Weirdhouse Cinema: Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob
Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, and we're back with
our fourth Godzilla movie here on Weird House Cinema. And man,
it's an entry that introduces one of the King of
Monsters greatest rivals, Mecha Godzilla, who also happens to be
one of the most iconic mechs of all time. I
think it's pretty safe to say, yes, we're talking about

(00:35):
nineteen seventy four's Godzilla versus Mecha Godzilla.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
What technically constitutes a mech? What makes a mech different
than a robot just size is, if it's a big
enough robot, is it a mech?

Speaker 2 (00:49):
Well, we're probably going to summon some some pedanic corrections here,
which we invite from mech fans. My understanding, which might
be flawed, is that a robot is entirely like off
on its own doing its own thing. O bang, it's programming.
Where's a mech? I think more tip typically has someone
inside it controlling it, or you might apply some sort

(01:13):
of like a remote control scenario. I realized that with
Mecha Godzilla. The lines are maybe a little blurred here,
and by some people's definition, Mega Godzilla might not be
a pure mech, but I also don't think mecha Godzilla
is a pure robot.

Speaker 3 (01:28):
By this distinction, Robot Jocks is actually despite the title
about mechs.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
I think so yeah, I think Robot Jocks is definitely
mechs mechs and maybe text mex right, because there's some
there is a character named text yeah yeah, whereas yeah
Mecha god I don't know. At the end of the day, though,
Mecha Godzilla is just mecha Godzilla, like it is what
it is, and it towers over so many things, like
you know, we just have to respect the mecha mecha

(01:56):
g here and h But certainly, folks out there, if
you have because people have had obviously decades to argue
about this, If you have thoughts on what exactly Mecca
Godzilla is and how we should classify it, well write
in now.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
One quick note that's unrelated to the content of today's episode.
I just had to say something about it because I've
noticed this. Since we're on video, we don't coordinate ahead
of time about what we're wearing. So the last two
weird house cinemas. I think we ended up wearing black
T shirts. We're not doing that on purpose, We're not
color coordinating, but I feel like Rob, this is an opportunity,
at least for the people watching on video. What's on

(02:33):
your T shirt? Show it off?

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Oh, it's one of my many bar kindred shirts. Here
my favorite vegan restaurant, slash bar in San Diego. Oh.

Speaker 3 (02:46):
Nice, I've just got a hammer horror T shirt.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
Nice. Nice.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
Yeah, not doing that on purpose, but I guess maybe
we both have a lot of black T shirts that
come out for the movie days.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
A lot of black T shirts. Yeah, I'm going to
try and spice it up and get some colored T shirts,
but a lot of black T shirts in the drawer.

Speaker 3 (03:04):
So Godzilla versus Mecha Godzilla is I think one of
the most fun Godzilla movies of the early films. When
I first saw this, I did expect a giant robot
version of Godzilla shooting missiles out of his fingers, so like,
you get what you pay for in that regard, but
I did not expect many other things about this film.

(03:26):
I did not expect, for example, the scene where a
hit man from outer space in a Phantom of the Opera,
Gorilla Mask is uk uking while he throws folding chairs
at our hero on a boat. This is to say,
there is much more than just a mecha Godzilla to
this mecha Godzilla movie.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
Absolutely. Yeah. If you think that it's just going to
be limited to Godzilla fighting a mechanical version of himself,
don't worry. There's more to it. But if you were
opposed to the idea of a mechanical Godzilla, this movie's
probably not for you, because it still very much the
central attraction.

Speaker 3 (04:02):
So by nineteen seventy four, we're a good ways into
the Godzilla series.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
Yeah, we're almost i would say terminally into the franchise
at this point. As we'll discuss, there were concerns about
where we were with the franchise. This was the fourteenth
Godzilla film and the penultimate film of the much loved
Shoa era that of course went fifty four through seventy five,
so as you might imagine, a number of the elements
involved in today's film were not new to the franchise.

(04:30):
A lot of ideas have been deployed over the.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
Years, taking many different things off of the shelf and
combining them in new ways exactly.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
Like alien invasion threat that had been used before. What
I think sixty four is Godora the Three Headed Monster,
the fifth film and the franchise. Yeah. Likewise, the idea
of a divine kaiju, you know, like a giant monster
as deity, that had already been deployed in sixty four
Authora versus Godzilla the fourth film, which we previously covered

(05:03):
on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (05:04):
Though different in the sense that in Mathra Versus Godzilla,
Godzilla was still kind of bad and was fighting the
divine Kaiju. So Mathra is the divine Kaiju that has
to be summoned by rituals as kind of a good
god who must defend the people against the ravages of Godzilla.
By this movie, Godzilla is firmly.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
A good guy, absolutely and had been for a while,
as the dialogue will refer to. Let's see, we also
had certainly had kaiju triple threat battles before, so Godora
and its follow up, sixty five's Invasion of the Astro Monster.
Both of these film featured team ups and multi monster battles.

(05:44):
Battle Royals if you will, and then Yeah, Godzilla as
a good guy. This originated in Godora, so this had
been in play for a while, and then, in terms
of just monster battles at all, this had been happening
since the second film, fifty five's Godzilla Race Again. Yeah, but,
as the title suggests, Godzilla versus Mega Godzilla is the

(06:04):
first film with a robotic monster villain, taking the obvious
next step in the franchise's evolution, while also cashing in
on the growing mech and giant robot craze in Japan
at the time. However, it's worth pointing out that, you know,
we certainly had giant robot films before Godzilla. Original Godzilla
director Ishruhanda's nineteen fifty seven film The Mysterians is a

(06:26):
great early example of a giant robot in a Japanese film.

Speaker 3 (06:30):
Right, But that's not a Godzilla movie. That's just a
different Honda movie that's got this giant robot.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
Right now, Technically, Godzilla teamed up with a robot jet
Jaguar in the nineteen seventy three film Godzilla Versus Megalon.
And then some of you might be aware of mechany Kong,
the mechanical like essentially what Mega Godzilla is to Godzilla.
Mechanic Kong is to King Kong, and the Canny Kong

(06:57):
actually predates Mecha Godzilla. It appeared on The King Kong Show,
a TV series that ran sixty six through sixty seven
in Japan, and appears in the film King Kong Escapes
from sixty seven.

Speaker 3 (07:09):
Sometimes you just find out there was a King Kong
TV show. Never never even imagined such a thing.

Speaker 2 (07:16):
Yeah, and sadly though, to my as far as I'm aware,
maybe this happened on some television series, and I'm not
aware of a Godzilla fans chime in, but I don't
think we've ever had a proper tag team of King
Kong and Godzilla versus McCanny Kong and Mecca Godzilla. If
it has happened, please alert me to it so that
I can seek it out immediately.

Speaker 3 (07:36):
That would be interesting.

Speaker 2 (07:38):
Also, I think this is the first Godzilla film to
involve Interpol. Generally, I would say giant monsters trying to
destroy whole cities is not on their radar, but in
this one it is.

Speaker 3 (07:49):
What is going on with Interpol. In this movie, Interpol
is imagined as a cross between a between like I
six from the James bond Onto movies and a Ninja
Secret Society.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
Yeah, you know, I think a part of it comes
down to this, and we'll discuss this more as we proceed.
Any good giant monster film has to be some sort
of film when the giant monsters aren't on screen, right,
it has to decide, and this film has decided that
it is going to be, you know, at least a
slightly groovy spy slash super crime slash, you know, international

(08:29):
mystery sort of a film.

Speaker 3 (08:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
Oh, and it does a pretty good job with that.

Speaker 3 (08:32):
I didn't make the super crime connection, but you're right.
The Interpol agent who is revealed later in the film
would fit right in in Mario Bava's Danger Diabolic, wouldn't he?
He would like he looks like a character from that movie.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
Yeah. He just wandered in and and and his detached
for most for a good portion of the film, Like,
all right, what's he gonna do? Is he gonna jump
in and do something? Which side is he on? Yeah? So, yeah,
as we've been saying, Godzilla versus Meka, Godzilla is a
film with a lot going on in it. It jumps around,
has a little something for everyone, Blistering kaiju battles, funky
humanoid aliens and vital to actually watching any giant monster

(09:11):
movie from beginning to end. It has a decent human plot.
When the monsters are not on screen, you're not just
longing for the monsters to come back.

Speaker 3 (09:19):
It's kind of juggling a few too many characters, I think,
But yeah, but it is. The human plot is not bad.

Speaker 2 (09:27):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, especially.

Speaker 3 (09:29):
Once the once the planet of the Apes aliens show up,
like and they reveal the gorilla masks. That's pretty solid.

Speaker 2 (09:36):
Yeah. So I've long been a mega Godzilla admirer from AFAR,
but I didn't actually get around to watching this one
for the first time till last year. I watched it
with my kiddo and we watched it, I believe, that
one in the English dub version, and then for this episode,
I rewatched the film with the original Japanese language track
and subtitle. So I've had it both ways now, and

(09:58):
at some point my kiddo and I are going to
follow up with seventy five's Terror of Mecca.

Speaker 3 (10:03):
Godzilla excellent. Actually, I have not seen that one.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
So Honda comes out of retirement to direct that one.
So into the Showa era, so it's an important one.

Speaker 3 (10:14):
I'm licking my chops, but I thought it might be
good quickly to situate Godzilla Versus Mecha Godzilla a bit
in the series history. So I want to acknowledge a
source before going forward. For a lot of the following,
my knowledge comes from the articles about the relevant films
by the journalist and author Steve Rifle, that are included

(10:36):
in the Godzilla Showa era film's collection from Criterion. So
that collection comes with a big, an excellent booklet. Actually
it's got like an overall article about the series and
then little entries on each movie.

Speaker 2 (10:48):
Yeah. I'll come back to that release here in a minute.
But Steve Rifle has written multiple books about the Godzilla franchise,
So if you want to dive deep, have some maybe
some vacation reading about Godzilla, this is the author you
should pick up.

Speaker 3 (11:01):
So the immediate previous Godzilla film, Godzilla versus Megalon from
nineteen seventy three, is considered by a lot of people
to be a real low point in the series. It
was made on an extremely limited budget, it was shot
in just a few weeks, and it relied heavily on
recycled footage from previous Godzilla films. At the same time,

(11:25):
I think the stakes might have felt pretty low to
the studio because this is another one of the later
Godzilla movies targeted specifically at children, you might even say
little children, kind of similar to All Monsters Attack from
nineteen sixty nine, which we've already talked about in a
dedicated episode. Gone entirely is the dark tone of movies

(11:47):
like the original fifty four Godzilla, And though there are
plot elements in Godzilla Versus Megalon about nuclear testing, it
seems that the real presence or feeling of the themes
like environmental destruction or nuclear you know, the dangers of
nuclear war, those are not really felt in the movie.

(12:08):
It's just kind of a it's a plot element, but
it doesn't really feel like it means anything.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
Yeah, your better Godzilla films are also, to some degree
message films. Yeah, I'm not going to say that today's
film really has some message now, but yeah, some of
the ones that we've talked about before the half so.

Speaker 3 (12:27):
By this point in the series, when you get to
the ones in the later sixties and early seventies that
are aimed at kids, of course, Godzilla is a friendly
protector of humanity and there's a lot of cute stuff
in these movies, like The Baby Godzilla Manila, which my
daughter loves, and a lot of slapstick comedy for the kids.

