Ep #74 - Carlo Vanstiphout's Guide to Kaiju in the '60s

After Godzilla leapt to the big screen in 1954, he quickly became Japan’s most recognizable pop culture expression of lasting trauma and remorse over the nuclear end of their involvement in WWII. In the 1960s, Godzilla-inspired kaiju movies took this same metaphor of an unstoppable destructive force that indiscriminately kills both the innocent and the guilty with equal fury, and made it fun! Carlo Vanstiphout of Back Row Cinema and CRUD Buddies shares his expertise on his favorite era of Japanese monster movies and help us understand how Japan learned to stop worrying and love the atomic monsters. While Godzilla is discussed in detail, Carlo focuses mostly on Big G’s Toho friends, as well as a certain fire-powered turtle and a stone giant from Daiei (Toho Studio’s main kaiju competition).

In this episode, Carlo navigates through the several dozen kaiju movies made in the Sixties and chooses six that he truly enjoys and thinks best represent what was happening in the genre at the time. Left to their own devices, Bart and Jenna could have blundered through these movies and perhaps drawn a few conclusions about the appeal of rubber monsters in the ‘60s. But thankfully Carlo is on hand to explain what the hell is going on in these colorful, outrageously fun, and often perplexing batch of films.

The following films are discussed:

• Mothra (1961)
モスラ
Directed by Ishirô Honda
Starring Furankî Sakai, Hiroshi Koizumi, Kyôko Kagawa

• Frankenstein vs. Baragon (a.k.a. Frankenstein Conquers The World) (1965)
フランケンシュタイン対地底怪獣
Directed by Ishirô Honda
Starring Nick Adams, Kumi Mizuno, Tadao Takashima

• Daimajin (1966)
大魔神
Directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda
Starring Miwa Takada, Yoshihiko Aoyama, Jun Fujimaki

• Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (a.k.a. Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster) (1966)
ゴジラ・エビラ・モスラ 南海の大決闘
Directed by Jun Fukuda
Starring Akira Takarada, Kumi Mizuno, Chôtarô Tôgin

• King Kong Escapes (1967)
キングコングの逆襲
Directed by Ishirô Honda
Starring Rhodes Reason, Mie Hama, Linda Miller

• Gamera vs. Guiron (1969)
ガメラ対大悪獣ギロン
Directed by Noriaki Yuasa
Starring Nobuhiro Kajima, Miyuki Akiyama, Christopher Murphy