Inhoudsopgave van LIFE Godzilla - LIFE Godzilla

IN 1992, SONY/TRISTAR PICTURES ACQUIRED the rights to Godzilla from Toho, intending to produce the monster’s first original American movie—the beginning of a planned trilogy. (“It will probably be much more interesting than the ones being produced in Japan,” Honda said just before his death.) Why had it taken so long for Godzilla to get his Hollywood break? “Godzilla wasn’t really a candidate for a Hollywood film until sci-fi and monster movies broadened their appeal and stopped being seen as B movies, starting in the late sixties with movies such as Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey,” says J.D. Lees. “By the early ’80s, the rise of visual effects companies like Industrial Light & Magic, coupled with the massive success of sci-fi films such as Star Wars,…

AT 6:45 ON THE MORNING OF MARCH 1, 1954, a Japanese fishing boat, the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (No. 5 Lucky Dragon), was cruising toward the Pacific Ocean’s Marshall Islands in search of bigeye tuna when crewman Matakichi Oishi saw a flash of yellow light through the porthole. “Wondering what had happened, I jumped up from the bunk near the door, ran out on deck, and was astonished,” he later wrote. “Bridge, sky, and sea burst into view, painted in flaming sunset colors.” Oishi had just witnessed the explosion of “Castle Bravo,” a 15-megaton thermonuclear device, on the islands’ Bikini Atoll. One thousand times more powerful than the bomb that had decimated the Japanese city of Hiroshima nearly a decade before, it was the latest and most destructive in a series…

“AS THE MISSILES AND ROCKETS STREAM through the upper atmosphere, man hopes to ultimately reach other planets, seeking to find the answers to worlds outside his own,” the breathless narrator says at the beginning of the English-dubbed version of Godzilla Raids Again, the 1955 sequel to Honda’s original film. “But as he attempts to unlock the mystery of the universe in which he dwells, are there not darker and more sinister secrets on this planet, Earth, still unanswered, still baffling and defying man?” The film’s answer is a resounding yes. Its action begins when a pilot crash-lands on an isolated island, where he’s eventually rescued by a fellow aviator. Before they escape, they witness two giant monsters, Godzilla and Anguirus (a sort of mutant turtle), fight before falling into the…