(12:47):
You know. The fight scenes have more of a goofy,
goofy slapstick fight kind of feeling. And this was part
of a trend, you know. So by the nineteen seventies,
Toho had seen diminishing ticket sales for gud Zilla releases,
and this was widely chalked up to competition from television.
So they compensated by cutting production budgets and trying to

(13:09):
spend as little as possible making these movies. And another
way you could look at it is they were trying
to react to the rise of television and the loss
of interest in theatrical movies by making the movies more
like the TV shows that they thought they were losing
out to. TV shows such as Ultraman, which we've talked
about on the show before. This is about humanoid alien

(13:32):
warriors in robotic looking suits that can enlarge their bodies
to Kaiju size to fight against attacking monsters. And if
you grew up more in our era of childhood, I
think you could argue that shows like the Mighty morphin
Power Rangers were a sort of spiritual successor to a
subgenre that originally began with Ultraman and things like that.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
Absolutely, and if you look at and I haven't watched
many of these shows in their entirety, but I've seen
a lot of clips and the Tokasatsu TV series that
were really you know, jumping out in the seventies, like
they were really going all out. Yeah, so you can
understand how, like, why would you go see a Godzilla
movie at the theater when you could see all this

(14:16):
wild action on television and then perhaps diminishing returns as
the cinematic treatment is just trying to match the TV treatment. Yeah,
so again, why go to the theater to see that
it's all on my screen at home?

Speaker 3 (14:29):
Yeah, exactly. So it feels like, I mean like we
weren't sitting in the room with these people, so we
don't know, but it kind of feels like Godzilla versus
Megalon the movie before. This may have been born out
of a question like how can we get an ultraman
in a Godzilla movie and not spend any money? So
in this movie you get the giant robot Warrior Jet

(14:51):
Jaguar who has to fight to protect Earth from a
huge beetle named Megalon. This beetle has drills for hands,
and Godzilla gets into the fight too, but his presence
in this movie is almost an afterthought, like it is
still a Godzilla movie, so I guess we got to
toss him in there, but it's very much a Jet
Jaguar movie.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
Yeah, kind of poocy energy there, I guess. Yeah, I've
seen this one, but it was on amss T three
K years ago.

Speaker 3 (15:16):
Yeah, what is Jet Jaguar doing now? So in this
movie during the fight scenes. I was reading about this recently,
Like the monsters do a lot of silly stuff. They
repeatedly break the fourth wall and they do poses and
even reaction shots for the camera. So it's a little
bit like Godzilla becomes Jim from the Office and Megalon

(15:39):
had a poor domestic box office performance but ironically did
pretty well overseas. So for a lot of fans outside
of Japan, Godzilla Versus Megalon was the first Godzilla film
they actually got to see in theaters. So that's all
the background. One year after that comes Mecha Godzilla. The

(15:59):
inspiration for this movie is allegedly that producer Tomoyuki Tanaka
spent some time on the island of Okinawa the year
before and started thinking that it would be an appealing
setting for a movie. A major element in the story
is this legend of a magical sentinel named King they
call him King Caesar in the movie, or King Shisa,

(16:22):
which is prophesied to one day wake from its ages
of slumber and protect the island of Okinawa. This is
apparently based on a real creature of Okinawan folklore called
the Shisa, which is a lion headed dog that plays
a role as a protector as well.

Speaker 2 (16:38):
That's right, Like, this is a basically based on the
lion dog of mainland China, and it goes way back
in Okinawan sculpture and mythology. So there are lots of
examples of these things if you travel to Okinawa and
you see some of the artifacts.

Speaker 3 (16:57):
Though I will say the design of King Caesar giant
monster is feels a little bit less lion dog to me.
You can still see elements of that, but it's bipedal
and the face feels very bat like. I get strong
bat energy from King Caesar.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
Strong bat energy a little bit like almost like a
bat were wolf.

Speaker 3 (17:17):
Yes, bat where Well that's exactly Yeah, kind of like
you ever watched the first ever episode of Batman the
animated series.

Speaker 2 (17:26):
Yeah, yeah, kind of like Manbat except without wings.

Speaker 3 (17:29):
Man Bad is great. But also with these I mean,
like I'm not saying it's devoid of the lion dog design.
There are flourishes of that in there too, like you
can recognize it.

Speaker 2 (17:39):
But but the great thing is is we'll get into later.
Like King Chisa really stands out, like, yeah, if there
was no mecha Godzilla in this film, I'm not saying
it would be as as great, but it's still a
pretty interesting faux slash partner for Godzilla in that this
creature just looks so much different and you know, a
nice furry kis.

Speaker 3 (18:00):
So why are Godzilla and his new ally King Caesar
fighting a robot this time? Seems like it's the same
reason that the previous movie was all about an ultraman
copycat jet Jaguar. Robots and cyborgs were all the rage
in Japanese media at the time. It's like the public
had a sort of botborg fever, and so they're feeding

(18:21):
that fever. We got to get a robot or a
cyborg in there and actually in this movie they called
mecha Godzilla. Both they emphasize, actually, Mecha Godzilla is a cyborg.
So the Criterion article points out in particular the success
of giant robot TV shows in the sixties and seventies
like super Robot Red Baron, another one called super Robot

(18:43):
Mack Baron, one called Iron King, and one called jumborg Ace.
And the article also notes several interesting things contributing to
the design of Mecha Godzilla. One is effects director Terry
Yushi Nakano created the original design by taking a Godzilla toy,
so this was supposed to be Godzilla. The toy was

(19:06):
made out of ten and then beating it with a
hammer to deform the surfaces of it. It doesn't say
this in the article, but I'm imagining this means that
it was stripped of its paint and outer texture that
gave it the Godzilla appearance. So this would leave it
with a more bare metal appearance and also probably some
more flattened and angled surfaces like we get with Mecha Godzilla. Apparently,

(19:30):
the effects team also studied the movements of soldiers in
historical European plate armor as a basis for Mecha Godzilla's movement.

Speaker 2 (19:39):
That's interesting.

Speaker 3 (19:41):
So a lot of fans think of Godzilla versus Megalon
as one of the low points of the series Godzilla
Versus Mecha Godzilla. It's not like an absolute fan favorite,
but it's pretty well liked. It was considered a partial
return to form after the more explicitly infantile Godzillas of
previous years. I'm not saying this is like a you

(20:01):
know that it's like a super mature film, but it's
not as explicitly aimed at children. It is more of
an adult plot line. And apparently they redid Godzilla's head,
designed to make him a little less goofy looking and
give him more of a fight and face and Mecha Godzilla.
After this movie proved enduringly popular, like fans wanted mecha

(20:22):
Godzilla to come back, So Mecha Mecha shows up in
many subsequent properties.

Speaker 2 (20:27):
Yeah, comes back in the next film, Terror of Mega Godzilla,
and then later on we get new versions of Mega Godzilla.
Like I think, this movie effectively shakes things up in
a number of ways, but at the end of the day,
the big thing that it does is it introduces a
character that you know, I'm not saying equals Godzilla, but

(20:47):
almost it has like its own energy unto itself, Like
there's something about mecha Godzilla that's it feels like some
sort of a potent symbol for I don't know, the
complete mechanization of your hopes and dreams and do a
new terrifying form. Uh and oh and then I should
also add just the monster battles in this one, I

(21:08):
think sizzle really nicely. There are a lot of fireworks literally, yeah,
very good.

Speaker 3 (21:13):
And gore. This one has gore, more gore than I expected.
There's a horrible scene where Angeiris really gets mangled and
you see all this like gore coming out of its
broken jaws. There are scenes where Godzilla gets wounded in
the throat and there's jets of arterial blood spraying out
of Godzilla's neck. There are also there's also weird alien

(21:36):
gore where the Aliens get wounded and they're squirting some
kind of black fluid out of their out of their
you know, throats. More gore than I expected from a
Godzilla film.

Speaker 2 (21:47):
This might have to have to be a topic we'll
come back to, like how much of this is it
just being the seventies at this point, you know what
kind of gore was present in the the Godzilla movies
that came right before this, and how much of is
a reaction to gore that was existing in competing media,
like in the Ultra Man movies and TV shows, or

(22:09):
in the Gamera movies, which also have their own like
alien goopy blood going on.

Speaker 3 (22:13):
I mean, I'm not saying this is a highly gory film.
It's not. It just feels gory for what I'm used
to thinking about with Godzilla.

Speaker 2 (22:20):
Yeah, yeah, all right. I don't really have an elevator
pitch for this one because the title kind of says
it all. Like that kind of speaks to the to
how iconic the idea of Mecca Godzilla is versus Godzilla.
You know, it's like Godzilla versus the inorganic, opposite, evil
version of itself.

Speaker 3 (22:38):
I could give a pitch that's different than the title,
and that is, come see the sights of the amazing
island of Okinawa.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
Yeah yeah, yeah, it's.

Speaker 3 (22:46):
Almost like an Okinawa tourist advertisement.

Speaker 2 (22:49):
It really is. They shot there and it looks gorgeous.
I have not been myself yet. All right, if you
would like to see Mega Godzilla. Well, you can get
this one in a number of places. Off it is
a Godzilla movie. But we once more want to highlight
that Criterion Collection book set Godzilla the Shoa Era Films

(23:09):
nineteen fifty four through nineteen seventy five. It's an amazing hardback,
beautifully illustrated book with no fewer than fifteen Godzilla films
on Blu Ray. It's a little bit pricey if you
get at full price, but there are frequent sales, especially
at Criterion Channel. I mean the Criterion Collection website for
this totally worth it for Godzilla fans. This is an

(23:32):
investment in your future. But if you're looking to stream
at Criterion Channel currently offers this among many other Godzilla films.
All right, let's get into the people behind this one,
and I will agree with you once more. We do

(23:53):
have I think too many human characters. I feel like,
why do we have two professors when we could have one?
Or they were like no, no, no professor could have
an expertise in both physics and archaeology. I think they
could for a Godzilla film, just to move things along.

Speaker 3 (24:08):
I don't think we need two professors. I don't think
we need the professor's daughter. I don't think we need
the second Interpol agent.

Speaker 2 (24:17):
Yeah yeah, so yeah. A lot of moving pieces here,
but at any rate, let's start at the top. The
director and one of the writers on this one is
Yun Fukuda, who lived nineteen twenty three through the year
two thousand, Japanese director, best known for his work for Toho,
and especially in the Godzilla franchise, of which he directed
five Ibirajara the Deep from sixty six, Son of Godzilla,

(24:40):
sixty seven, Godzilla Versus Gigan seventy two, Godzilla Versus Megalon
from seventy three, and of course Today's movie, his last
in the franchise. He also directed seventy seven's The War
in Space, but otherwise seem to have directed a lot
of espionage and comedy films, kind of like groovy spy pictures,
and these seem to have been his preference in comparison

(25:01):
to the Kaiju movies, films such as the esp espionage
thriller sp In nineteen seventy four.

Speaker 3 (25:09):
Oh, okay, esp and spy in the same word.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yeah, yeah, like esp spy. Yeah. So it's not like
it's not like he was later trashing the Godzilla films,
but I think late later on people interviewed him and
he was like, I don't you know, He's like, I
don't really like to look back on those so much,
or maybe he had mixed feelings about his time with
the Godzilla films but still appreciated that people still love them.

