First (Movie I Ever Saw)

 

Do you remember the first movie you ever saw? I do. It’s one of my earliest memories, and I remember it vividly.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and we were staying at my grandparents’ house for the weekend. I was about four years old. Most everyone was upstairs talking and talking and talking – boring adult stuff – and I was down in the den playing with my uncle’s abandoned Matchbox cars. They came in a heavy tin play-set with ramps and such. It was very cool.

So there I am, kneeling at the coffee table and playing with Matchbox cars. The only other person down in the den was my grandfather, who was watching me. And by “watching me,” I mean he was taking a nap in his armchair. That’s when the afternoon movie came on.

There was no way my grandfather, who preferred westerns, would normally watch a movie like this. I tried to make as if I wasn’t watching – I had the sense that this was something I wasn’t supposed to see – but I couldn’t not watch. It was riveting. I understood that it was just a movie, but it had never occurred to me that there could be a threat of such scale, a threat of our own making. I’m positive this was the first time I’d seen people die in a movie. And it certainly never occurred to me that a hero could be both awesome and terrible.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I was afraid that I’d be turned into a skeleton by the villain of the piece, as demonstrated in poorly animated sequences throughout the film. But there was no denying that I was hooked.

That movie, of course, was Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster.

 

GODZILLA VS. THE SMOG MONSTER

Directed by Yoshimitsu Banno, 1972, 87 minutes, Rated PG
“It probably came from a sticky, dark planet far, far away. Now go to sleep.”

 

Before carbon neutrality, before An Inconvenient Truth, even before the term “global warming” was even a thing, there was a mighty climate warrior reaching out to the masses and doing his part in the fight against pollution: Godzilla. Because what better spokesperson for saving Mother Nature than a gigantic, lumbering nuclear reactor stomping all over the place?

Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, is a pretty straight-forward affair: an alien life-form called Hedorah drops by to feed on our pollution. Fortunately, neither Hodorah or the pollution sits too well with our softer, kid-friendly version of Godzilla, so the King of All Monsters comes wadin' in like John Wayne to take care of business. All of the action is witnessed from the point of view of a Japanese scientist and his short shorts-wearin' young son.

Let's start off with the Smog Monster himself, Hedorah. Godzilla has appeared in over 30 feature films, and for my money, Hedorah is by far one of his toughest opponents. Sure, Hedorah can shoot heat lasers out of his eyes and spit toxic loogies, and he can even shift shapes (an ability later seen in such foes as Orga and Destroyah). That's all well and good, but Hedorah is also an entity of living sludge. This not only renders Godzilla's bread-and-butter – his atomic breath – fairly useless, it allows Hedorah to regenerate himself simply by consuming more pollution.

We’re shown this through little animated interludes that show up in the film, illustrating all the pollution we’re pumping out and how it’s feeding the Hedorah. The animations are crude and accompanied by some hokey music, but the overall effect makes Hedorah even creepier.

But really, this film belongs to the hippies. The film itself was released just a couple years after Woodstock, and it really shows. What is mankind's solution to taking on the scourge of pollution? Hold a rock concert at the top of Mt. Fuji, of course!

This is, to date, the only Godzilla film to feature an acid rock music video (complete with trippy fish-headed dancers). Here is the chorus:

          Save the Earth! (save the Earth)
          Save the Earth! (save the Earth)
          See the evil problem around us
          Save the Earth! (save the Earth)
          Save the Earth! (save the Earth)
          And the Solution: stop pollution
          Save the Earth! (save the Earth)
          Save the Earth! (save the Earth)
          Save the Earth!

No one said this film was subtle.

As if the movie's message wasn't heavy-handed enough, we have a villain that practically fellates those industrial smoke stacks, just as world governments today tend to fellate the oil companies. We then see the unrestricted corporate monstrosity fly around the country, gassing and killing hundreds of people (of all the Godzilla films, this one has to be in the top five for body count). It’s all pretty dark stuff, and that’s before we get to Godzilla all but performing abortions on the little Hedorah egg-spore-thingies.

Well, it’s not all dark. There is one other thing this movie is well-known for: Godzilla using his atomic breath to fly. I’m not sure how the physics behind that works, but I guess it seems silly to complain about basic laws of science in a Godzilla movie.

 

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