, I would commune with the spirit of Godzilla at an 8th-floor terrace cafe with a direct view of the head, before going downstairs to rewatch the movie and takes some notes.

In November of this year, Godzilla will celebrate his 65th birthday. Right now, he's still averaging one new movie every two years here on his original stomping grounds. Toho's homegrown series of Japanese Godzilla films boasts thirty-two entries alone. There was a record break of twelve years between Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) and Shin Godzilla (2016). However, with the latter film, plus Netflix's anime Godzilla trilogy and two recent Legendary Pictures productions, the King of Monsters has been enjoying a global resurgence as of late.

Now, in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Hollywood has assembled its very own all-star kaiju flick, which draws from Toho tradition to present what USA Today called "the Avengers of giant creature features." For the first time in an American movie, the gang's all here: not just Godzilla, but also King Ghidorah, Mothra, and Rodan. Their appearance in King of the Monsters is informed by past appearances in Toho films, so if you've seen the movie and are curious to dive deeper into its ocean of references, then prepare to embark on a spoilery submarine expedition through Toho history.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters may be the title of the movie but there are two monster kings in it and they aren't exactly friends. Neither is it Godzilla that Charles Dance's character, Col. Jonah, is talking about when he deadpans the line, "Long live the king."

Although he's never explicitly referred to as "King Ghidorah" in the movie (except in the closing credits, where he's listed as playing "Himself" along with the other three main monsters), Ghidorah is classified as a second apex predator among the Titans. This makes him a contender for the throne of the earth ... until we learn that he's a "false king," not of this world at all.

That's right: Ghidorah, Godzilla's old Toho arch-enemy, is an oversized extraterrestrial in this film, just as he was 55 years ago when he made his first appearance in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964). As recently as the Netflix trilogy ender Godzilla: The Planet Eater, we saw Ghidorah flying in from outer space via a wormhole.

Of course, it takes a while before Dr. Illene Chen, played by Zhang Ziyi, introduces the name Ghidorah into the mix. Until then, he goes by the designation "Monster Zero."

This is pulled from his second appearance in Invasion of the Astro-Monster (1965). In that movie, a group of humanoid aliens called the Xiliens controlled Ghidorah, whereas in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991), he did the bidding of a group of 23rd-century humans called the Futurians.

There's a somewhat funny xenophobic streak to Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (funny if only because of how brazen it is). The film went direct-to-video in the U.S. years after its release in Japan and you can very much see how it was made for the market of an ethnically homogenous country where foreigners were not to be trusted. The Futurians and their killer robots are mostly Caucasian males, who slowly reveal themselves to be evil time travelers, bent on rewriting the past to prevent Japan's economic ascendancy.

Blowing these guys up is one thing, but when the camera lingers on American soldiers lying dead on the beach, and when it then cuts to the U.S. Navy cheerily abandoning those soldiers after one missed radio call, it's not hard to see why Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah was accused of anti-Americanism. It just goes to show that the ethnocentrism cuts both ways.

In its own way, King of the Monsters — this American Godzilla movie — upholds that same spirit of ethnocentrism. It adopts a Caucasian male (Kyle Chandler) as its lead, letting his character command the center of attention in every situation as he channels his Type-A personality into aggressive dialogue. Meanwhile, the movie dispatches its one Japanese character, the aforementioned Dr. Serizawa, by way of a plot device that I have taken to calling "the nuke biscuit."

In its post-credits scene, King of the Monsters shows us Col. Jonah retrieving one of Ghidorah's severed heads. This may be setting up the wacky cyborg dragon Mecha-King Ghidorah (who also appeared in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah) for a future installment in the MonsterVerse. Godzilla vs. Kong vs. Mecha-King Ghidorah?

Now that we're done inspecting Easter egg specimens — or Mothra egg specimens, as the case may be — I'd like to return to the scene of 8:55 a.m. on a Friday at Toho Cinemas. As I settled into my seat to watch King of the Monsters on its opening morning in Japan, I had already begun to form a shaky hypothesis that Godzilla is what you might call "big in America."

If you're familiar with the phrase "big in Japan," then you might appreciate that there's a whiff of condescension to it. It's like hearing someone chime in about "first-world problems." Semantically speaking, it reduces the importance of something from American pop culture by consigning it to the far-flung outpost of this foreign country whose tastes are obviously more eccentric than that of the speaker.

