Weirdhouse Cinema: Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974)

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

00:00:13
Speaker 2: 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 nineteen seventy four's Godzilla versus Mecha Godzilla.

00:00:39
Speaker 3: 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?

00:00:49
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:01:28
Speaker 3: By this distinction, Robot Jocks is actually despite the title about mechs.

00:01:34
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:02:11
Speaker 3: 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 your T shirt? Show it off?

00:02:34
Speaker 2: Oh, it's one of my many bar kindred shirts. Here my favorite vegan restaurant, slash bar in San Diego. Oh.

00:02:46
Speaker 3: Nice, I've just got a hammer horror T shirt.

00:02:50
Speaker 2: Nice. Nice.

00:02:51
Speaker 3: 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.

00:02:57
Speaker 2: 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.

00:03:04
Speaker 3: 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. 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.

00:03:44
Speaker 2: 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.

00:04:02
Speaker 3: So by nineteen seventy four, we're a good ways into the Godzilla series.

00:04:06
Speaker 2: 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. A lot of ideas have been deployed over the.

00:04:34
Speaker 3: Years, taking many different things off of the shelf and combining them in new ways exactly.

00:04:41
Speaker 2: 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 on Weird House Cinema.

00:05:04
Speaker 3: 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.

00:05:23
Speaker 2: 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. 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 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 great early example of a giant robot in a Japanese film.

00:06:30
Speaker 3: Right, But that's not a Godzilla movie. That's just a different Honda movie that's got this giant robot.

00:06:35
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:07:09
Speaker 3: Sometimes you just find out there was a King Kong TV show. Never never even imagined such a thing.

00:07:16
Speaker 2: 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.

00:07:36
Speaker 3: That would be interesting.

00:07:38
Speaker 2: 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.

00:07:49
Speaker 3: 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.

00:08:03
Speaker 2: 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 mystery sort of a film.

00:08:30
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:08:30
Speaker 2: Oh, and it does a pretty good job with that.

00:08:32
Speaker 3: 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.

00:08:46
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:09:19
Speaker 3: It's kind of juggling a few too many characters, I think, But yeah, but it is. The human plot is not bad.

00:09:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, especially.

00:09:29
Speaker 3: Once the once the planet of the Apes aliens show up, like and they reveal the gorilla masks. That's pretty solid.

00:09:36
Speaker 2: 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 at some point my kiddo and I are going to follow up with seventy five's Terror of Mecca.

00:10:03
Speaker 3: Godzilla excellent. Actually, I have not seen that one.

00:10:07
Speaker 2: So Honda comes out of retirement to direct that one. So into the Showa era, so it's an important one.

00:10:14
Speaker 3: 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 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.

00:10:48
Speaker 2: 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.

00:11:01
Speaker 3: 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, 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 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. It's just kind of a it's a plot element, but it doesn't really feel like it means anything.

00:12:12
Speaker 2: 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.

00:12:27
Speaker 3: 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. 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 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 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.

00:13:56
Speaker 2: 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 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?

00:14:29
Speaker 3: 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 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.

00:15:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, kind of poocy energy there, I guess. Yeah, I've seen this one, but it was on amss T three K years ago.

00:15:16
Speaker 3: 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 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 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, 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.

00:16:38
Speaker 2: 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.

00:16:57
Speaker 3: 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.

00:17:12
Speaker 2: Strong bat energy a little bit like almost like a bat were wolf.

00:17:17
Speaker 3: Yes, bat where Well that's exactly Yeah, kind of like you ever watched the first ever episode of Batman the animated series.

00:17:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, kind of like Manbat except without wings.

00:17:29
Speaker 3: 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.

00:17:39
Speaker 2: 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.

00:18:00
Speaker 3: 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 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 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 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, the effects team also studied the movements of soldiers in historical European plate armor as a basis for Mecha Godzilla's movement.

00:19:39
Speaker 2: That's interesting.

00:19:41
Speaker 3: 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 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 Godzilla to come back, So Mecha Mecha shows up in many subsequent properties.

00:20:27
Speaker 2: 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 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 think sizzle really nicely. There are a lot of fireworks literally, yeah, very good.

00:21:13
Speaker 3: 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 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.