Speaker 3 (25:31):
Well, you can feel his love for funky spy subject
matter in this movie because it's half of what the
movie is is spy stuff.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
Yeah, all right, there are three other credited writers. I'll
try and roll through them pretty quickly. Here we have
Misami of Fukushima nineteen twenty nine through nineteen seventy six,
Japanese sci fi author who was known as the Demon
of SF and apparently played a big role in popularizing
science fiction in Japan and translated many popular names such

(26:01):
as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, so forth into Japanese,
and he also wrote various works of short fiction. Shinichi
Sekizawa nineteen twenty through nineteen ninety two a frequent Godzilla scribe,
beginning with sixty two's King Kong Versus Godzilla, and this
author's Godzola credit stretch from there to nineteen eighty nine's
Godzilla versus Bayolante story credit there. And then we have

(26:26):
Hiro Yasu Yamaura born nineteen thirty eight, Japanese screenwriter who
worked on various sci fi and kaju projects, with this
being the biggest. All right, now let's get into we
have factions at play here. Let's start with the humans.
We have basically, our star is our human star is

(26:46):
Masahaki Daimon, playing the character Kasuke Shimuzu. He was born
nineteen forty nine Japanese actor. Best known for this film,
but his credits also include seventy three's Lady Snowblood that's
a cult favorite Ladies Samurai movie, and the TV series
Ultraman eighty. I this guy does, he does a fine job.

(27:07):
I don't want to be mean here, but he he
kind of mugs like a grumpy toddler the entire film,
and he's kind of just sort of your cookie cutter,
good guy. I don't know, I he bored me a
little bit.

Speaker 3 (27:20):
He is surprisingly action oriented, given that his character is
not supposed to be some kind of secret agent or whatever,
and yet he is always like bristling for a fight
and ready to you know, ready to tackle the bad guys.
So he he comes off like he's supposed to be
just a tough guy. He's a tough, tough guy.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
Yeah, And when he's actually in action, it is entertaining.
I really like the sort of spy fisticuffs and like
and crime sequences. Yeah. And so when it's action oriented, yeah,
he's great. But the rest of the time, there's a
lot of him sort of like reacting to things, and
I just don't get a strong sense of reaction from
this guy.

Speaker 3 (28:01):
You can. He feels like the kind of character who
makes a tough, frownie face when he's getting his picture taken. Yeah,
and people are like, come on, you can smile.

Speaker 2 (28:09):
Yeah. And it's tough because we have some other character
actors in this film that are far more charismatic.

Speaker 3 (28:15):
Yeah, this character in the movie does have a brother
who is less grim than case A k.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
Yeah, he has his more handsome brother. Is the character
Masahiko Shimuzu played by Kazuya Aoyama born nineteen fifty one,
Japanese pop musician turned actor turned Seaweed corporate ceo apparently
as a family business. Wow, So he didn't actually have
that many acting credits. I think he was just you know,

(28:44):
getting out there and exploring his creative side before stepping
up and being the seaweed corporate overlord that he was
born to be.

Speaker 3 (28:53):
Does he specialize in a particular kind of seaweed or
is it? Is it like I think it's kombu or
I don't knowri or.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
I didn't have the fortitude to really research the business
that much. I was just like, okay, seaweed, all right, good,
good going.

Speaker 3 (29:08):
It's an important business, it is. I love some seaweed products.

Speaker 2 (29:12):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely so. Yeah that's where he That's where
the true colling was. He's out there doing good.

Speaker 3 (29:18):
Work supply us with our precious MSG.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
Yes, okay. We also, if you've seen enough God's Ola movies,
you might ask be asking, well, where's our photojournalist? Well,
we have an archaeologist who is sometimes mistaken for photo
journalists and basically fills the same the same character profile.

Speaker 3 (29:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
Yeah, this is the character Seiko Kanda Gosuku played by
Raiko Tajimia, and she was born in nineteen forty nine
Japanese actress who I think she did other live action
acting work, but she also did a great deal of
voice work in anime, so her other credits include and
this is voice work, I believe seventy nine The Roses

(30:00):
of Versailles. All right, now, let's get instant to some
people that or maybe a little more recognizable and also,
for my money anyway, more charismatic and entertaining on the screen.
The first of two professors we have Professor Miya Yajima.
He's a physicist and he was played by Akahiko Herrada.

(30:23):
Lived nineteen twenty seven through nineteen eighty four. Hirata was
a Godzilla in Toho veteran at this point, having appeared
in the original nineteen fifty four Godzilla film. He's the
guy with the ipatch in that.

Speaker 3 (30:35):
He's the important scientist in the first one who comes
up with the oxygen bomb, who sacrifices himself.

Speaker 2 (30:42):
Yes, exactly, so key role in that. But after that
he was in various other related films. He was in
fifty six is Rodin. He was in The Mysterians, sixty
one's Mathra, sixty two's King cong Versus Godzilla, sixty three's Atragon,
which we've watched on the show. Sixt Godora, the Three

(31:03):
Headed Monster, Ibira, Horror of the Deep. Let's see Son
of Godzilla, and then he's also in the follow up
to this film, Terror of Mecha Godzilla, which would prove
his last Sozilla film before his death in eighty four.
So he's a great presence in this film.

Speaker 3 (31:18):
His character has one of the most hilarious Chekhov guns
in movie history. I can't wait to talk about that.

Speaker 2 (31:24):
He does. He does? Yeah, all right, there is another professor.
We also have Professor Wagura. He's an archaeologist, a various
deemed archaeologist, played by Hiroshi Kozumi. He was also a
Godzilla and Toho veteran at this point. In fact, he
played professors in both sixty four's mathra Versus Godzilla and

(31:46):
Godora the Three Headed Monster.

Speaker 3 (31:48):
This character is absolutely useless in a flight.

Speaker 2 (31:51):
Yes, all right, but now we're getting to get into
a really cool character and actor here. Let's say I
don't want to spoil who he is, We'll just say
he's the guy with sunglasses.

Speaker 3 (32:04):
At this point, I'm gonna in our early version of
the plot summary, I'm going to be calling him the
rock and roll spy.

Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah, rock and roll spy. Here is played by Shin
Kasheita born in nineteen thirty nine. Died in nineteen eighty two.
He just oozed as cool for much of the film
and walks a nice morally ambiguous line where again we're
asking ourselves to is he a hero? Is he a villain?
Is he with the aliens? Is he with the humans?
When's he going to do something? I can't wait?

Speaker 3 (32:30):
Is he going to keep wearing those sunglasses no matter
how dark the environment.

Speaker 2 (32:34):
Is, going into actual cave in cave, still.

Speaker 3 (32:37):
Wearing in an unlit cave with aviators on.

Speaker 2 (32:41):
That's how cool he is. Yeah, he's not going to
take those off, So.

Speaker 3 (32:45):
I mean that must be some hangover easily.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
With Well, you might think he's a vampire, and based
on some of his other credits, you might be right.
Very distinctive looking character actor here that earned him a place,
an endearing place in Japanese Cinnamon TV coming off stage work.
He had the stage background, very well regarded actor whose
short career leaves us wondering, like, what else where else

(33:11):
we might we might have seen him if he had
lived longer. We've actually covered a Kashida film before because
he played one of the masters of death in nineteen
eighties Showgun Assassin. Oh, so I believe he was the
one with the iron fist weapon. Each had like a
signature weapon that they used.

Speaker 3 (33:28):
Were these the guys with the big straw hats that
come down way over their heads and kind of.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
Swoop out exactly? Yeah. These were in the original nineteen
seventy two Lone Wolf and Cub Baby cart at the
River Styx, which was one of the two films incorporated
into Showgun Assassin. These are the Hidari brothers, and so yeah,
he's one of the Hidari brothers that ended up being
called Masters of Death that of course end up inspiring
the three storms in Big Trouble, Little China. Yeah. He

(33:56):
also appeared in seventy two's Lone Wolf and Cub Baby
Cart in Peril in a different role. And he appears
in two films in the nineteen seventies Toho Dracula trilogy,
seventy one's Lake of Dracula and seventy four is Evil
of Dracula. I believe he plays the vampire in both
of them. These have been on my list for a while,
but I haven't checked one out. But just visually, I

(34:18):
would say that Kashita makes for a great Dracula or
a great vampire.

Speaker 3 (34:23):
Yeah, I'm looking at the screenshots you got here. I
want to see it now.

Speaker 2 (34:26):
Yeah, and his other credits include Lady Snowblood two Love
Song of Vengeance from seventy four, among other pictures. So yeah,
really cool actor cool. All right, let's talk briefly about
the alien faction here. There is an alien supreme leader
by the name of Kurnuma, and he is played by
Goro Mutsumi, who of nineteen thirty four through twenty twenty

(34:48):
one Japanese actor whose other credits include sixty six is War,
The Gargantua's nineteen seventy Stray Cat Rock, Delinquent Girl Boss
said to be a fun film, and he also pops
up Lone Wolf and Cub nineteen seventy four's White Heaven
and Hell. He's also in the War in Space and
returned in Terror of Mecca Godzilla the idea I think

(35:09):
playing a different role. This guy's pretty terrific. It plays
the leader of the alien invasion from black Hole Planet
three like a mob boss with a cigar, or like
a in at times, also like a Bond villain, you know,
gloating and boasting about his plans.

Speaker 3 (35:24):
The aliens here feel like a mafia which is an
interesting choice.

Speaker 2 (35:28):
Yeah, and that's why Interpol was involved. I guess, like
the alien invasion. Yes, they have a giant robot to
destroy a whole cities and take out our natural kaiju
protection system. But they are they're essentially a criminal organization
that has to be rooted out at that level.

Speaker 3 (35:46):
I mean, it's true they could not have built the
base that they did without doing some smuggling, and that's
interpolse Turf.

Speaker 2 (35:52):
Yeah, because it was discuss they built it in Mount Fuji,
which is just fascinating to think about.

Speaker 3 (35:59):
Did they I thought was in Okinawa because don't we
see don't we see the characters like running out of
the base onto the beach in Okinawa?

Speaker 2 (36:08):
Hmmm?

Speaker 3 (36:10):
Oh man. No, matter what the answer to this question,
I would say there is definitely some geographic contraction taking
place in the film. We do see Godzilla I think,
get launched out of Mount Fuji at some point.

Speaker 2 (36:25):
Yeah, I believe I'm right on this. I think Mega
Godzilla appears from Mount Fuji, but describe but disguised of
course as Godzilla, as we'll discuss. Yeah, but it gets
complicated too because there's the Black the Black Mountain that
is kind of like the black Mount Fuji that is
a symbol in the clouds of the coming prophesized monster invasion.

(36:46):
So there's some interesting, maybe not even fully formed Mount
Fuji iconography going on in this movie.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
Yes, there is a vision of black clouds above the
white clouds, and that looks like Mount Fuji. You're correct
that Godzilla is well Mecca. Godzilla disguised as Godzilla is
launched out of Mount Fuji. But then I think, I.

Speaker 2 (37:06):
Mean, there's the bass. The base you're right might be
in a different mountain.

Speaker 3 (37:10):
I mean, you could be right, But then I don't
understand how the characters who like run out of the
base are in this Like they get to the base
from the cave in Okinawa.

Speaker 2 (37:21):
Remember, Yeah, that's right, that's right, that's right, because there's
a Yeah, there's like a hidden button that they push. Okay,
so I think you're correct on the location of the base.

Speaker 3 (37:30):
It's I think it is fast and loose with where
the places are.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
Yeah, yeah, all right. Oh we also have an alien henchman.
That's pretty fun. Digo Kusano, who lived nineteen thirty nine
through nineteen ninety one, plays this alien agent Number one,
and his credits include a couple of Lone Wolf and
Cup movies. This guy has great minion energy, clearly. Okay,

(37:54):
we also have the Okinawans. We have two main Okinawans.
Of note. We have this character Nami a Kunagami. She
is the Azumi Royal Family princess and she is played
by Bell Bello Lynn born nineteen fifty one, South Korean
born singer, one of only four film credits. Her song
in this film was released as a single by Toho Record,

(38:15):
so you can look it up on discogs.

Speaker 3 (38:18):
Yes, there is a musical number, a full song performed
in Godzilla Versus Meca Godzilla.

