This article is from WeChat official account:Inspector Ma (ID: SXBLG2015) , author: Mazhen Jiang, from the head of FIG: “Godzilla adamantyl Wars” stills
Recently, “Godzilla vs. King Kong” was released, but today’s article is not spoiled. Don’t discuss who is better.
Because I want to talk to you about the story behind these two behemoths. Godzilla and King Kong can be regarded as cultural symbols of Japan and the United States. In fact, there was a decades-long battle for cultural discourse power between them.
So today, let’s sort out the history, I believe this is more exciting than watching monster fights.
The story starts in the 1930s.
At that time, a film worker had a nose at Paramount Pictures. This person is called Merian, which is the future father of King Kong.
But what is more legendary is that this old man is also a tough guy. During the First World War, Mei became a pilot. In a mission in 1918, the plane he was flying was hit and the fuselage caught fire. Everyone present thought that this man was bound to die, but he survived stubbornly. As a result, two years later, Merian flew the plane on the mission again, but was shot down unfortunately. But he survived, even staying in the prison camp for 9 months.
After the war ended, Brother Mei joined the American Geographical Society and went out on an expedition. His image is particularly in line with the avid adventurer tough guy.
Merian
However, Merian has a seemingly childlike dream in her heart. He wants to make a movie about gorillas. When Merian was a child, he once read a book called “Exploration and Adventure in Equatorial Africa.”
This book records the local customs in Africa, and also introduces many African animals. Among them, the image of the gorilla had a great impact on Merian.
In 1927, Merian saw another book that had a great influence on him. This book is called “Komodo Dragon”, and it is Merian’s friend and naturalist William Douglas Burden who wrote this book. This book details the Komodo dragon, the monitor lizard living in Indonesia.
Book Shadow of “Komodo Dragon”
Actually, today, with the development of information, we can no longer imagine how much impact gorillas and Komodo dragons can cause.
But we can imagine that at the beginning of the 20th century, advances in science and technology made people’s horizons wider and wider. But just go forward for a few decades, the boundary between real animals and legendary beasts is not so obvious.
It’s hard to imagine that huge orangutans and lizardsOne of the animal movies, but it is actually a funny movie, and it has not been authorized.
The outline of the story is that a man plays King Kong on stage, making money to attract his girlfriend. It’s really a little black humor.
In 1938, another film “King Kong Appears in Edo” was released in Japan. Judging from the existing posters, it looks like a period drama. It is said that this movie is divided into two parts, namely 変化の巻 and gold の巻.
However, the influence of “King Kong” in Japan is definitely not limited to a few imitative movies. On the contrary, this epoch-making movie has influenced an important figure in the Japanese film industry.
Friends who are familiar with Japanese special photos will not be unfamiliar, this is the famous special god- Tsuburaya Eiji.
Yengya Eiji
In an interview with the “Mainichi Shimbun” in 1962, Tsuburaya Eiji recalled:
“King Kong” is a global sensation, of course including Japan; this film made Raidenhua become a first-rate film company from a second-rate film company. I also tried to persuade the studio I worked on to import the film’s technical methods, but they didn’t have much interest.
Not only that, but Tsuburaya also specially found a negative copy of “King Kong”. He studied the special effects frame by frame without a technical manual or report publication as a reference.
From then on, the 32-year-old Tsuburaya also discovered his destiny. Of course, this is also a later story.
Because a few years later, the monsters created by King Kong and Tsuburaya seem to have shouldered their mission. If they are “over-interpreted”, their burden is the legacy of the historical issues of Japan and the United States, and the struggle for cultural strength.
A few years later, the cruel World War II broke out. There is a saying that only about 1% of the Japanese movies shot before the war survived, and the few King Kong movies shot in Japan are now lost. I believe that they have a high probability of being destroyed by war.
Finally in 1945, people saw “monsters” countless times more terrifying than King Kong. It is effortless and can wipe out hundreds of thousands of people. This is the nuclear bomb.
Soon, Japan surrendered unconditionally. Under American occupation, Toho, played by Tsuburaya Eiji, was also on the verge of collapse.
But in 1953, things changed. Its cause is another monster movie. At this time, Warner Bros. USA produced a movie called the Beast of 20,000 Fathoms. But what we are more familiar with should be its Japanese translation-“Atomic Monster”.
Two-page poster of “Atomic Monster”
Interestingly, the prototype of this movie is actually a thought-provoking novel-“Foghorn”.
The so-called fog angle, to put it bluntly, is the horn on the lighthouse. In the case of heavy fog, it can serve as a warning to passing ships.
