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It is often claimed that persons who report encounters with cryptozoological creatures “just want attention.” It’s an odd claim – while such people certainly do get attention, it is very rarely of a sort that rational people would desire. Take Doug Wilhide, the subject of a front-page story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on June 2nd, 2000. The previous day, that same paper had published a letter he’d written them, claiming to have seen an alligator in Lake of the Isles, a scenic body of water in Minneapolis’ Uptown area. Now, this was an unusual claim, to be sure. But it probably didn’t automatically deserve the headline, “Is the ‘alligator in Isles’ story a croc?” Or the Peter Pan references contained within the article. And there certainly wasn’t any reason to tell us that Wilhide’s daughter and fellow alligator-spotter, Anduin (whose name, in these multicultural times, gave pause to nobody), was named after a river in Lord of the Rings. Unless we were meant to think, “Jeez! Only weirdoes read Lord of the Rings!” Which we most likely were, in those pre-Peter Jackson days.

Trouble was, his story wasn’t really all that incredible.

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As a boy, I spent three years as a member of the Cub Scouts (the junior organization to the Boy Scouts of America). This afforded me many opportunities to be deep in the woods with large groups of other young boys. And thus I was able to observe the tendency of young boys, when deep in the woods, to become convinced that said woods were populated by animals that were, shall we say, not entirely accepted by conventional science.

One such animal – and I use the term rather loosely – was the Bull Weevil. The Bull Weevil, I was told with great gravitas at the beginning of one camping trip, was a horrible, maneating beast; it had eerie, luminescent red eyes, and terrible, hideous fangs and talons. Apart from these features, however, it was essentially humanoid. It was therefore, basically, an ogre, a bogeyman of the forest, just waiting for its opportunity to turn a rather commonplace scout camping trip into a morbid, supernatural tragedy.

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There was a Jackalope on my block when I was a boy.

But first, some background:

The word “Jackalope” – referring to an antlered rabbit – was coined by the American pioneers; it was a creature of their tall tales. Though on a basic level, according to these tales, the Jackalope was simply a species of rabbit that sported deerlike antlers, its attributes would be…embellished from story to story. Sometimes it was said that male Jackalopes would become incorrigible during rutting season, attacking anything whatsoever in order to impress the females; bison, taking pity on the rabbits, would step out of their way when thus attacked. Sometimes it was said that Jackalopes loved alcohol, and would raid human camps for it. They couldn’t live in holes like other rabbits, due to their antlers; they had no fear of predators for the same reason. And so on. Some storytellers went so far as to ascribe anthropophagy (man-eating) to the species, though one imagines that the Jackalopes would have a bit of difficulty taking their prey. The pioneers, it seems, had what you might call “fertile imaginations.”

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The American Version

It’s clobberin’ time!

In May of 1964, it was announced that Henry G. Saperstein – remember that name; it’ll be more important later in the series – had acquired the U.S. rights to Mothra vs. Godzilla, and was going to release it as “Godzilla vs. the Giant Moth.” This didn’t last. Saperstein sold the rights to American International Pictures, where it came under the stewardship of James Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff. Nicholson renamed the film “Godzilla vs. the Thing.” (Which latter character presumably came from the Place, where it lived side-by-side with the Persons.) Perhaps he thought the giant-moth idea wouldn’t play in Peoria; perhaps he was concerned about copyright, as another company had released Mothra in the U.S. Whatever his reasoning was, AIP’s massive marketing campaign played off of the ambiguity of the new title, tempting audiences with the mysterious identity of Godzilla’s opponent. The dubbing for this version was done by Titra Studios, an organization which provided supplemental income for numerous struggling actors. Said actors’ attitude toward these movies ranged, predictably, from enthusiasm to outright disdain. The dubbed film debuted on a double bill with Voyage to the End of the Universe. It has been reported that many of the children who went to see the bill were really only there for the Godzilla picture.

The American version of Mothra vs. Godzilla is far and away the most respectful of any such version to date. The music is intact; the translation is excellent. Very few scenes are taken out, and most of them are extremely trivial. The dubbing is mostly very good, though some of the characters have extremely lame Asian accents, as if we are meant to believe that all these Japanese people are speaking English, as a second language, amongst themselves all the time. Mothra is referred to by her real name the first couple of times we hear of her, but then she starts getting called “the Thing,” and this about half the time, apparently at random. Why would the Shobijin call her “the Thing”? Or the Infant Islanders? Other renamings occur – Infant Island becomes Mothra Island, and Junko becomes Yuka, or Yoka, or something like that. But these are fairly minor points in an otherwise first-rate ‘americanization.’ And they are quite offset by a unique event: The U.S. version has a short sequence, shot by Toho Studios, of American warships attacking Godzilla. This was actually a holdover from the original script of the film, in which these were to be ‘Rolisicans’ doing the attacking; this was scrapped, but then reattached, for international release. It’s a pretty good scene, with some great shots of Godzilla emerging from smoky explosions. More importantly, it doesn’t exist in the Japanese version, possibly because it was felt that Japanese audiences would be a little nervous about the depiction of the U.S. military firing missiles toward Japan. But why would that be?

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Review

Yeah, I’m pretty sure they’re ignoring us.

In Steve Ryfle’s Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star: The Unauthorized Biography of “The Big G,” – really the definitive English-language Godzilla text – he calls Mothra vs. Godzilla “indisputably the greatest of the Godzilla sequels.” Though it pains your reviewer to differ with so eminent a Godzilla scholar, he must dispute this anyway. In doing so, your reviewer is at variance with not only Ryfle, but most of North American Godzilla fandom; the treatment that this movie receives in the literature is enthusiastic to the point of the embarrassing. And it’s certainly not a bad movie. What, then, is your reviewer’s problem?

Well, it’s not Godzilla. Godzilla is more threatening in this film than he has been since the first, or will be for the rest of the Showa period. He is a pure engine of destruction, here. Some commentators have argued that he destroys in this film accidentally, just through the fact of his existence; but upon alighting in Nagoya, his first action is to blast a building with his ray for no reason, and he assaults Mothra’s egg with a similar lack of provocation. This is an evil Godzilla, and it’s nice to see. He also remembers to use his atomic breath in this film, and that’s great too. Further, he attacks a lot of things with his tail, which whips around nicely when not being so used; and if the recent Godzilla video games have taught humanity anything, it’s that Godzilla’s tail is especially dangerous. On the down side, the sequence where he tears down buildings through sheer clumsiness could probably go. Where appearance is concerned, this is one of the better Godzilla suits (constructed by Kanzi Yagi, with a particularly high level of input from Haruo Nakajima), though it is not as good as the one fromKing Kong vs. Godzilla. It’s thinner and darker than before, and has a lumpier head; its upper lip quivers in a lifelike manner, though this was apparently caused by a tear in the suit rather than intentional agency. His light-colored eyebrow ridges, while a bit odd-looking against his general coloration, are positioned so as to give him an angry and sinister appearance.

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