Speaker 2 (38:24):
Yes. And then there's also this old man. He's the
Azuomi Royal Family high priest and I think he's like
your grandfather too, right, Yes, or is referred to as grandfather,
and he is played by Maseo Imafuku. Lived nineteen twenty
one through twenty fifteen. He was only fifty three at
the time. I kind of I don't know that I've

(38:46):
seen other films with him, but you get the impression
that this is maybe one of those actors who made
a lifelong career of playing old men, you know, with
some help from makeup, but His other credits include sixty
eight's Kill and seventy one's Demons.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
Think to notice if his long white beard was stuck on,
but it may well have been.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
Yeah, he's very much that. Yeah, he's a lot of fun.
But yeah, it may have been a stuck on beard. Yeah,
all right, And then we have the monsters. We have
to give credit to the people in the monster suits.
They're doing a lot of the heavy lifting here playing Godzilla.
We have Isao Zushi age unknown as far as I
could tell now, retire Japanese monster suit performer here in

(39:25):
his only performance as the King of Monsters. Original Godzilla
actor Hero Nakajima had retired by this point. I think
it's seventy two. Zushi otherwise worked in Tokosatsu Kaju TV programs. Okay,
playing Mega Godzilla. We have Kasunari Mori, also unsure on

(39:46):
this actor's age, Japanese suit actor best known for his
performance as Mega Godzilla in this film and its follow up,
seventy five's ter of Mega Godzilla, otherwise worked in TV
and then playing King Caesar and and Giris. We have
Kenichi Kasumi born nineteen fifty, Japanese actor who started out
in these varias Tokusatsu you know monster suit pictures, wearing

(40:09):
the monster suits on TV shows such as seventy two's
Red Man and Go god Man, possibly Mirror Man as well,
But by the late nineteen seventies he slouched off the
chrysalis of the Kaiju suit to assume the birthday suit
of numerous Japanese erotic and sexploitation Pink films, apparently appearing
in a variety that included both horror and LGBTQ themed pictures.

(40:33):
He also has writing credits on eleven Pink films active
through about twenty sixteen. Interesting Yeah, And then finally the score.
This is the score by Masaru Saito nineteen twenty eight
through nineteen ninety nine, Japanese composer who also worked on
numerous Kurosawa films, including Throne of Blood, as well as

(40:54):
several Godzilla films. Joe, you might have more to say
about this than Mason Ship. You know the gear in
the makings of music more than I do. But there's
a particular guitar sound that pops up throughout this picture
that I think is fuzz tone guitar distortion, And I
pretty much only know this because of time of the apes.

(41:14):
A film cut of the Japanese TV series Saru no
Gunden that was, you know, featured on MST three k it.
It has a similar sound, different composer, but it provoked
a Joel MST three k riff that says they've entered
the valley of the fuzz tone guitar, and that always
stuck with me, even though I know really have never

(41:35):
I don't have a clear idea of what a fuzz
tone guitar is, but I recognize the sound.

Speaker 3 (41:40):
Well, you're probably right. I can't recall, just sitting here
the moment in the soundtrack that you're thinking of, so
I don't know exactly what you're talking about, but you're
probably correct. Fuzz is one of the main distortion effects
that people apply to guitars, you know, the standard ones.
People think of a like overdrive distortion and then fuzz

(42:02):
and I think, yeah, they're probably going fuzzy here for
a very boxy, squared off sound.

Speaker 2 (42:08):
Yeah, all right, so that's us a rundown of the
people and some of the factions here. Okay, let's get
into the plot of this bad boy all right.

Speaker 3 (42:24):
Well, so you get a bit of pre credit stuff
at the beginning of the movie with these cool like
hollow drums and jazzy horns, and then the action opens
with a pan through a dark, spooky landscape with big
crags of volcanic rock. Those are sticking up everywhere, and
then from a hollow in the earth, we catch a

(42:45):
glimpse of something moving. It is a big thorny plate,
and then we see that that plate is the back
of a monster that begins to trundle about through the
rock field, and then we can see it's Angiras. This
is the Toho kaiju that is kind of based on
a type of dinosaur called the ankylosaurus. Right, it's not

(43:06):
exactly an ankylosaurus, but it's pretty close to that.

Speaker 2 (43:09):
And then if you're thinking about it just in terms
of kaiju movies, like this is a crawling suit. There's
a dude in there on all fours crawling around.

Speaker 3 (43:18):
Yeah, that's right. We may have mentioned this earlier, but
Angiras was actually the first monster Godzilla ever fought. That's
kind of weird to think about. You might think of
like King Kong being first, but the first Godzilla movie
has no other monster. It's just Godzilla versus human ingenuity
versus science. But in the second Godzilla movie Godzilla Raids

(43:39):
again from nineteen fifty five, we meet this guy and
they throw down, and Giris appeared in many other movies
of the series, first as an enemy of Godzilla and
then later as an ally. By this point they're positively chummy.
I think.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
Yeah, you can imagine how this basic design was picked
for Godzilla's first enemy, though, because if you're looking at
a bunch of dinosaur like paleo art representations, you often
see a t rex, a bipedal dinosaur battling four legged dinosaurs,
often like a triceratops or something. So it made perfect sense.

(44:14):
It's like he should battle something on four legs.

Speaker 3 (44:17):
So and gear Us lumbers over the rocks in the
twilight and then lets out this sad wail at the sky.
It's almost like he's calling to someone, a long lost friend. Maybe.
Then we see a mountain in the distance with dark
ocean waves in the foreground, and suddenly the mountain starts
exploding with sparks and lightning. A Godzilla squeel plays you

(44:37):
know that sound, and then title Godzilla versus Mecca. Godzilla.

Speaker 2 (44:42):
Oh man, this title comes strong too. It's like the
text is just coming at you multiple times, and then
you got like the two colors looks amazing.

Speaker 3 (44:51):
Then a very abrupt change of tone. Suddenly we're hearing soft,
whimsical music that's playing while we see it's playing over
pretty scenic images of historical buildings and nature scenes in Okinawa.
I assume all of the shots here are Okinawa.

Speaker 2 (45:08):
Yeah, yeah, they filmed in Okinawa. And just a geographic
reminder for folks out there, the Okinawan Islands are a
cluster of islands making up Okinawa Prefecture, the southernmost and
westernmost prefecture of Japan. It's essentially roughly halfway between the
four main islands of Japan and Taiwan. It's a two
and a half hour to three hour flight from Tokyo.

Speaker 3 (45:31):
Yeah, much further south than the rest of the Japanese islands,
warmer climate. I think within Japanese culture, the sub regional
culture of Okinawa is considered kind of the island version
of Japanese culture. It's like tropical weather and a more
relaxed attitude I think is commonly what's thought there.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
Yeah. Yeah, and of course there's you know, a lot
of other ins and outs concerning the history of Okinawa,
some of which they actually into in this film. I
was rather surprised at yes, you know, talking about like
historic independence of these islands.

Speaker 3 (46:06):
Yeah. So after the credits in Okinaware, we are at
the ruins of an ancient stonecastle overlooking the coast, and
a priestess dressed in brightly colored ceremonial robes is in
the middle of performing a ritual song and dance in
front of a crowd. And I hope you like her
singing because again later in the movie, actually during the

(46:28):
climax of the action, everything will stop to give her
a three minute long musical number.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
Gewhige I'm here for. I think that's probably what's lacking
with the more recent Godzilla films, especially the US versions.

Speaker 3 (46:40):
That is true, Yeah, they could use musical numbers where
we've got to summon the monster with the sweet song.
And like monsters, they don't just want to fight all
the time. Sometimes they want a sweet song.

Speaker 2 (46:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (46:51):
So visiting the area are the brothers Massahico and case K.
I think at first they're portray as being like tourists.
They're here taking pictures and watching, you know, visiting the sites.
But kese K says he is working on an upcoming expo.
I don't know what that means, but we do see

(47:11):
him later at either a construction or excavation site, so
he's some kind of boss of some development.

Speaker 2 (47:18):
Yeah. And there's probably much to be dissected here about
like the positioning of a like just sort of a
corporate suit as your main hero in a Japanese film
from this era, you know, like I'd have to read
up on that, But so much has been written about
Odzola films. I'm sure someone has has had a feast
of this.

Speaker 3 (47:34):
I'm not sure why Massahiko is here. Maybe he's just
visiting his brother while his brother is doing this project.

Speaker 2 (47:39):
Yeah, I mean he's younger, maybe a little more happy
go lucky. Maybe he hasn't had to like settle into
like a salary man position yet.

Speaker 3 (47:46):
Yeah. So they're watching the performance when suddenly the priestess
stops in the middle of her dance and she gasps
and looks into the distance terrified, And then we see
inside her head as she has a terrible prophetic vision
and she faints. The vision is, of course, a city
under attack by a giant monster. The buildings are crumbling,
the skyline is in flames, so she collapses and the

(48:08):
two brothers go to her side. We learn that her
name is Nami, and her grandfather, the priest, comes running
out of the castle concerned for her. She explains what
she saw. She says a giant monster is going to
destroy the city. All who flee will be crushed under
its mighty feet. And then later the brothers are traveling
along a coastal highway together by truck and they're talking

(48:29):
about what happened. They mentioned that the woman and her
grandfather are descendants of the royal house of Azumi, who
once ruled Okinawa, so they're not just like you know,
performers at at a tourist festival, like they're actually the
inheritors of this great royal line. Kaisek drops Masahiko off

(48:50):
at a local cave so that he can go spelunking.
Masahiko explores the cave and inside he finds a weird
metal scale on the floor. The scale shines like the sun,
and when Massahico gets closer to it, we hear a
rapid clicking sound, a bit like radio static or like
a Geiger counter going nuts.

Speaker 2 (49:09):
And this is a real cave location I didn't look
up to see where they actually filmed it if it
is indeed an Okinawan cave. But it is a real
cave and it looks really nice, nice formations.

Speaker 3 (49:19):
Meanwhile, Ksek goes back to this dig site that he's
in charge of. Again, I don't know whether this is
an excavation or a construction site. Maybe they're digging a foundation,
and his workers have uncovered a different cave with a
megalithic stone frame around its entrance. Case K goes inside
and he finds a room with ancient paintings on the wall,

(49:40):
and there's a shrine holding a statue of a four
legged creature.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
Yep, and as we'll learn, this as a shiza, so
the find.

Speaker 3 (49:48):
Is a sensation. The dig site is flooded by reporters
who want pictures of the artifacts. Case K is joined
by a woman named Seiko, who is an archaeologist specializing
in ancient Okinawan's. She studies the artwork of the cave
and determines that the statue of the four legged beast
must be King Caesar, the guardian deity of the Azumi monarchs,

(50:10):
and she says that the Azumi house has a legend
quote long ago, mainlanders came here to Okinawa. They tried
to destroy the House of Azumi, but a monster appeared
gleaming like copper, to save the royals and their subjects.
Its name was King Caesar. So she takes the statue
away back to her office at the university to learn

(50:31):
more about it. And at her office at the university,
we see her translating. In her office, she says, a
black mountain will appear in the sky, and when it does,
but then meanwhile so that like trails off And meanwhile
we see out in the hallway a creepy guy dressed
all in black spying on her. So this movie is
going to have multiple different guys dressed in black spying

(50:54):
on our main characters. So I'm going to distinguish them
first as Mustache Spy and rock and roll. This guy
is the mustache spy. He is small framed, nervous looking,
with a thin mustache, kind of a bony face. He
peeks in through her office door while she isn't looking,
and he's about to slip inside and do something we

(51:15):
don't know what. We don't find out because suddenly this
spy gets spooked by a noise down the hall, and
he runs away, and then who shou'd come around the
corner but the other man in black. This is the
rock and roll spy who is bigger. He's taller, He's
got shaggy hair, aviator sunglasses, and a long black coat
with a big dracula collar. Once again, this guy would

(51:37):
fit right in in Danger Diabolic. He just he's got
that funky cool seventies look. Absolutely, this guy smokes a
lot too. He comes around the corner smoking a cigarette.
Then he swaggers down the hall and then also leans
into Seko's office and we get a close up of
a ring on his finger. It has a black rectangle

(51:58):
and the camera focuses on it like it's some kind
of device. Must be doing something. Next scene is we
have some characters on a plane to Tokyo. So on
the plane, case K and Siko happened to bump into
each other again, so they met at the dig site.
Now they're meeting their meeting again by accident. I noticed
this is a This is a roomy flight. People are

(52:20):
just walking around. The aisles look very wide. People are
freely changing seats to talk to each other.