But the roar of the horn was mistaken by the prehistoric behemoths on the seabed as a signal of companions. But a misunderstanding is a misunderstanding after all. The lonely and disappointed monster finally destroyed the lighthouse and sank to the bottom of the sea. Perhaps it has already understood that it cannot be attached to too many things.
“Fog Corner” also has an impact on Japanese pop culture. The lighthouse of “Pokémon” Masaki is regarded as a tribute.
However, the original idea of the novel has not been completely copied. On the contrary, a more fashionable element has been added to the story, that is, nuclear panic.
Because in the story, the cause of the incident was an atomic bomb experiment conducted in the polar circle. But the explosion awakened the sleeping behemoth. It went to New York to aggressively invade and caused a huge panic.
However, less than a year after the movie was released, the Atomic Monster did not come. What followed was a sudden experiment.
On March 1, 1954, the United States tested a hydrogen bomb on Bikini Island. It is said that because of serious mistakes in the US estimates, the radiation produced by the explosionThe shot far exceeded the expected range. This made the Japanese fishing boat Fifth Fukulong Maru outside the safe zone a serious threat. All of a sudden, Japan’s domestic anti-nuclear movement broke out.
Fifth Fulong Wan
It is rumored that it was on a flight from Jakarta to Tokyo. A filmmaker named Tomoyuki Tanaka also looked at the sea and was lost in thought.
Tanaka is lucky
He began to think about two seemingly unrelated things.
The first thing was the Fifth Fulong Maru incident that happened not long ago, and the second was a trivial matter. Tanaka once saw the information of “Atomic Monster” in a business magazine.
He believes that the two can be combined to make a movie. So Tanaka wrote on the plane and wrote the outline of the story.
Soon, this idea was implemented, and there was a secret code-G work. The film is directed by Inoshiro Honda, and the special filming is by the professional Eiji Tsuburaya.
Although they will put the unreal monster in the real world. But from the beginning, everyone didn’t have the mentality to make a “monster movie”, but regarded it as a serious and realistic subject and treated it sincerely. Because everyone hopes to use this movie to reflect the reality of geopolitics and social care, and evoke the shadow of nuclear explosions. And this G work is Godzilla.
The origin of the name Godzilla is actually a mystery to this day. A more credible theory is that the name Godzilla is a combination of gorilla and whale.
It is also believed by an unreliable statement that this actually stems from the nickname of a fat employee of the Toho company.
But no matter what, everyone likes the name.
After that, the appearance of the monster has to be confirmed. In the beginning, the design work was performed by cartoonist Kazusuke Abe, who brought in the masterpiece “Young Kenya” by his teacher Toji Yamakawa. Among them, a scene of an encounter with Tyrannosaurus gave the film a decisive influence.
Juvenile Kenya
However, Abe Kazusuke’s design draft was not recognized. Because the monster is drawn too abstract, its head is like a mushroom cloud, loud but not elegant.
The final result is that the art director Akira Watanabe found the American magazine Life, referenced the image of Iguanodon and Tyrannosaurus above, put the two together, and added a stegosaurus bone plate to it., This is basically all work.
The Iguanodon and Tyrannosaurus in the picture above are the original pictures for reference at the time. I found the stegosaurus by myself, for reference only
However, Tsuburaya still has an obsession in his heart. He hopes to use stop motion animation to complete special effects like “King Kong”, but forget it, it will take 7 years to finish the job, and he can only give it up.
Under the difficult shooting, “Godzilla” finally turned out. This movie has established Dongbao’s global top position in special effects. Even from the current point of view, the tension brought by the roughness of the movie is definitely not something that CG technology can easily replace.
Of course, this movie is more memorable, but it is Godzilla’s thoughtfulness. At the end of the film, when people were happy to defeat this monster, only the sober Dr. Yamane whispered softly, he said:
I don’t think that Godzilla will be the last one. If we continue the hydrogen bomb test, the Godzilla kind may still appear somewhere in the world…
It is true that Godzilla has become a symbol of nature’s punishment. If the environment is destroyed endlessly, human beings can only reap the consequences. So to this day, when someone tells me that Godzilla is just a botched monster movie, I will be very upset. But there is no way, I can only say one sentence:
But anyway, “Godzilla” delivered satisfactoryThe box office is still very impressive. This also laid the foundation for a later life and death decision.
In 1962, King Kong and Godzilla not only had a terrifying contest. Also contributed a famous scene on the screen.
That’s right, it’s this “nucleic acid test” animation, which is constantly being made into emoticons to spread. This gives people a feeling that the greatest contribution of Godzilla and King Kong’s lore 60 years ago was just a network meme.
On the contrary, the story behind this movie is quite exciting.