As I see it, "big in America" is not quite the same as "small in Japan"—the existing derivative term for a Japanese celebrity who achieves success internationally but is virtually unknown in his or her home country. It's more like being the reverse Cheap Trick, by which I mean, a thing that started out big in America before gaining increased popularity at home.

Outside Toho Studios in Setagaya, Tokyo, there's a huge mural of Godzilla, which is complemented near the guard gate by a Godzilla statue and another huge mural of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. In its obituary for him, The Los Angeles Times noted how Kurosawa was "often described as the 'most western' of Japanese directors." Audiences in his home country held him at somewhat of a distance until he started to gain more international recognition with his 1950 masterpiece Rashomon.

Then the tide turned, eventually making Kurosawa's name a source of national pride ... for film-lovers, at least. It helped inspire Star Wars and the early career of Clint Eastwood, but even today, you might see that name met with a shrug in parts of Tokyo unless you were talking to a true cinephile.

So it goes with Godzilla. My first King of the Monsters screening was in one of the bigger auditoriums at a theater in Fuchu, Tokyo, yet it was less than half-full and I don't think this can be attributed solely to the hour of day. The logic of matinee prices is inverted in Japan. At Toho Cinemas, it's actually the late showings — after 8 p.m. — that are cheaper. Land of the Rising Sun and all that.

I was with the missus at the very first showing of this movie in our (admittedly suburban) corner of the capital and it was a smattering of mostly middle-aged and older Japanese men that surrounded us. A good number of them were sitting alone.

By Monday, Variety would be running articles about how Godzilla now looks to be a fading franchise, even in the states. It would also be reporting that King of the Monsters had earned $8.4 million on its opening weekend in Japan. Most of its money at the international box office came from China, where it drew in $70 million.

Contrast this with its $49 million opening in the U.S. The size of China's population — at 1.4 billion, it's the world's largest — plays a big part in its box office numbers, but Japan's population is about a third of America's and yet King of the Monsters only took in about a sixth of the box office revenue here.

Crunching these numbers, a picture begins to form of a franchise that is more popular abroad than at home—at least when it's in the fumbling hands of American movie studios.

It goes without saying that statistics, coupled with one American expat's anecdotal evidence, aren't enough to negate a beloved pop culture icon in his home country. However, if you went around asking Tokyoites (which I inquisitively did with an air microphone for the rest of the film's opening weekend), you might be surprised how many of them would profess to having never in their lives sat down and watched a single Godzilla movie. They might have caught bits of one on TV but Godzilla isn't necessarily a property that holds the same mass appeal here as Marvel movies do in the states.

As insane as it sounds, people don't always like seeing their city destroyed or watching monsters fight like pro wrestlers. The very idea of Godzilla is as divorced from their everyday reality as the concept of cowboys would be to those of us U.S. citizens who don't listen to country music or watch an abundance of Westerns.

One person I asked told me that he thought Godzilla had been influenced by King Kong (1933), and I suddenly felt like an idiot because I'm supposed to be a movie blogger but it hadn't even occurred to me, in my Japan-centric love of Godzilla, that King Kong pre-dated Gojira and was a major influence, the way the Westerns of John Ford were an influence on Kurosawa's samurai films.

If you dig back into the Godzilla franchise's history, you'll find that Toho producer Tomoyuki Tanaka deliberately set out to emulate the likes of King Kong and give Japan its own giant monster movie. Thus a new King of the Monsters, Godzilla, was born. As the song lyric goes, "What's a king to a god?"

Don't get me wrong: of the people I spoke to on opening weekend, some of them — mostly retired guys — did have fuzzy memories of growing up with Godzilla movies. They couldn't usually recall which monster they had seen Godzilla fight, because let's face it: he's fought so many over the years. The word "versus," accompanied by an opposing monster's name, has become a regular feature of his film titles.

To the adult Taro Tanaka (the Japanese equivalent of a generic name like John Smith), King of the Monsters might very well seem like something "for Americans." It's a Hollywood movie, after all, and as we've seen with its J-horror remakes and live-action anime adaptations, Hollywood has a way of removing the soul from the thing.

Whether or not you believe that that's what happened with King of the Monsters this weekend, the movie clearly comes from a place of geeky affection. It may not be perfect, but it's too dense with references to other Godzilla films to be written off as anything less than kaiju-literate.

Put that in your nuke biscuit (and feed it to Godzilla).