It’s (Still) Alive! A History of Godzilla in the United States
“Godzilla,” produced in a Japanese studio, is an incredibly awful film. It looks as though its Japanese producers … made a close study of the old film, “King Kong,” then tried to do substantially the same thing with a miniature of a dinosaur made of gum-shoes and about $20 worth of toy buildings and electric trains.¹
When the Godzilla franchise was first unleashed on New York theaters on April 27, 1956, the unflattering opinion of New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther was widely shared. Godzilla: King of the Monsters!, as the US adaptation was titled, was seen as a pale imitation of an American giant monster film released 23 years prior: King Kong. The spectacle of a man in a suit destroying a model version of Tokyo felt both goofy and pointless to US consumers, prompting critics to damn it as a meaningless romp. The film’s US gross of $2.5m put it at the higher end of summer B-movies, but only just.
This was an inauspicious American debut for one of the twentieth century’s most recognizable cultural icons. Back in Japan, by contrast, the original Gojira (a fusion of the Japanese words for “gorilla”…