The story began in the late 1950s. At that time, Willis, the special effects master of “King Kong”, wanted to combine King Kong and Frankenstein to make a movie, but the plan was soon aborted.
Frankenstein
However, this move alarmed Baker, a former universal producer. So Baker took over the plan, but the whole progress didn’t improve. But soon, he met the Japanese company Toho.
It turns out that at this time, after filming “Godzilla” and “Godzilla Counterattack”, Toho very much hoped to find an opportunity for Godzilla to return.
Godzilla’s counterattack, released in 1955
So, the clever Baker quickly adjusted his plan and replaced Frankenstein with Godzilla.
He not only sold the idea to Dongbao, but also persuaded the other party to fully bear the right to use King Kong. As a result, the plan began to advance. The film is still written by Honda Inoshiro, and the screenwriter is in charge of Shinichi Kanazawa, who has written “Mosra.”
Guan Ze Xinyi
Regarding the script of this time, Shinichi gave up the heavy nuclear panic. Instead, cut in from a light-hearted and interesting point of view, turning the irony into commercial rampant.
The story is two lines in parallel, one is that the United Nations exploration submarine awakens Godzilla. The other line is that greedy humans deliberately visit King Kong in order to create gimmicks. In the end, the two giants started a desperate struggle.
The script was handed over to Hideo Tsuburaya, and he was very excited. In 1962, he said in an interview:
This script is for me It’s very special because it recalls the 1933 “King Kong” that ignited my special photo interest.
It is true that for Tsuburaya, “King Kong” is a work that he cannot avoid in his life. When he first studied “King Kong”, he was still a historical drama photographer. From marveling, studying, to creating, his mood is very complicated.
As for the action arrangement, Tsuburaya Eiji found a new inspiration. Just a few years ago, another century war that represented Japan and the United States came to an end. Rikidoyama from Japan and Lu Seitz from the United States fought fiercely.
So, Tsuburaya began to let the holster actors who played the monsters imitate the fighting style of professional wrestling to match the cheerful atmosphere.
Interestingly, Tsuburaya also used stop-motion animation in the movie to show Godzilla’s flying kick. Is this a tribute to the stop motion animation in “King Kong”?
Soon, the movie was released, which was an unprecedented success in Japan. But things became completely different in the United States, although the producer Baker brought King Kong and Godzilla together. But when he introduced the film to the United States, he remade some shots and added American roles. In the end, even some of the classic soundtracks in the Japanese version were roughly replaced with the soundtrack of “Black Lake Monster”.
In 1963, the US version of the film was released and the box office was very impressive, but the crudely edited version was misunderstood and criticized by the media. The New York Times once described it as a “ridiculous farce.”
Interestingly, the audience can probably guess that Godzilla and King Kong represent the facades of Japan and the United States. When two tigers fight, there must be a winner. So I don’t know when it will start. An urban legend began to appear on the market. In the Japanese version, Godzilla won. In the US version, King Kong won.
But I found two versions for comparison, and found that the scenes at the end of the film are actually the same. Two giant beasts scrambled and fell into the water, Godzilla disappeared, and King Kong slowly swam into the distance.
But these two versions do have different endings in details. At the end of the US version, King Kong’s roar sounded and the film ended. It seems that only King Kong survived. But in the Japanese version, Godzilla’s roar sounded first, and then King Kong’s voice began to appear.
This can be seen as an open ending, but at least in the original version, Godzilla’s cry seems to imply that it did not lose to the United States.
But in any case, the battle has come to an end. In the following days, the well-known “Alt Q”, “Ultraman” and “Ultra Seven” came out one after another. Eiji Tsuburaya has also become a household name among the public. In 1970, the god of special photos passed away and became the peak of Japanese pop culture forever.
However, the story is not over. Just a few years later, another secret war was fought between the United States and Hong Kong, China.
In a blink of an eye, in 1976, news came out in the United States that a remake of “King Kong” with an investment of $24 million would be born. In order to portray part of the scene, the film even prepared a 12.2 meter high mechanical model.
However, this model was actually not used much in the end
It is said that this incident has shocked the booming Hong Kong Shaw Brothers movie.
On the one hand, this movie is extremely handy. On the other hand, Shaw Brothers’ rival, Jiahe Movie, is about to release this movie.
So Shaw made a major decision. He invested a huge sum of 6 million Hong Kong dollars to shoot our own King Kong-“The Gorilla King” before the release of “King Kong”.
Speaking of this, I have to mention one thing. In fact, “King Kong” is also a character with a face and a face in Hong Kong’s popular culture. According to available data, in 1934, the Hong Kong Gaosheng Theater once screened “King Kong” under the name “The Orangutan King”.
Even in 1959, Hong Kong also invited actors from “King Kong”, added King Kong to the Journey to the West universe, and filmed “The Monkey King in Heaven”.
One year later, King Kong had another fight with Huang Feihong. That’s right, this film is called “Ape King vs. Huang Feihong”.
So, such a deeply rooted image must be taken seriously.
In order to shoot the Hong Kong version of King Kong well, Chua Lam, who studied in Japan, set his sights on neighboring countries. Finally, Shaw invited Arikawa Sadashang who participated in the production of “Godzilla” to take charge of the special photo.
There are rumors that Yuan Heping is actually the one wearing the Gorilla King leather case.
From this point of view, “The Gorilla King” united the elites of Hong Kong and Japan against “King Kong”, which is a bit of uniting Wu against Cao. Although the plot of “The Gorilla King” is similar to that of “King Kong”, from the scenes, this movie is full of special quality, just like the progeny of “Godzilla”.
But it is a pity that Hong Kong’s “Ape King” has not been able to win a round from word-of-mouth or even the box office. But a few years later, it has become one of the few “Hong Kong special photos” in Hong Kong that has been talked about.
But people at this time, who would have thought that more than ten years later, the Americans have reached out to Godzilla. This is the next story again.
In 1997, Tomo Tanaka, who contributed to the birth of Godzilla, returned to the sky. A year later, “Godzilla” filmed by the Americans was released.
But instead of becoming a satisfactory commemorative work, this movie has triggered resistance from Japanese Godzilla fans. In fact, as early as 1992, Samsung Pictures obtained Godzilla’s authorization, but the filming was completed only 6 years later.
But this movie has a great flaw, that is, this Godzilla looks too ugly, just like a disgusting lizard.
There is even an ironic rumor in the media, which believes that the failure was actually caused by an accident.
At the beginning of the cooperation, the Japanese side provided a memorandum which recorded the strict rules of Godzilla’s modeling in detail. But this memo was lost by the American director and screenwriter. So after the movie was released, most of Godzilla’s diehards did not think that this disgusting lizard was worthy of Godzilla’s name.
But cultural matters still have to be resolved by culture. In 2004, Toho Japan released the movie “Godzilla’s Last Battle”. They specially arranged this American Godzilla to appear on the stage, and it turned out that it was only three seconds handsome, and it was flew by the Japanese orthodox Godzilla. Who can be worthy of the name Godzilla can be said at a glance.
Although this time, Japan has reshaped Godzilla culturally. But in the early 2000s, Godzilla movies were already very difficult to lead in Hollywood special effects movies.
So sadly, when Toho released “The Last Battle of Godzilla”, he also announced that he would no longer make Godzilla movies for five to ten years.
It seems that everything has come to an end in the last battle for the right to speak.
However, the story of Godzilla is not over. As you and I have seen, in 2009, American Legendary Pictures obtained the rights to film Godzilla and co-produced the American version of Godzilla movie with Warner Bros.
In Japan, “Authentic Godzilla” was also launched in 2016. In this movie, the anxiety caused by the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant is presented. It seems that everything is back to the original point in 1954-the behemoth that was born from the nuclear panic.
Now, the universes of Godzilla and King Kong merge again. The two giant beasts will usher in a new battle.
But I personally think that if we look at the history of these decades, this movie can bring us not only exciting scenes, but also deeper thinking.
As we discussed, the dispute between Godzilla and King Kong seems to be burdened by the grievances and grievances of the American and Japanese cultures for decades of fighting for the right to speak, as well as the historical problems of the two countries.
However, Godzilla and King Kong played fiercely on the screen, creating classic works. In wars and disputes between countries, the people will always be injured.
Returning to these two behemoths, it is not difficult for us to find that Godzilla and King Kong seem to be opposed to each other, but their original cores have reached the same goal by different means.
We can see in “King Kong” the greed, sinisterness of human nature, and recklessness in order to grab benefits. Godzilla is seen as revenge from nature. And the trauma of war. They seem to be secretly telling the plight of human beings.
For example, the damage caused by war, the fate of the people, the backlash of the natural environment, and the sinister heart of the people. Returning to the individual again, this may be a question that each of us must think about.
The road ahead is still very long. How to live peacefully in this pure land is ultimately up to each of us to decide.
Okay, thank you for reading. According to the research on these shadow seas, it is not a cultural dumping or turning over the coffin.
I want to take this opportunity to share my shallow experience with everyone.
Because the information involved in this history is too complicated. If I made a mistake, I apologized earlier and hope that all my friends will criticize and correct me. So that’s it for today’s article, thank you all.
This article is from WeChat official account:Inspector Ma (ID: SXBLG2015) , author: Ma Zhenjiang