Speaker 2 (52:26):
Yeah, I don't know how much of this is just
the this was the golden age of of sort of
a luxurious flight, or if this is the course a
fake airplane where everything's faced out a bit more for
filming purposes. But everybody's smoking too, or a lot of
people are smoking.

Speaker 3 (52:41):
Yes, So Siko explains that she has deciphered the mural,
but she still doesn't understand what the statue of the
lion dog monster represents, so she's taking it to another
professor named Wagura for help, and their conversation is interrupted
by the rock and roll spy who's also on the plane.
He's sitting on the road directly in front of them,

(53:02):
chain smoking cigarettes, and he winds up and says, oh,
you know, professor Wagura, he's the famous archaeologist, isn't he.
And when they ask who he is, he claims to
be a freelance reporter, and then he laughs at himself,
almost like a freelance reporter. That's a good one. So

(53:22):
they're they're talking there, and then suddenly everybody on the
plane starts freaking out and pointing out the windows. We
look out the windows too, and we see a giant
black cloud shaped like a pyramid hovering in the air
and case K says, it looks like a black mount Fuji.

Speaker 2 (53:39):
Which again is kind of neat, you know, the Mount
Fuji being this, you know, an important symbol of Japan,
and this cloud being like a black, black evil inversion
of it. And of course that's the whole dichotomy between
Godzill and Mecha Godzilla as well.

Speaker 3 (53:53):
Right totally. Oh, and here we get finally the first recitation,
full recitation of the words from the mural, because Siko
repeats them. She says, when the black mountain rises above
the clouds, a great monster will come forth and destroy
the world. But it doesn't stop there. There's a second half.
It says, but when the red moon sets and the

(54:15):
sun rises in the west, two monsters will join forces
to save the world. Then also, once they get to Tokyo,
Kisek and Seko share a taxi and so they're taking
a taxi from the airport and then it stops at
the professor's house. Seiko gets out because this is where
she's going to talk to Professor Wagura. Kaise K gets

(54:37):
out too and goes up to the door, and it
turns out he this professor is kase K's uncle, so
he didn't say anything about it because he was quote
having a bit of fun. Okay, so this is like
a theme or running theme. This guy loves to deceive
Saiko the archaeologist.

Speaker 2 (54:55):
Yeah, good natured deception.

Speaker 3 (54:58):
Yes, so they are on. They're now on the quest
to understand the statue. But they're they're not the only
ones in research mode. Kese K's brother Masahiko is also
trying to figure something out. He is visiting the laboratory
of the great scientist Professor Miyajima to understand the scale
of metal that he found in the cave in Okinawa.

(55:19):
Professor Miyajima takes a look at this piece of metal
and he concludes space titanium.

Speaker 2 (55:26):
I love this good, especially because Masahiko then follows up with, like,
you mean titanium that comes from space, and the professor
just kind of grunts. It might be a very grunty high,
but it still made me laugh.

Speaker 3 (55:37):
Yes, yeah, exactly, titanium from space. In this scene, we
get some charming little effect. There are some lasers in
the lab and I think they're represented as red ink
drawings on the film cells. We also meet Professor Miyajima's
adult daughter, Ikuko, who will of course be coming along

(55:58):
for subsequent monster related advance.

Speaker 2 (56:00):
Yeah, because why not.

Speaker 3 (56:02):
It does not seem like a very necessary or consequential
character to me. Ye, suddenly there is an earthquake, and
I thought this was funny. The ground starts shaking, and
of course everybody, the three characters are in the room,
and everybody grabs hold of something to study themselves. But
one of them grabs hold of the microscope.

Speaker 2 (56:21):
Yeah. Unless that that the microscope is like bolted to
the floor, you're not really going to get much out
of that.

Speaker 3 (56:29):
Yeah, there's an earthquake in my kitchen, and I grabbed
the blender, and we find out that earthquakes keep happening.
The news reports, we actually hear them talking on the radio.
The news reports say that nobody knows what's causing the earthquakes,
but quote some say a huge creature is burrowing underground.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
Perfectly reasonable in the Godzilla film universe, because again, this
has happened like pretty much every year for over a decade.

Speaker 3 (56:56):
Yes, exactly, it's seasonal, seasonal Kaiju attack.

Speaker 2 (56:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (57:00):
So that night, Seiko and kse K's uncle are studying
the inscriptions on the statue while Ksek is unpacking his things,
and suddenly there is an attack at the house. The
mustache spy breaks in through the window and he's pointing
a pistol with the silencer at the two professors. He
demands the statue at once. They do not hand it over,
so he tries to take it by force, but then

(57:21):
kse K intervenes, so he bursts into the room. He
disarms the spy and they're they're wrestling on the ground,
and uh, and it's a tough fight, like the spy
at various points is like, you know, he gets it,
gets him on by the neck and there it's it's
looking dangerous.

Speaker 2 (57:37):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (57:37):
Case K is really a man of action in this movie.
The first time I was watching it, I was trying
to remember what his job was and I didn't remember.
They said he was running an expo, So I was thinking,
is he supposed to be a secret agent or something.
It's like a James Bond type job. But I don't
think so. It just seems like, for whatever reason, he
is completely fearless and an expert hand to hand combat.

Speaker 2 (58:01):
Yeah. I think you're right. Yeah, But I will again
say that in these moments with this kind of like
close knit spy crime action. I feel like that it's
very enjoyable. I think the movie does a good job
with it, and we also at times get some like
frantic camera work to sort of heighten the sense of
like confusion and action. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (58:19):
I mentioned this earlier, but in this scene, case K's
uncle is absolutely useless, Like they're fighting and the gun
is on the floor. Case K is fighting for his
life and the uncle just stands there watching like, oh,
what do I do?

Speaker 2 (58:31):
Probably one of the more realistic moments, maybe, yeah, as
opposed to your random salary man having this like background
and action. You know, yeah, most of us would probably
be paralyzed with fear in this scenario.

Speaker 3 (58:45):
But try to remember, two against one is good odds.
If somebody is viciously attacking your friend, go and grab them,
try to help your friend. Y.

Speaker 2 (58:52):
Yes, do the maths professor do the Yeah.

Speaker 3 (58:55):
So eventually he does pick up the gun, but then
he still doesn't intervene to help in any way way.
The fight comes to a draw and the spy jumps
out the window to escape, So Ksek runs out after
the spy into the dark, but cannot find where he went. However,
we see the other spy, the rock and roll spy
looking on from afar, smoking a cigarette and yes, wearing

(59:16):
the aviator. Is in the dark, it is to pitch
black outside.

Speaker 2 (59:20):
Yeah. Yeah, people, he does eventually take them off, but yeah,
not for pretty much anything.

Speaker 3 (59:26):
Yeah, but this is a good little action and intrigue scene.
I liked it.

Speaker 2 (59:30):
Yeah. Yeah, Twinly runs out in the street trying to
look for the assailant. That we get some of that
frantic camera work that I thought was pretty nice.

Speaker 3 (59:37):
Yeah. After this we get the movie's first monster attack. So,
a volcano erupts. I guess this is supposed to be
Mount Fuji.

Speaker 2 (59:54):
Yeah, I think so. An out comes kind of like
a big rock, right, It kind of ejects what seems
like a rock.

Speaker 3 (01:00:00):
And then the rock turns into Godzilla. Is that right?

Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
Yeah? Or yeah, maybe it was Godzilla along or hatches Godzilla,
but now suddenly, oh it's Godzilla.

Speaker 3 (01:00:09):
So our characters watch on TV as Godzilla marches across
the countryside, heading toward the nearest city. Kisek's uncle is
reminded of the prophecy when a black mountain rises over
the clouds, a great monster will come to destroy the world,
and then Seko had a line that made me laugh
out loud. She said, yes, but I never imagined that
monster would be Godzilla, So that was funny at first.

(01:00:32):
But then when I thought about it, I thought, actually,
at this point in the series, what she said makes
perfect sense because at this point Godzilla is not here
to destroy. Godzilla is a friendly, a protector monster.

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
Yeah, and maybe she doesn't even remember the first Godzilla,
which I guess was like technically a different Godzilla monster.

Speaker 3 (01:00:54):
I think maybe, yeah, And then we see other reactions.
Back on Okinawa. We see the priestess and her grandfather
talking about how the only thing that can protect the
world from Godzilla is their own monster, King Caesar. But
where is he. He We don't know. Maybe he'll maybe
he'll come forth, but he's not appearing yet. Also, the

(01:01:15):
grandfather seems pretty keen on letting Godzilla stomp the mainlanders.
He sees this as fitting revenge for their invasion of
Okinawa many centuries ago.

Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
Yeah. I was kind of surprised at this this part
of the plot, but yeah, grandfather is like, yes, it's
almost like he is praying to Godzilla at this point.

Speaker 3 (01:01:32):
Yeah, yeah, crush them. So Godzilla stomps around and smashes
some buildings, not as we occasionally see Kaiju movies by
like accidentally walking through them and just haphazardly causing destruction.
He is actively malicious. He pounds down hospitals with his
fists on purpose, and he's making a face like yeah,

(01:01:53):
take that. And then suddenly a new monster shows up,
and Giris is here. He tunnels up out of the
ground like a graboid and starts fighting Godzilla, and Kesek,
who just happens to be driving nearby, says to himself
and Giris attacking its friend Godzilla, it doesn't add up.

Speaker 2 (01:02:12):
Yeah, these two are friends, these are known friends. Why
are they fighting?

Speaker 3 (01:02:15):
And this fight is brutal. Godzilla fights like the devil.
I feel so bad for poor Angiris. This Godzilla grabs
Angiris by the tail, slams it on the ground, takes
hold of its snout, and then pries the jaws back
until blood and gore squirting out of the corners of
its mouth. And then at this point, the first time

(01:02:36):
I watched it, I thought, oh, okay, Angiris is dead here.
But then when I watched it the second time, I
realized there was a thing I hadn't caught. The first time,
we see Angiris kind of scuttle away into a hole
in the earth. So maybe it's supposed to be that
Angeris survives.

Speaker 2 (01:02:50):
That's good because both times I watched it, I felt
like I just witnessed a murder. Yeah, Godzilla just murders
this poor poor Kaiju, who just is like, where is
my Why is this thing that looks like my friend
killing me?

Speaker 3 (01:03:02):
Why has my friend betrayed me? Yeah, but in this
fight there is a clue that all might not be
as it seems. One of Godzilla's scales gets knocked off,
revealing underneath it a kind of gleaming reflective metal Casek
goes to survey the battlefield right after the fight. At
one point he says, what a mess, and he finds

(01:03:25):
another piece of space titanium. This time it's a brick
of space titanium, and he takes it to Professor Miajima.
In this scene, we get the I mentioned this earlier.
One of the weirdest Chekhov guns in any movie I
can think of it is Professor Miyajima's super magnet tobacco pipe.
So he's got a smoke pipe clearly for tobacco use only,

(01:03:47):
which separates into two pieces. It's got the bowl and
the mouthpiece, and the professor explains that when the two
pieces are separated, they can be activated to generate an
extremely powerful magnetic field that destroys any positive and negative
electrodes in the area. And case k says, that's some pipe.

