On the heels of the previous Godzilla Tag-Team match, 1972's Godzilla vs. Gigan, Toho gifted the world yet another crazy Tag-Team affair! But this time, instead of teaming with my boy Anguirus, the Big G would be seen joining forces with...Ultraman? Not quite, but close enough! And while as you can see in the poster above, the oddball Gigan is back for more action, instead of teaming up with the awesome King Ghidorah, he instead mixes his might with another monster, equally as bizarre as he! In what is quite probably the second weirdest entry of the Showa series outside of Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster, I'm about to tell you of one of the most bizarre films of my childhood. Buckle up...
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| Jet Jaguar |
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| The True OG, Ultraman |
Perhaps the weirdest thing about Godzilla vs. Megalon, is that aforementioned robot side-kick! The singular personality of Jet Jaguar was born out of a contest held by Toho in 1972. The contest winner would have their design featured in an upcoming Toho production! The winner was a school-boy, who came up with the very Ultraman-inspired "Red Arone", which was later reworked by Toho into what we would come to know as Jet Jaguar. Supposedly, when shown the reworked design, the kid who created "Red Arone" was quite unhappy, as it didn't resemble his creation as closely as he would have liked. But just the same, it must have been cool to be a kid, having SOME version of a character you made up yourself, featured in a movie!
Speaking of Ultraman, it was Godzilla's own special effects wizard creator, Eiji Tsuburaya, who kicked off the Tokusatsu (or "Special Filming", meaning special effects based) "Giant Robo-Man" craze, in the mid-60s. Beginning with the very X-Files-like show Ultra Q, which featured something of a paranormal investigation team, dealing with various weird creatures, aliens and monsters, in 1966, the concept later evolved into a second show which debuted later in the year, Ultraman. Ultraman featured a dedicated team of anti-monster fighters who protect the Earth (or rather, Japan) from supernatural threats. Shin Hayata, prominent member of this "Science Patrol", unbeknownst to his teammates, had fused with an alien being, and when things were too tough for the Patrol to handle, he would transform into the gigantic, robot-looking warrior known as Ultraman, to defeat the monsters. Ultraman proved to be so popular with kids, that several other VERY similar shows were created in the late 60s and early 70s, including Giant Robo, Mirrorman, and Toho's own Zone Fighter, which featured several appearances by Godzilla himself!
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| Mirrorman |
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| Zone Fighter, teaming with Godzilla. |
Ironically, Toho's Zone Fighter show was produced within the same time frame as Godzilla vs. Megalon, and would debut not long after the movie itself, also in 1973. The show is considered "canon" to the Showa Era movies, and not only featured appearances by Godzilla, but villain monsters like Gigan and King Ghidorah as well! If Toho had any long-term plans for Jet Jaguar, they certainly never came to pass, unfortunately.
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| Jet Jaguar's creator, Goro, and his friend Hiroshi. |
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| Little brother Rokuro, and his weird-ass fish thing. |
In the film's story, scientist and inventor Goro Ibuki, has created a sophisticated android, apparently just for fun, called Jet Jaguar. WHY Jet Jaguar? Well, that is a mystery the movie leaves unexplained. One day, when Goro, his hip friend Hiroshi Jinkawa, and little brother (whom he seems to be raising on his own) Rokuro Ibuki, are enjoying a seemingly peaceful day at a local lake. As you can see above, Rokuro was playing out on the water, with what looks like a very odd "mother fish and children" floating water-bike of some kind. No doubt another invention of Goro. And while it looks goofy as hell on the surface, I'll fully admit that seeing it as a kid, I actually thought it was pretty cool, and wanted one. Though to be perfectly fair, seeing it in action, it does seem RATHER slow moving, so maybe that wouldn't be so much fun after all?
