Just the Ticket #215: Godzilla vs Hedorah

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Ticketmaster.

This is what I've been waiting for, Ticketholders! Like, I wasn't waiting to get to this specific movie in the Goj-Year-ra lineup, but I swiped away my media player with an incredible sense of hype and emotional disturbance that I hadn't felt since Minus One or the original Godzilla.

Emitted into the world in 1971 as a visceral and blatant commentary piece the likes of which the franchise hadn't attempted in nearly a generation, Godzilla vs Hedorah (Godzilla vs the Smog Monster in the U.S.) was directed and co-written by franchise first-timer Yoshimitsu Banno, with Haruo Nakajima returning as Godzilla, and Gigan and Heisei era Godzilla suit actor Kenpachiro Satsuma as Hedorah. None of the human actors here are recognizable to Godzilla fans, nor have any notable roles outside the franchise, so I'll just be referring to them by name or archetype going forward.

Between the epic Bond-alike banger of a theme song, "Give Back the Sun!" (I prefer the first variation, and the subtitled lyrics say "return the sun!"), the side focus on a "million-man groove party" on Mount Fuji, and the interspersed animated psychedelia, Godzilla vs Hedorah most definitely feels of its decade of release. But it also gets into the action very quickly (Hedorah attacks people and ships alike within the first few scenes, and Godzilla has near-constant screen time from the twelve-minute mark onward), the choice to have a child as the main character with a psychic link to Godzilla through his dreams is executed much more effectively than in Some Monsters Almost Attack, the message-focused nature of the script basically necessitates that the movie has stakes beyond property damage and alien conquest for once (people in this children's monster movie get melted down to skeletons, Hedorah—named after the Japanese word for sludge and vomit, just like Dragon Ball Super's Dr. Hedo—mutates fish, maims the main character's father, and tarpits an innocent kitten, Godzilla loses an eye and a hand and is knocked unconscious several times and almost buried alive, and I end up saying "what the fuck‽" every five minutes because there's nearly always something incredible or emotionally scarring onscreen).

When a field marine biologist (who's never heard of tadpoles surviving on land in a fictional 'verse where frogs exist, because it's the law that scientists in Godzilla movies be devoid of conventional intelligence) is maimed and emotionally scarred into scientific obsession by his encounter with an amphibious, Lovecraftian biometal hive mind from space that grows and mutates by consuming industrial pollution and masses of partially degraded refuse and flotsam, his son prays to God...zilla to save Japan and the rest of the world from being reduced to a smog-covered, sulfuric boneyard. But when it comes to saving the environment from ourselves, we cannot hope to rely on a powerful minority (because the threat may be too overwhelming or those with power might prove ill-equipped or be just as monstrous), and must work together with our betters (and our "betters") to truly return to greatness. So (again) for the first time, we get the humans being helpful and effective and cooperating with Godzilla (who is a metal-as-fuck, tactical badass with fearlessly vicious and creative moves who pretty much cuts promos on Hedorah throughout their numerous fights in this movie and ironically serves as an allegory for clean nuclear energy at one point) to eliminate the threat.

Does the "tadpoles can't come on land" thing bother me? Yes. Does it bother me that Hedorah is from space (I like to theorize that it was one of the meteors from the beginning of Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, and that it was created from waste of the Xliens' peroxide refineries and brought to life by the Monster Island weather calamity) because the maimed idiot scientist couldn't identify a few elements (modern, "I've never heard of it, so it can't be true" logic at its finest) and applied "if a boat sinks, it must be Godzilla" reasoning to make a stupid, wild-ass guess that turned out to be right? Yes. But does it bother me more that we didn't get a sequel because producer Tomoyuki Tanaka fired (demoted?) Banno for "ruining Godzilla" with the nuclear flight scene? Yes.

Godzilla vs Hedorah is an awesome movie.

A-

As I spend the weekend watching an androgynous child create psychedelic, Lovecraftian imagery for his own education and amusement, please Stay Tuned and remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can continue to help save trees from becoming paper by writing my opinions on the internet, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my big, green content.

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Ticketmaster,

Out.