Speaker 2 (01:04:08):
That is some pipe seems like it has a very
specific purpose. I wonder if it will factor into the
plot later on.

Speaker 3 (01:04:15):
Yeah, I mean, you know, I just wanted to make
a pipe that destroys electrodes. So then we cut to
Godzilla breathing fire on a factory. This whole part of
the city is in flames. Godzilla is smashing it up good,
and our heroes drive out in a car to get
a look at Godzilla, when suddenly, in the middle of
the rampage, the earth shakes and a second Godzilla comes

(01:04:39):
up out of the ground, busting up through the roof
of a warehouse, and case Key says, two Godzillas, what's
going on?

Speaker 2 (01:04:46):
An interesting little little fact. Here is the murder Godzilla
that we saw, the one that has already lost a scale,
and there's some suspicious metal underneath. This is apparently apparently
used like a promotionary Godzilla costume, like one it was
worn at events and all I read separate from the
updated Godzilla costume that's used for the true Godzilla. So

(01:05:08):
I think this maybe helps to establish something feeling not
quite right about the doppel ganger.

Speaker 3 (01:05:13):
Yes, and I think the director was not happy with this,
like they wanted to be able to or maybe the
effects director. They wanted to have the specially made suits,
but budget constraints meant that one of the Godzilla suits
had to be the one that they used for public
public events.

Speaker 2 (01:05:29):
But I think it kind of works, you know, I
don't know. I feel like it would be unfair if
divine forces allowed a perfect Godzilla facts simile to be
unleashed on the world. True believers should be able to
tell this is not Godzilla.

Speaker 3 (01:05:42):
So we're about to get a big reveal. We cut
away while this fight is going on to somewhere else,
which I originally took to be a spaceship, but we
will actually learn it's an underground bunker. We've already had
the discussion about where exactly is this unclear, But we
meet a new character, a guy who comes off like
a mix between Clawtu and Tony soprano. He's in a

(01:06:05):
silver space suit but no helmet, with a big silver
smudge on his face, and he is smoking a big
fat cigar. So he is like an alien mafia boss
who loves stogies and green wine.

Speaker 2 (01:06:18):
Where does his green wine? I guess probably comes from elsewhere,
assuming he's not drinking absinth. But the cigars are these
space cigars or theace tobacco? Is it space tobacco or
is he a big fan of tearing tobacco? And if
that is the case, like, what's the big plant? Like
are we still going to grow tobacco? Are we only
going to grow tobacco? Like? What is the long term

(01:06:39):
plan for planet Earth? Here?

Speaker 3 (01:06:41):
Unclear? Yeah, but they do want conquest. We will learn
in just a few minutes. So this guy says, I
didn't expect the real Godzilla to show up so soon.
The Earthlings must be surprised, so they're not leaving us
in suspense about the other Godzilla tremendously long here, but
here we get to see the second monster fight of
the movie. This is now Godzilla versus Godzilla. We already

(01:07:03):
know one of them is fake, but they both still
look like Godzilla at this point, it's kind of like
in Mortal Combat, in those matches where you have to
fight yourself near match. Yeah, but our heroes look on
while the two Godzillas bash each other in the middle
of this exploding industrial area, and one Godzilla loses a
big chunk of skin, revealing a patch of metal underneath,

(01:07:25):
and then Professor Miyajima says, that explains it. The Godzilla
from Mount Fuji is a cyborg. They say it's body. Oh,
he says, its body is made of space metal. Meca
Godzilla would be a fitting name, so they name it
in the film.

Speaker 2 (01:07:39):
But then yeah, shortly after we'll hear the aliens refer
to it as Mega Godzilla as well. So I know,
this just shows you how how good the professor is.
He's like, Mega Godzilla is the fitting name for it.

Speaker 3 (01:07:50):
That's what aliens would call it, if.

Speaker 2 (01:07:52):
They would call Yeah. So the two.

Speaker 3 (01:07:55):
Godzilla's trade blasts of radiation breath at each other, but
the Alien boss laughs while watching the fight on the screen.
He says, Godzilla, you're a fool if you think you
can beat my cyborg, and he presses a button and
a mecha Godzilla's fake Godzilla skin burns off, revealing the
full metal body underneath. So now we see its true form.

(01:08:16):
Here the soundtrack changes to a jazzy, drum heavy kind
of club number. And here Rob, do you want to
describe the look of mecha Godzilla once it is revealed
and it's true and horrifying glory?

Speaker 2 (01:08:29):
Oh yeah, I mean mecha Godzilla is amazing looking classic
mega Godzila here, more than just a Godzilla terminator indoskeleton
or just a mach version of Godzilla. First of all,
his face is just pure mechanical malice. And then also
you mentioned earlier about how they looked at the way

(01:08:50):
like a European soldier in armor would have moved in
like the Middle Ages. You can clearly get a sense
of that from the design as well. Looks like body armor,
looks and looks like a big suit of armor. But yeah,
just an absolutely demonic face, just a silver icon of
pure world cleansing destruction.

Speaker 3 (01:09:09):
Yeah. I think it has car tail lights for eyes
that orange, that orange kind of plastic with the the
I don't know, some kind of internal textures that diffuse
the light in a certain way, as metal shark teeth,
like real triangular teeth, finger rockets. That man, it shoots
off more than ten rockets, so they must be self replenishing.

(01:09:31):
Like it shoots its fingers off as rockets, and then
it's just got more finger rockets to go.

Speaker 2 (01:09:35):
It's just got coils and coils of finger rockets inside
of it.

Speaker 3 (01:09:38):
Yeah, and shoots rainbow eye lasers. So the two Godzilla's here,
the mecha Godzilla and the real Godzilla, do a lot
of beam versus beam in this fight, Like Godzilla is
shooting his radiation breath and mecha Godzilla is shooting it
it's eyeball lasers, and there are explosions. Eventually, the real
Godzilla is wounded and falls into the water of the

(01:10:00):
bay and we see blood frothing in the in the
churning water. Mecha Godzilla is also wounded and falls down.
Inside the alien Mecha Godzilla control room, they announced that
Mecha Godzilla's head control has stopped working and they need
to recall him for repairs. So the boss admits, we'll
have to postpone our attack on Tokyo, bring him back

(01:10:20):
for maintenance, and we'll attack Tokyo later.

Speaker 2 (01:10:23):
So a stalemate, a rare sort of stalemate here between
Godzilla and antagonist.

Speaker 3 (01:10:28):
Right, Mecha Godzilla fires up his feet rockets and then
flies away kind of iron man.

Speaker 2 (01:10:33):
Like, oh man, and I love love love Mecha Godzilla's
flying form. You know, he looks like this super heavy
chonky jet.

Speaker 3 (01:10:40):
Yes, doesn't really have wings, like the arms go sort
of straight back.

Speaker 2 (01:10:45):
Yeah, but the arms are kind of they are sort
of like swept back wings. I'm not saying it makes
aerodynamic sense what we're seeing here, but I love the presentation.

Speaker 3 (01:10:53):
Professor Miyajima deduces that Mecha Godzilla must be under alien control,
and he tells mass he Go that they'll have to
fly to Okinawa to investigate, to go to the cave
where he found the space titanium. So that's what they're
going to do. Next, we get a scene of the
aliens doing maintenance on Mecha Godzilla and inside the way

(01:11:14):
the lights are put together, with all the reflective surfaces,
it looks like Saturday night fever.

Speaker 2 (01:11:18):
It's, yeah, I like to say, kind of a funky
vibe here the aliens have.

Speaker 3 (01:11:24):
So the aliens determined repairs are going to take too long.
They don't have the specialists they need. So the alien
boss says, I know what we'll do. We're going to
kidnap the greatest Earth scientists to do the repairs for us.
So ohen. He also at this point says send Agent
R one to steal the statue of King Caesar. We

(01:11:44):
can't have King Caesar getting woken up in the middle
of all this.

Speaker 2 (01:11:47):
So the Aliens have things scouted out pretty well. They
know exactly what are the main Kaiju threats to their
Mecha Godzilla plan, and indeed, like what monsters is Mecha
Godzilla intending to take out? Clearly Mega Godzilla here is
mainly deployed to destroy Godzilla, and once Godzilla is destroyed
then they can just eradicate the Earth or whatever their

(01:12:10):
exact plans are.

Speaker 3 (01:12:11):
I was thinking about how, as is often the case
in movies like this, the Aliens are able to watch
events on TV in places where there's no conceivable way
there are cameras there. So I don't know how their
TVs are working, but they just kind of have omniscient television, the.

Speaker 2 (01:12:29):
Spy drones and deployed in ways we can't imagine.

Speaker 3 (01:12:32):
Yeah, so anyway, there is more archaeology research. The two
professors put together that in order to wake up King Caesar,
you have to put the statue they found on the
stone shrine at Azumi Castle, and the statue is key
to summoning the monster that can protect them from Mega Godzilla.
Now that Godzilla appears to have been defeated, so their

(01:12:54):
only hope now is King Caesar. So case K and
Seko are sailing to Okinawa. Also, so all of our characters,
I think are going to Okinawa. And so for me,
there was a genuine laugh out loud moment here where
it cuts to the two of them, cuts to Ksek
and Siko leaning on the railing of an ocean liner

(01:13:15):
and saying, I doubt the aliens expected us to change ships.

Speaker 2 (01:13:21):
Yeah, and I mean also actually trying to get to
Okinawa in a hurry, Like I mean, I know that
going by ship to Okinawa's is always an option, But
this looks like more like a cruise liner. This doesn't
look like a pleasure ship is Yeah, looks like a
pleasure cruise. It doesn't look like its main purpose is
to get you from point A to point B or
like really quickly.

Speaker 3 (01:13:41):
It feels like a line that was inserted to untangle
some kind of plot pacing problem. But I'm not sure
what that would be. Yeah, anyway, it can't have worked
too well throwing off the tail because both of the
spies are on the boat peeping at them.

Speaker 2 (01:13:56):
They see Yeah, they were not able to shake a
single follower here.

Speaker 3 (01:13:59):
Yeah, both the spies are here, and we see the
rock and roll spy just slamming cigarettes on the upper deck.
So Massahiko, the Professor, and the professor's daughter Ikuko go
to the cave in they go to the cave where
the space titanium came from. And then while they're in
the cave, they get ambushed by aliens in silver jumpsuits.

(01:14:19):
Aliens take them at gunpoint to the secret mecha Godzilla layer,
where they meet the Big Boss, the guy who likes cigars,
and he explains to them who the aliens are. They
are a strike force sent by black Hole Planet three
and he is their leader. Their mission is what else
they got to conquer Earth?

Speaker 2 (01:14:37):
And I thought about this a little bit. I assume
black Hole planet three is the third planet orbiting a
black hole of some sort. Yeah, I guess, yeah, okay.

Speaker 3 (01:14:47):
It's like an interstellar you know.

Speaker 2 (01:14:50):
Yeah, what is time like for them?

Speaker 3 (01:14:52):
They're from the matt Damon planet the Professor. The Professor
when he gets this speech, he says, space aliens, as I.

Speaker 2 (01:15:01):
Suspected, always correct the Professor.