00:21:47
Speaker 2: 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 in the Gamera movies, which also have their own like alien goopy blood going on.

00:22:13
Speaker 3: 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.

00:22:20
Speaker 2: 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.

00:22:38
Speaker 3: I could give a pitch that's different than the title, and that is, come see the sights of the amazing island of Okinawa.

00:22:44
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, it's.

00:22:46
Speaker 3: Almost like an Okinawa tourist advertisement.

00:22:49
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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.

00:24:08
Speaker 3: 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.

00:24:17
Speaker 2: 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, 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 to the Kaiju movies, films such as the esp espionage thriller sp In nineteen seventy four.

00:25:09
Speaker 3: Oh, okay, esp and spy in the same word.

00:25:13
Speaker 2: 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.

00:25:31
Speaker 3: 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.

00:25:41
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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. 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.

00:27:20
Speaker 3: 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.

00:27:42
Speaker 2: 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.

00:28:01
Speaker 3: 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.

00:28:09
Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's tough because we have some other character actors in this film that are far more charismatic.

00:28:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, this character in the movie does have a brother who is less grim than case A k.

00:28:21
Speaker 2: 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, getting out there and exploring his creative side before stepping up and being the seaweed corporate overlord that he was born to be.

00:28:53
Speaker 3: 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.

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

00:29:08
Speaker 3: It's an important business, it is. I love some seaweed products.

00:29:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely so. Yeah that's where he That's where the true colling was. He's out there doing good.

00:29:18
Speaker 3: Work supply us with our precious MSG.

00:29:21
Speaker 2: 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.

00:29:38
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:29:39
Speaker 2: 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 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. 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.

00:30:35
Speaker 3: He's the important scientist in the first one who comes up with the oxygen bomb, who sacrifices himself.

00:30:42
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:31:18
Speaker 3: His character has one of the most hilarious Chekhov guns in movie history. I can't wait to talk about that.

00:31:24
Speaker 2: 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 Godora the Three Headed Monster.

00:31:48
Speaker 3: This character is absolutely useless in a flight.

00:31:51
Speaker 2: 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.

00:32:04
Speaker 3: 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.

00:32:11
Speaker 2: 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?

00:32:30
Speaker 3: Is he going to keep wearing those sunglasses no matter how dark the environment.

00:32:34
Speaker 2: Is, going into actual cave in cave, still.

00:32:37
Speaker 3: Wearing in an unlit cave with aviators on.

00:32:41
Speaker 2: That's how cool he is. Yeah, he's not going to take those off, So.

00:32:45
Speaker 3: I mean that must be some hangover easily.

00:32:48
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:33:28
Speaker 3: Were these the guys with the big straw hats that come down way over their heads and kind of.

00:33:33
Speaker 2: 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 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 would say that Kashita makes for a great Dracula or a great vampire.

00:34:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm looking at the screenshots you got here. I want to see it now.

00:34:26
Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

00:35:24
Speaker 3: The aliens here feel like a mafia which is an interesting choice.

00:35:28
Speaker 2: 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.

00:35:46
Speaker 3: I mean, it's true they could not have built the base that they did without doing some smuggling, and that's interpolse Turf.

00:35:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, because it was discuss they built it in Mount Fuji, which is just fascinating to think about.

00:35:59
Speaker 3: 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?

00:36:08
Speaker 2: Hmmm?

00:36:10
Speaker 3: 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.

00:36:25
Speaker 2: 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. So there's some interesting, maybe not even fully formed Mount Fuji iconography going on in this movie.

00:36:52
Speaker 3: 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.

00:37:06
Speaker 2: Mean, there's the bass. The base you're right might be in a different mountain.

00:37:10
Speaker 3: 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.

00:37:21
Speaker 2: 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.

00:37:30
Speaker 3: It's I think it is fast and loose with where the places are.

00:37:34
Speaker 2: 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, 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, so you can look it up on discogs.

00:38:18
Speaker 3: Yes, there is a musical number, a full song performed in Godzilla Versus Meca Godzilla.

00:38:24
Speaker 2: 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 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.

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

00:39:05
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 I don't have a clear idea of what a fuzz tone guitar is, but I recognize the sound.

00:41:40
Speaker 3: 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 and I think, yeah, they're probably going fuzzy here for a very boxy, squared off sound.