The boys' idyllic day at the lake is abruptly interrupted, and ruined, by a giant fissure that opens, draining the entire lake into the deep underground. After saving his kid brother with a towing line, Goro and Company, left stunned by the demise of their favorite lake, make for home. But upon coming home, they are attacked by mysterious assailants, who have broken into their very odd, cube-shaped science hut. The bad guys make a get-away, but return soon enough, as they're after the amazing Jet Jaguar! It seems they are agents of a lost, now underground civilization, the remnant of essentially ancient Atlantis, called "Seatopia". Seatopia has been suffering lately, due to earthquakes caused by the surface-dwellers' idiotic nuclear experiments. And now, they want revenge!
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| An average day, down in Seatopia. |
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| Seatopia's fashionably 70s leader, Emperor Antonio. |
Surprisingly, it would seem that Seatopia's retaliation for the destruction of their own home, is going to come in the form of, believe it or not...a giant monster! In this particular case, a gigantic beetle-thing whom they worship as a god, called Megalon. Their plan seems to be, to get control of Goro Ibuki's miraculous Jet Jaguar, who they will in turn use to guide Megalon, as he hops and glides and bombs his way to the utter destruction of the surface world! Or at least Tokyo.
The problem is, those damn surface dwellers seem more clever than anticipated. After a thwarted attempt to dump poor Goro and Rokuro down the fissure in a big metal cargo box, they double back, and that blasted inventor manages to cook up a supersonic device which allows him to retake control of Jet Jaguar! He sends Jet on a mission to Monster Island, to enlist the aid of Godzilla, which forces Seatopia's Emperor Antonio to call on his own aid, this time from those deep space bastards of Space Hunter Nebula M, the very same giant cockroach aliens from the previous film, Godzilla vs. Gigan. The roaches promise to send Gigan to help, setting up the Tag-Team rematch between Godzilla and Gigan that I mentioned early in this very same article!
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| New partner, same bad attitude! |
As an aside, it seems that this movie was made rather hastily, after a previously planned Godzilla project had been canned at the last minute. It seems that director Jun Fukuda was left to basically write the script, based on a rough story outline, by himself, and the production took place over three weeks. Not that Gigan before it was some elaborate masterpiece, but it's a shame, as usual, that Toho, especially in the 70s, was being so cheap when it came to their Godzilla films. Because it would have been interesting, and preferable, to see what Megalon could have been, with more time, and more budget. Then again, what I just said applies to the vast majority of "genre" (science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc.) films from yesteryear, most of which were (and this applied to TV shows as well) constrained by smaller budgets and less time than they should have been given. Such fare was considered "low brow" back then, and thus it was very rare for shows, or films of such nature, to be given the kind of treatment they deserved.
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| Fearsome Godzilla |
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| Cute Godzilla |
As a SIDE-side note, it must be said that the suit featured in this movie, dubbed "MegaroGoji", is a major contrast to the suit used in multiple prior Godzilla films. Where as the suit which had been used from Destroy All Monsters, all the way up through Godzilla vs. Gigan (in another cheap move, Toho was REALLY getting their mileage out of these suits in the 70s), was featured arguably the most fearsome, and certainly most angry looking face of the bunch, this new suit was quite the opposite. The "MegaroGoji" suit, which would be featured in the Zone Fighter show, as well as ultimately the final three Godzilla films of the Showa Era (including this one of course), features a decidedly softer, friendlier look. In fact, many fans consider it to look somewhat "dog-like", and is arguably the cutest looking Godzilla. Toho really wanted to drive home the fact that Godzilla was now firmly a good guy, and humanity's friend and guardian, no longer the city-trampling terror. This suit was said to be slapped together faster than any other suit in the series, but in all fairness, it looks pretty damn good if that's the case.