Speaker 3 (01:15:05):
The cigar Boss gives them a pitch. He's like, we
need mecha Godzilla working so that we can conquer Earth
on schedule. But his head got dinged up in the
fight with Godzilla. Since you are the greatest scientist on Earth,
we need you to fix him. And first he appeals
to the Professor's pride and curiosity, like wouldn't it be
an honor to work on such a project of great

(01:15:28):
alien technology. The Professor is stonefaced, and then he goes
for a new tactic. They take Massahico and Ikuko away
to what they call the death Chamber and say, okay,
well now you've got to repair our mech or your
daughter and her friend will die, and he reluctantly agrees.
And all through these scenes, the boss alien is drinking

(01:15:49):
green liquid green wine. I guess is what it seems like.
Somewhere else, on a dark and stormy island, we see Godzilla.
Godzilla is not dead. Godzilla clon's ashore. The wind is whipping,
there's a storm in the air, it's dark out, and
he stands up on the beach and starts absorbing lightning strikes.

(01:16:09):
This seems to be now how Godzilla powers up and
he gets so powered up his body is emitting sparks.
It feels like, what's one of those great power up shows.
I get the feeling. I never really watched Dragon ball Z,
but I get the feeling that this is a lot
of what dragonball Z is. Like.

Speaker 2 (01:16:27):
Oh yeah, yeah, I forget that there's a particular term
for this in Japanese media, but yeah, the power up
scene where one even often changes form. There's not really
a form change here, but it does feel kind of
like the Godzilla quickening, Yes, absorbing all this lightning energy,
And I also liked it how it like in this
film anyway, clearly establishes Godzilla is kind of an elemental force, yes,

(01:16:50):
which is nice, whereas King Caesar is more of a
clearly divine element with some other attributes we'll get into.
And then of course, mecha Godzilla is alien technology.

Speaker 3 (01:17:03):
Interesting. Yeah, okay, well, the way Godzilla is absorbing lightning
strikes here ties in. I think to the vision of
Godzilla in this movie as having electromagnetic related powers, which
is fairly new as far as I recall, we.

Speaker 2 (01:17:18):
Can going up against a metal adversary.

Speaker 3 (01:17:29):
So back on the pleasure cruise in the middle of
the night, the mustache spy sneaks into Seko's room in
the middle of the night and steals the red box
with the King Caesar statue inside, and he gets away
with it, but then he is surprised in another room
by kase K and they fight again. It's a fisticuffs rematch.
Kasey K tries to get information out of him. He's like,

(01:17:51):
why does he want the statue? Who is he? The
spy draws a knife and attacks, but case K manages
to shoot the spy in the face with his own
silenced pistol. However, the spy is not killed. This was
one of the weirdest parts of the movie for me.
Instead of dying, the spy collapses and then undergoes a transformation. He,

(01:18:14):
like the other aliens, has looked totally human so far,
but once wounded in the face, he goes through a
were wolf transformation effect. Except he's not a were wolf.
He is a ware gorilla with a gorilla mask like
they used in Planet of the Apes, but only for
half of his face. The half that got wounded. So
now he has a Phantom of the Opera style half mask,

(01:18:37):
but it's a gorilla mask.

Speaker 2 (01:18:39):
Yeah, like some they're basically space gorillas. Yes, whish I.

Speaker 3 (01:18:44):
Love and he at this point does not speak human language,
but starts grunting and making uk uk sounds like a
movie ape amazing, So Keisek chases the gorilla spy out
onto the deck of the ship, which is completely empty.
There are no other passengers. The ape man throws some
deck chairs at him and they catch up and end

(01:19:04):
up fighting again. And just when it seems like the
gorilla alien has the upper hand and is about to
shoot case K, someone else off screen shoots the alien
and then the alien tumbles into the ocean, clutching the statue.
So like, oh no, did we lose the statue? And
who did the shooting? Might not be hard to guess

(01:19:25):
at this point, but somebody, somebody saved our hero here.
But so obviously we're in suspense for a moment, like,
didn't we need that statue to summon King Caesar? Is
there any way to get it back from the bottom
of the sea. I was thinking, oh, are we about
to get a submarine plot where they send a submersible
down to find it. No, Fortunately, case K deceived Sakoh

(01:19:46):
yet again, hiding the real statue in the ship's safe
and leaving a fake decoy statue in her room without
her knowledge. When she finds out about this, she says,
you made a fool of me, and and then case
K says, it sounds like he's reciting a proverb deceive
your friend to deceive your foe, and then they both laugh.

(01:20:07):
I didn't I didn't know where that proverb was from.
I looked it up. It seems just based on a
quick googling, it looks like it might be an adaptation
of a saying of sun zoo.

Speaker 2 (01:20:16):
Okay, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:20:18):
Anyway, they they have a whole conversation with the captain
of the ship about how their voyage was so pleasant,
and then they kind of show a sizzle reel of
the ship coming into the harbor and dropping anchor, and
it again kind of feels like a part of the
movie sponsored by Okinawa Cruise Lines.

Speaker 2 (01:20:35):
It really does.

Speaker 3 (01:20:37):
But when kaise Ke and Seko arrive at the hotel,
they find that their friends have been missing for several days.
Uh oh, So kase K goes to the cave to
see if he can find any clue about what happened. Meanwhile,
we find out that inside the secret base, the Professor
is finished with his repairs on Mecca. Godzilla. The big
boss alien, is very pleased with his work invites it's

(01:21:00):
the professor to drink green wine with him and celebrate
the glorious rebirth of their cyborg. But the Professor is
not interested. He just wants the prisoners freed, and the
Stogy boss is like, okay, yeah, come on, follow me.
But what do we think are these aliens going to
keep their word? Of course not. They just open the
door and they chuck the Professor into the death chamber,

(01:21:21):
along with his daughter and with Masahiko, and then they
turn on the heating elements and the steam jets. So
it seems that the death chamber is basically a bakery oven.
It's a steam injected oven.

Speaker 2 (01:21:33):
At least they'll get a good sweat in before they expire.

Speaker 3 (01:21:36):
It'll give them a nice crispy crust. So back in
the cave casek is looking around and he finds something.
It is the Professor's monster magnet tobacco pipe.

Speaker 2 (01:21:47):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:21:48):
He then gets held up at gunpoint by an alien
in a silver jumpsuit, and case K asks where are
my brother and the professor. The alien says, you'll be
joining them soon as a corpse. But before the alien
can kill Casek, someone else shoots the alien from off screen.

(01:22:08):
And who is it? It is, of course the rock
and Roll Spy, the one who has been saving Ksek
the entire time. So he hops into frame with his
glorious shaggy hair. He's still dressed in the black outfit
and yes, wearing his sunglasses in the cave, and the
rock and roll spy transitions from guns to melee and
beats up the alien. At one point he does a

(01:22:30):
is it called an elbow drop? What he does on him? Ye?

Speaker 2 (01:22:32):
Oh yeah, I think so that's that drops the elbow.

Speaker 3 (01:22:35):
So the unconscious alien's hand then like he falls on
the ground, and we see the alien and his hand
warps into a hairy gorilla hand, but the rest of
his body doesn't transform yet. The spy finally introduces himself.
He tells Ksek his name is Nanbara. Who is he?
Is he another alien from a rival planet? What's the deal? No,

(01:22:57):
he explains, he is with Interpole. Yes, the International Criminal
Police organization. He says, quote, we got wind of their
strange activities six months ago, we cast a net to
apprehend them. You and your friends got caught in it.
I was really confused at this point. So does that
mean that Interpol planted the King Caesar statue in the

(01:23:19):
cave under the expo site?

Speaker 2 (01:23:22):
I mean I didn't get that from it. Okay, yeah,
I think I just assumed it was more like, Okay,
we have alien invaders working to some degree like a
criminal enterprise, so it falls under Interpol's jurisdiction, so it
must be an international effort as well, right, I'm assuming
otherwise it would be purely like a Japanese police effort.

Speaker 3 (01:23:44):
I don't know much about Interpol. My understanding is that
they are mainly a sort of information sharing organization. Like
I did not think Interpol had enforcement capabilities of its own.

Speaker 2 (01:23:58):
Yeah, like, because when they were h Hannibal Lecter, then
they leaned on Interpol for information. But in this case
they're deploying agents. Maybe it's it's different if it's a
If it's Hannibal Lecter, you just let other authorities know
about it. If it is alien invaders, well then you
have to send out your super cool agents to deal with.

Speaker 3 (01:24:15):
It, Sonnbara. Here the the Interpol agent, also like, what
is the our Interpol agents in this world generally understood
to be cool, like like rock and roll kind of
lifestyle or yeah, I would think of them as being
a little more I don't know, bureaucratic office dwellers.

Speaker 2 (01:24:35):
But well, the field agents I guess are cooler.

Speaker 3 (01:24:38):
Yeah, sonn Bara. He interrogates the defeated alien and demands
to be taken to the secret base, and so they
go there. They find a secret button that opens the
door hidden inside a stalactite that's like a breakaway yeah. Yeah.
There are more scenes, of course, of the steam jets
going in the death chamber, and I noticed that the

(01:24:59):
people in this steam injected oven are hugging too much
for a room that's supposed to be too hot. They're
all clutching each other, and this goes on for a
long time. I started to think the death chamber is
feeling a bit like padding, like, yes, we know the
steam vents are blowing. It's hot. So Nanbara in case
K discovered that there is a password to enter the base.

(01:25:22):
The password is you say the people inside say alpha,
and then you say, Centaurus. So our heroes go inside
and they beat up some aliens, put on alien jumpsuit disguises,
and they set the prisoners free. They escape the base,
they leave the cave. They go to the car, but
then Ninbarra thinks, wait a minute, this car might be

(01:25:43):
booby trapped, So they leave the car and trigger it remotely.
And yes, indeed, while they're in the cave, the aliens
put a bomb in their car. Well, don't usually think
about that happening.

Speaker 2 (01:25:54):
Yeah, Like I said, these are very criminally aligned aliens.

Speaker 3 (01:25:58):
So there's another It feels again like a mafia theme,
like Mafia once again, almost inspired by The Godfather, one
would think, because there's a car bomb in the first
Godfather movee too. Yeah. Anyway, so the plot the plot,
there's there's another plot going on at the same time,
which is we see Seko, the archaeology professor, at the

(01:26:19):
hotel with the King Caesar statue, and she looks out
the window and sees a red moon outside, just like
in the prophecy, remember the red Moon. So we have
the characters kind of all splitting up into different factions
for the final mission. The professor, Nanbara and Masahiko are
going to go back into the alien base to destroy

(01:26:40):
Mecha Godzilla's head control. Meanwhile, Kaseke, Ikuko and Seko are
going to meet up and take the statue to Azumi
Castle and perform the ritual to summon King Caesar. You
got all that straight?

Speaker 2 (01:26:54):
Yeah, okay, it might just be enough to pull this off,
because we can we can maybe stop or at least
least weakend Mega Godzilla and hopefully summon a creature to
battle it.

Speaker 3 (01:27:05):
Right, So, the latter group they go to the castle,
which is now shown to be on the beach. They
meet with the priestess from the opening scene and her grandfather,
who are being held hostage by another group of aliens
from black Hole planet three, but they are saved by
the intervention of a second Interpol agent. Let's get another
one in there. The prophecy comes true because remember it

(01:27:30):
said that the red moon would set and the sun
would rise in the west. How is that possible? While
they see a sun rising in the west and it
turns out it is some kind of reflection or mirage
in the sky, and then the sunlight reflects off of
the jewels in the eye sockets of the King Caesar statue,
and this creates laser beams that blast a hole in

(01:27:51):
the side of the mountain opposite the bay, revealing the
face of the actual giant King Caesar. But he's not
awake yet. He is slumbering inside the rocks. He must
be awakened by a descendant of the Azumi royals. So
here we get the movie's musical number, sung by the
priestess Nami rob I took a I found online. Somebody

(01:28:15):
claimed this is an English translation of the lyrics to
the song. I don't know if any of the lines
really stand out at you. It says, even the great
burning sun pierces through the curtain, beautiful morning sun. From sleep,
the star wakes my Shisa, beloved star of the beach.
We are waiting for you to be here.