00:42:08
Speaker 2: 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.

00:42:24
Speaker 3: 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 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 exactly an ankylosaurus, but it's pretty close to that.

00:43:09
Speaker 2: 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.

00:43:18
Speaker 3: 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 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.

00:43:53
Speaker 2: 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. It's like he should battle something on four legs.

00:44:17
Speaker 3: 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 know that sound, and then title Godzilla versus Mecca. Godzilla.

00:44:42
Speaker 2: 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.

00:44:51
Speaker 3: 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.

00:45:08
Speaker 2: 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.

00:45:31
Speaker 3: 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.

00:45:53
Speaker 2: 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.

00:46:06
Speaker 3: 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 climax of the action, everything will stop to give her a three minute long musical number.

00:46:34
Speaker 2: Gewhige I'm here for. I think that's probably what's lacking with the more recent Godzilla films, especially the US versions.

00:46:40
Speaker 3: 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.

00:46:51
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:46:51
Speaker 3: 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 him later at either a construction or excavation site, so he's some kind of boss of some development.

00:47:18
Speaker 2: 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.

00:47:34
Speaker 3: I'm not sure why Massahiko is here. Maybe he's just visiting his brother while his brother is doing this project.

00:47:39
Speaker 2: 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.

00:47:46
Speaker 3: 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 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 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 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.

00:49:09
Speaker 2: 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.

00:49:19
Speaker 3: 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, and there's a shrine holding a statue of a four legged creature.

00:49:44
Speaker 2: Yep, and as we'll learn, this as a shiza, so the find.

00:49:48
Speaker 3: 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 just walking around. The aisles look very wide. People are freely changing seats to talk to each other.

00:52:26
Speaker 2: 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.

00:52:41
Speaker 3: 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, 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 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.

00:53:39
Speaker 2: 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.

00:53:53
Speaker 3: 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 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 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.

00:54:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, good natured deception.

00:54:58
Speaker 3: 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. Professor Miyajima takes a look at this piece of metal and he concludes space titanium.

00:55:26
Speaker 2: 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.

00:55:37
Speaker 3: 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 for subsequent monster related advance.

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

00:56:02
Speaker 3: 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.

00:56:21
Speaker 2: Yeah. Unless that that the microscope is like bolted to the floor, you're not really going to get much out of that.

00:56:29
Speaker 3: 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.

00:56:49
Speaker 2: Perfectly reasonable in the Godzilla film universe, because again, this has happened like pretty much every year for over a decade.

00:56:56
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, it's seasonal, seasonal Kaiju attack.

00:56:59
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:57:00
Speaker 3: 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 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.

00:57:37
Speaker 2: Uh.

00:57:37
Speaker 3: 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.

00:58:01
Speaker 2: 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.

00:58:19
Speaker 3: 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?

00:58:31
Speaker 2: 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.

00:58:45
Speaker 3: 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.

00:58:52
Speaker 2: Yes, do the maths professor do the Yeah.

00:58:55
Speaker 3: 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 the aviator. Is in the dark, it is to pitch black outside.

00:59:20
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, people, he does eventually take them off, but yeah, not for pretty much anything.

00:59:26
Speaker 3: Yeah, but this is a good little action and intrigue scene. I liked it.

00:59:30
Speaker 2: 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.

00:59:37
Speaker 3: Yeah. After this we get the movie's first monster attack. So, a volcano erupts. I guess this is supposed to be Mount Fuji.

00:59:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so. An out comes kind of like a big rock, right, It kind of ejects what seems like a rock.

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

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

01:00:09
Speaker 3: 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. 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.

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

01:00:54
Speaker 3: 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 grandfather seems pretty keen on letting Godzilla stomp the mainlanders. He sees this as fitting revenge for their invasion of Okinawa many centuries ago.

01:01:25
Speaker 2: 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.

01:01:32
Speaker 3: 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, 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.

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

01:02:15
Speaker 3: 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 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.

01:02:50
Speaker 2: 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?

01:03:02
Speaker 3: 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 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, 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.

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

01:04:15
Speaker 3: 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 up out of the ground, busting up through the roof of a warehouse, and case Key says, two Godzillas, what's going on?