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| My VHS cover. |
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| Alternate VHS cover |
My own experience with Godzilla vs. Megalon, comes from that period of my childhood, around 1989/90, when we finally first got a VCR in our household. As I've related in the past, I'm pretty certain that the first Godzilla movie I ever came to own on tape as a kid, was Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster. But other early inclusions in my collection, were Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Godzilla vs. Monster Zero, and the bizarre classic we're here talking about today. On an interesting side-note, if you look above to the top picture of the cover of my own VHS copy of this film, you'll see that it features rather bland, and rather odd artwork. In point of fact, that image of Godzilla, is taken from the first film in the Hesei Era series (the only one I that knew existed until I got later into my teens), The Return of Godzilla. I'm going to guess that art was used, as perhaps they figured that was the version of Godzilla that U.S. audiences might be most recently familiar with, as the American version of the film, Godzilla 1985, was I'm sure a popular rental of the time. I know I rented it pretty early into our VCR ownership. As for the bottom image? I've actually never seen that art before I did research on this piece, but while it's kinda goofy looking, I think kid me would have preferred that cover.
As for what kid me actually thought of this film? Put bluntly, I'd have to imagine, of the growing number of Godzilla (and related Toho) films that I came to own, or see thanks to TNT's MonsterVision, that Megalon was not one of my favorites. But that isn't to say that I disliked it, by any means. In fact, I loved pretty much any Godzilla or monster movie in general, as a kid. ANYTHING Godzilla-related was my bag back then, meaning even if it wasn't a favorite, I still loved it. A slight exception would be poor All Monsters Attack, which I saw on TV as "Godzilla's Revenge", a movie that I hardly HATED, but didn't love either. Mainly due to the fact that most of the monster footage was taken from other movies. But as for Megalon himself? I suppose I probably felt he was a pretty cool monster. The idea of Jet Jaguar, and a little boy who gets to live with his cool inventor brother, and have cool gadgets to play with, and NOT be bossed around, I'm sure held a lot of appeal. And of course this movie was actually my own personal first experience of the monster Gigan, along with the Godzilla: Monster of Monsters NES game, as I would not come to see Gigan's debut movie until a few years later, on TV.
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| Those damn bullies! |
As an adult, all these long years later, my opinion of the film is that it was obviously rushed. Like Gigan before it, Megalon suffers from too-short a production cycle, and a similarly cheap over-use of stock footage of city destruction and other such scenes, used from various previous Godzilla movies. Neither movie is BAD, by any means, at least not in my view, or likely the view of most fellow die-hard Godzilla fans. But it is, again, a damn shame that these productions were treated as they were, because these films deserved to be much more than they got to be. In the end, I think stacked up next to each other, even ignoring the fact that Gigan has my beloved Anguirus in it, as well as King Ghidorah, I think Gigan still comes out on top over Megalon. Megalon is, I'm sorry to say, one of the weakest of the Showa Era, and certainly of that tail-end 70s period.
However, as a movie, it's also still a lot of fun. It is quite possibly the overall goofiest of the bunch, though it has very stiff competition from Son of Godzilla in that regard. But with the colorful Jet Jaguar, the goofy kid-brother, the cheese-ball Seatopian villains, and incredibly weird nature of Megalon himself, there's a strong argument to be made. Megalon, as a monster, while surely gigantic and fearsome in his destructive capacity, also has moments of acting, even just left on his own, spectacularly goofball. On the one hand, the dude's got metal "hands" that come together to form a drill, which he can use to bore under the ground. He also can shoot deadly electric beams from his rhino-beetle-like horn, and he can spit what seem to be highly destructive organic bombs from his mouth to boot. On the other hand, Megalon seems to like hopping across the land in a hilarious fashion, and at one point, left without the guidance of Jet Jaguar, he even busts out some "fancy gliding" dance moves for no apparent reason whatsoever!
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| The Slide |
Of course, THE single goofiest moment of the film, and the thing that is most infamous about this movie, is "The Slide". Known, thanks in large part to Mystery Science Theater 3000 (one of my favorite shows of all time), even to people who don't know Godzilla movies at all, let alone the exact movie it's from, this incident has become something of a Godzilla-meme unto itself. Which is both hilarious, but also a bit unfortunate. Hilarious because it IS such a genuinely ridiculous moment, and is entertaining in its own right. But unfortunate, at least in this man's view, because it is one of the single cheesiest moments in what is already (somewhat unfairly) a Godzilla series that is known by the mainstream public as being "cheesy" to begin with. It's unfortunate, I suppose I would say, that when many people who don't know or love Godzilla films as I do, think of Godzilla, they might likely associate that name most closely with a cornball image like this one.
