Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films 1954-1975 Criterion Collection Excerpt

Dating back to 1954, our favorite monster‘s ear-splitting roars have been heard all over the world in film, television — and even a few books. With so much new content to love, who wouldn’t want to go back to the start of it all? Criterion‘s Godzilla: The Showa Era box set is sure to please fans new and old. Read an excerpt below from Steve Ryfle on the film that started it all.

“The original Godzilla is Honda’s lament for the nuclear age. It was produced amid a months-long public crisis that occurred after fishermen aboard a tuna boat christened the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5) unwittingly strayed dangerously close to a U.S. hydrogen-bomb test at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific in March 1954; when they returned home, severely ill with radiation sickness, a national panic over radioactive fallout ensued. Japan had been transformed from defeated imperial power to economically resurgent young democracy (a country with a parliamentary government and a ceremonial monarchy, to be more precise) with close ties to Washington. Yet the Lucky Dragon incident seriously strained U.S.-Japan relations for the first time since the postwar occupation had ended in 1952; many citizens likened the fishermen’s fate to a third nuclear strike on Japan, and a national protest calling for a ban on nuclear testing arose. Honda’s film hints at these tensions: the opening scene, in which Godzilla invisibly attacks a salvage ship, is an unmistakable reference to the Lucky Dragon and the fear it inspired—what Honda called an “invisible fear” that nuclear annihilation could happen at any moment. Embodied by the monster, this fear haunts the movie and deftly politicizes what otherwise might have been a straight sci-fi entertainment.”

Steve Ryfle, “Reign of Destruction“