Speaker 2 (01:28:33):
It's kind of beautiful.

Speaker 3 (01:28:34):
That's not the whole thing. There's a lot more entreaty,
just begging for Shesa's help. But we strongly implore you
that sort of.

Speaker 2 (01:28:43):
Thing, beloved fruit of the coconut tree, We are waiting
for you to be here.

Speaker 3 (01:28:47):
She says, strongly help. But okay, this does succeed in
waking up King Sisa, who comes out of the Mountain
to defend the world from the Mega Godzilla attack. Of course,
the Aliens are sending out Mega gods Mecca. Godzilla is
going to do the rampage rob Would you like to
describe King Chisa here? Yeah, sorry, they call they call

(01:29:08):
him King Caesar in the movie. But also there's some
king shei'sa I wonder if you do. They pronounce it
differently at different times.

Speaker 2 (01:29:16):
I mean, it's always sort of pronounced. I mean, I
have more recent history with the with the Japanese language version,
and I don't know, it always sounds to me like
they're saying, she's a but it is very widely uh
translated as King Caesar in English. So I mean, can
you I think, as as English speaking fans of Godzilla,

(01:29:37):
I think you can use either, as long as you
don't get too wrapped up in the idea that this
has any connection to Roman Caesar or anything. But yeah,
so at first she's a king. She'sa is of course
in the rock and there's kind of this idea and
the alien boss is referencing this that, well, we'll go
ahead destroy King Chiza before it can even climb out,

(01:30:01):
but eventually she'sus going to get out and we see
more of it. As we mentioned, certainly a lion dog
feel a little bit like a werebat in its furriness.
But one interesting thing to think about is to ask
the question, how are we to understand King Caesar? Are
we supposed to think of this as a flesh and
blood incarnation of a god? As I think has been

(01:30:25):
fan speculation for a long time, or equally pondered by fans,
is King Caesar a kind of golum, a statue, an
artificial entity with maybe flesh on the outside, but something
else on the inside, kind of like an ancient analog
of mecha Godzilla Joe. For your purposes, here I included

(01:30:46):
a couple of cross sections I found online. One is
definitely from an old Japanese trading card. There are lots
of wonderful kaiju like dissection illustration showing you the possible
insides of monsters, and these are all amazing, And one
of them here definitely has like an organic inside for
King Caesar, but another one has very almost like ancient

(01:31:11):
robot feel inside like y has like bricks for bones
and golden bones and minerals, which again we have to
remember that they're using a statue of a lion dog
to summon him. So there is this connection with the
artificiality of that. So maybe on some level, this faded
combatant of mecha Godzilla is like an ancient version of

(01:31:34):
the same sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (01:31:36):
The ancient Holy Mech versus the futuristic unholy mech.

Speaker 2 (01:31:41):
Yeah yeah, so I like thinking about this creature like that.
By the way, King Shiza or King Caesar, to my knowledge,
has never really come back in a Godzilla film. There's
there's a later Godzilla movie from a different era where
Godzilla's fighting a bunch of monsters, and they sort of
they bring back the design of King Caesar, but they

(01:32:03):
don't draw in any of like the okinawa and stuff,
or certainly they don't explore this creature's background or interior structure.
It's just positioned as like an alien enemy of Godzilla.
Though at the same time, I will say, when they
bring the character back, they make King Caesar more curvy.
Oh yeah, yeah, so like a kind of yeah yeah,

(01:32:27):
but but yeah, so I think Godzilla fans might agree
this is a character that really needs to come back
in a major way.

Speaker 3 (01:32:34):
Totally. Yes. The fight here at the end of the
movie is a multi stage fight. So first you've got
Mecca Godzilla versus King Caesar one on one, and he
comments on this part of the fight.

Speaker 2 (01:32:53):
Well, I would say King Caesar puts up a good fight.
So he has no actual ranged weapons himself, but via
the like the gym in his head, he can absorb
and then blast back energy projections, which is a good way,
you know, making up for this lack of arranged ability.
But then the main feature of King Caesar is that

(01:33:16):
he's fast. You know, he's a lion dog, so he
can really try and close the distance between himself and
Mecha Godzilla pretty quickly. But in this case, Mecha Godzilla
is well prepared and has all the firepower in the world.

Speaker 3 (01:33:29):
So after this, after this initial stage of the fight,
we get a twist, which is that Godzilla reappears and
joins the fight. So remember the prophecy said there would
be a monster that would attack the world, and then
when the sun sets in the west or when the
sun rises in the west, then the two monsters would

(01:33:52):
appear to protect the world from the monster that attacked.
So the second one here is Godzilla.

Speaker 2 (01:33:58):
Yeah, and now you mentioned earlier two on one odds
it's pretty good, right, So you might think that our
good guy monsters have the upper hand here, but man,
we start seeing some amazing, full on assaults from the
ultimate mobile weapons platform that is Mecha Godzilla. My favorite
scene is one where Godzilla is coming from one direction,

(01:34:20):
King Caesar's coming from the other direction. Mecca Godzilla swivels
its head around so that it can fire projectile weapons
in both directions, just unleashing, like a full scale bombardment
at both of its adversaries. Just an amazing moment. And
then later on we see a full frontal projectile assault

(01:34:40):
that is also just all the fireworks. Again. Mecha Godzilla
has so many weapons. He's got the finger rockets. I
think he has toe rockets, he has some other kind
of laser weapon that comes out of his chest. He's
got the I beams everything in the world.

Speaker 3 (01:34:56):
He can generate a force field that surrounds him. That Godzilla,
you cannot be penetrated, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:35:01):
Right right, And then when he takes to the sky,
he has the aerial advantage and can basically like do
strafing runs on monster enemies.

Speaker 3 (01:35:10):
So it looks pretty tough. But this fight reveals a
previously undisclosed Godzilla power. I think I can't actually verify
this has never appeared in a movie before this, but
I think it has not. And that power is generating
a Kaiju sized magnetic field. So we see Godzilla pulling

(01:35:33):
objects to his body with this great magnetic field, like
he's pulling electrical pylons into his body. And then finally,
while Meka Godzilla is trying to fly around in jet
airplane mode to escape, Godzilla pulls mecha Godzilla to himself
with his magnetic power so that it cannot rock it away.
And then I guess comes the like the real grappling

(01:35:55):
part of the fight, which is Godzilla's. That's how Godzilla
gets the advantage is the.

Speaker 2 (01:35:59):
Grapple, and certainly mecha Godzilla can still handle his own
up close and personal, but I don't think as quite
as well as Godzilla. Like Godzilla, this is where he's
going to have the clear advantage as a grappler. Right.

Speaker 3 (01:36:12):
There's a concurrent side plot, also involving a great magnetic field.
Our other three heroes inside the alien base. They try
to sneak in, they get caught in a trap, they're
held prisoner, and while they're tied up, they hatch a
plan to use the Professor's super magnet tobacco pipe to
destroy the control room and sabotage Mecha Godzilla's controls. They

(01:36:34):
do succeed at doing this, but I did wonder, like
it seems like Godzilla and King Caesar have sort of
already won the fight at this point.

Speaker 2 (01:36:41):
Yeah, I don't think we really had that moment in
the fight where it's like Godzilla can almost pull it
off if only somebody in an alien base somewhere were
to blow up a key mechanism, Like we don't really
get that.

Speaker 3 (01:36:53):
Yeah, so, but I don't know. Maybe they just needed
to destroy the base to prevent Mecha Godzilla from being
repaired and coming back. Maybe maybe so. But also the
bass is collapsing in flames after this, and we see
our heroes trying to like run out and escape and
there's like stuff falling all around them, And I think
the movie leaves significant questions unanswered about which characters survive

(01:37:19):
getting out of the base. Like they see the base exploding,
and Kuko, the Professor's daughter, says, oh, my father, and
then another character says, I'm sure he got out all right. Oh.
Mentioned before the base collapses. The alien boss gets killed,
and when he dies, his face is not exactly a

(01:37:39):
gorilla mask like the others. It's like eighty percent gorilla mask,
but green with these yellow horns on the face. I
didn't know what the difference was there. Maybe he's just
kind of green from all the green wine he drinks.

Speaker 2 (01:37:52):
Or he is an elder and the elders grow tiny
little spikes out of there. We just we have so
many questions about the basic physiology of these aliens.

Speaker 3 (01:38:00):
Yeah. Also, after the fight is over, I really like
the way King Caesar just goes back in his hole
and reburies himself. Yeah, he sucks all the rocks over
his face.

Speaker 2 (01:38:10):
Yeah, I mean almost like he's not again, Like maybe
he's a slumbering creature, a slumbering deity, or maybe he
is again an artificial being that is only activated in
times of great need.

Speaker 3 (01:38:21):
Yeah. So at the end of the movie, we find
that the ancestors of the Royal House of Azumi can
rest in peace because everything has has been settled. Of course,
the world is saved from the rampage of mecha Godzilla
and from the alien plot that's all been put down.
We do see Massahiko as Okay, so he was in
the base, he got out, all right, we see him unharmed.

(01:38:45):
But what happened to the other two guys, the Interpol
agent and the professor. I think we never see them again,
and nobody says anything about whether they survived or not.

Speaker 2 (01:38:54):
I think you're correct, because some characters from this film
will pop up again in the Terror of Mega Godzilla.
But but yeah, I don't. I don't think our cool
sunglasses agent actually shows up again. I think I think
he had had other cool movies to do at that point.

Speaker 3 (01:39:10):
Man, well you should do a crossover like that guy,
the Interpol agent and Diabolic if they worked together, can
you imagine Yeah, yeah, the adventures they would have.

Speaker 2 (01:39:23):
So yeah, in general, I like I like the synergy
of like Spy Movie and in Big Monster Battle, I
think it worked pretty well here. I agree. Yeah, and
and again the monster battles do not disappoint a lot
of fun.

Speaker 3 (01:39:35):
All right, Well, I think that does it for my
thoughts on Godzilla versus Mega Godzilla.

Speaker 2 (01:39:41):
Yeah, yeah, same. But as you know, for your listeners
out there, if you have additional thoughts, insights, bits of trivia,
interpretations of what we see in this film, right in.
We'd love to discuss it with you. We'd love to
feature it on future episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Listener mail, you know, there's a lot to talk about here,
and this movie's been around long enough and been a

(01:40:02):
popular a popular Godzilla film long enough that people have
a lot of thoughts. For instance, in at least the book,
Ready Player one. I don't remember if this is in
the film adaptation or not, but the most powerful mech
that a player in the virtual world can take on
is the mecha Godzilla, and so the villain of the

(01:40:24):
piece ultimately like takes on the form of mecha Godzilla
to battle the hero again. I just can't recall if
that's actually in the movie as well, but it's definitely
in the book, all right. Well, just a reminder to
everyone out there that Stuff to Build Your Mind is
primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set aside most
serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on

(01:40:44):
Weird House Cinema. If you want to support the show,
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so that you're essentially subscribe to it. That sort of thing.
And if you are on letterbox dot com you can

(01:41:04):
follow weird House there. Our user handle is weird house
and we have a nice list of all the movies
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at what's coming up next.

Speaker 3 (01:41:13):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:41:33):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Weirdhouse Cinema: Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974)