01:04:46
Speaker 2: 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 I think this maybe helps to establish something feeling not quite right about the doppel ganger.

01:05:13
Speaker 3: 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.

01:05:29
Speaker 2: 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.

01:05:42
Speaker 3: 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 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.

01:06:18
Speaker 2: 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 plan for planet Earth? Here?

01:06:41
Speaker 3: 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 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, 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.

01:07:39
Speaker 2: 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.

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

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

01:07:55
Speaker 3: 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. 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?

01:08:29
Speaker 2: 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 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.

01:09:09
Speaker 3: 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. Like it shoots its fingers off as rockets, and then it's just got more finger rockets to go.

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

01:09:38
Speaker 3: 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 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 for maintenance, and we'll attack Tokyo later.

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

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

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

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

01:10:45
Speaker 2: 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.

01:10:53
Speaker 3: 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 the lights are put together, with all the reflective surfaces, it looks like Saturday night fever.

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

01:11:24
Speaker 3: 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 can't have King Caesar getting woken up in the middle of all this.

01:11:47
Speaker 2: 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 exact plans are.

01:12:11
Speaker 3: 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.

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

01:12:32
Speaker 3: 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 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 and saying, I doubt the aliens expected us to change ships.

01:13:21
Speaker 2: 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.

01:13:41
Speaker 3: 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.

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

01:13:59
Speaker 3: 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. 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?

01:14:37
Speaker 2: 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.

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

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

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

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

01:15:05
Speaker 3: 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 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 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. 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.

01:16:27
Speaker 2: 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, 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.

01:17:03
Speaker 3: 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.

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

01:17:29
Speaker 3: 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, 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, 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, but it's a gorilla mask.

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

01:18:44
Speaker 3: 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 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 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 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. 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.

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

01:20:18
Speaker 3: 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.

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

01:20:37
Speaker 3: 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 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, 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.

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

01:21:36
Speaker 3: 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.

01:21:47
Speaker 2: Yes.

01:21:48
Speaker 3: 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. 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 is it called an elbow drop? What he does on him? Ye?

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

01:22:35
Speaker 3: 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, 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 cave under the expo site?

01:23:22
Speaker 2: 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.

01:23:44
Speaker 3: 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.

01:23:58
Speaker 2: 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.

01:24:15
Speaker 3: 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.

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

01:24:38
Speaker 3: 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 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. 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 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.

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

01:25:58
Speaker 3: 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 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 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?

01:26:54
Speaker 2: 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.

01:27:05
Speaker 3: 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 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 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 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.

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

01:28:34
Speaker 3: 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.

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

01:28:47
Speaker 3: 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 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.

01:29:16
Speaker 2: 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 the same sort of thing.

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

01:31:41
Speaker 2: 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 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, but but yeah, so I think Godzilla fans might agree this is a character that really needs to come back in a major way.

01:32:34
Speaker 3: 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.

01:32:53
Speaker 2: 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 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.

01:33:29
Speaker 3: 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 appear to protect the world from the monster that attacked. So the second one here is Godzilla.

01:33:58
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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.

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

01:35:01
Speaker 2: 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.

01:35:10
Speaker 3: 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 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 part of the fight, which is Godzilla's. That's how Godzilla gets the advantage is the.

01:35:59
Speaker 2: 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.

01:36:12
Speaker 3: 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 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.

01:36:41
Speaker 2: 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.

01:36:53
Speaker 3: 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 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 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.

01:37:52
Speaker 2: 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.

01:38:00
Speaker 3: 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.

01:38:10
Speaker 2: 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.

01:38:21
Speaker 3: 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. 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.

01:38:54
Speaker 2: 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.

01:39:10
Speaker 3: 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.

01:39:23
Speaker 2: 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.

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

01:39:41
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 Weird House Cinema. If you want to support the show, just rate, review, subscribe wherever you have the ability to do so, be it on a podcast format, or if you're watching the video version on Netflix, give us some thumbs up so you want to see more of it so that you're essentially subscribe to it. That sort of thing. And if you are on letterbox dot com you can follow weird House there. Our user handle is weird house and we have a nice list of all the movies we've covered over the years, and sometimes a peek ahead at what's coming up next.

01:41:13
Speaker 3: 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.

01:41:33
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.