The move in question, comes late in the film, at the climax of the great Tag-Team battle between Godzilla & Jet Jaguar vs. Megalon and Gigan. By this point, Gigan has already had enough, and has flown off back out into space, leaving poor old Megalon all on his own. Jet Jaguar holds Megalon up, pinning his arms back, and Godzilla, backing up enough to build up some steam, proceeds to tail slide a RATHER long way, to give ol' Mega a "kangaroo kick" from hell. And he does this not once, but twice! Megalon is left so utterly defeated and humiliated, that he burrows back into the earth, and those dastardly Seatopians give the hell up for good. For what it's worth, while this is inarguably an incredibly cheesy moment, I WOULD argue that Godzilla using his own death breath to fly (backwards) in Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster, is still more ridiculous than this.
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| The US poster. |
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| The German poster... |
As another aside, if you look above, you'll see a couple of the international promotional posters for this film. In the American one, taking a book right out of the promo art for the 1976 remake of King Kong, Godzilla and Megalon are depicted as fighting, in the United States, on TOP of the World Trade Center buildings. As if the sheer bulk and weight of monsters that large, wouldn't absolutely crush those buildings in the first place! And speaking of King Kong...below it is the poster for the movie in Germany. It's a bit too long and convoluted a story to fully get into, but let's just say that Germany had a long history with false advertising, when it came to promoting Godzilla (and related) movies. The general idea here, being, that somehow Jet Jaguar is actually just King Kong...turned into a robot?
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| Pals. |
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| Just hangin' with the boys. |
As with pretty much any of the original Showa series of Godzilla and related monster movies, I would honestly recommend watching this one. Not as a first or even second choice. But it's still worth seeing, and it's a fun, and perhaps unintentionally funny, ride. I'd say it's the most "70s" of the bunch", in its own way, right down to the incredibly catch Jet Jaguar theme song at the end.
I don't generally like to think of Godzilla films as something to laugh at, and it genuinely bothers me, I'll admit, that so many people do view them that way. That isn't to say that I don't recognize and even treasure the goofier, and admittedly funny moments that the series can provide. I just dislike the notion that the films' "cheesy" effects, and just the movies as a whole in general, are "bad", and something to be sneered at, or only viewed/enjoyed ironically, as in "so bad it's good, let's watch them and laugh at them" kind of fare.
It isn't that I take Godzilla SO seriously, but I do think, viewed through the right lens and taken in the proper frame of mind, that most of these movies, have a lot more substance, and a lot more to offer, than merely laughs. These films, and especially the "Big G" himself, are very dear to my heart, and they are 100% a connection with that inner kid in me who, in spite of everything I've been through in life so far, has refused to become totally cynical and dead inside. I suppose you could say, that Godzilla is a connection to that inner child, and thus, what still remains, in the face of a VERY cynical world, of my innocence, and sense of wonder.
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So go watch yourself some Godzilla flicks, including this one! And I'll be back next month, with a brand new Halloween piece for all you boys and ghouls! In the meantime, stay dialed to the various Retro Revelations social media, for "Halloween Countdown" goodness.
Here is the
full list of Godzilla Chronicles articles, if you've missed any:
1. The Beginning
2. Gojira (aka Godzilla: King of the Monsters)
3. Godzilla Raids Again
4. King Kong vs. Godzilla
5. Mothra vs. Godzilla
6. Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster
7. Invasion of the Astro Monster (aka Godzilla vs. Monster Zero)
8. Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster
9. Son of Godzilla
10. Destroy All Monsters
12. Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster
