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Japanese Title: Gojira no Gyakushu (”Godzilla’s Counterattack,” roughly)
Toho Studios’ Official English Title: Godzilla Raids Again
Other American Titles: Gigantis the Fire Monster (original U.S. release title);
Godzilla’s Revenge
Noteworthy International Titles: Le Retour de Godzilla (French; “The Return of Godzilla”); Il Rei di Monstri (Italian; “King of the Monsters”); Godzilla Kehrt Zuruck (German; “Godzilla Returns”)
Director: Motoyoshi Oda
Producer: Tomoyuki Tanaka
Screenplay: Takeo Murata and Shigeaki Hidaka, from a story by Shigeru
Kamaya
Music: Masaru Sato
Special Effects: Eiji Tsuburaya
Japanese Release: 4/24/55
American Release: 5/21/59
U.S. Distributor: Warner Brothers
Review Copy DVD Distributor: Classic Media
Running Time: 82 min./ 78 min. (American version)
Monsters: - Godzilla (Japanese: “Gojira”) – A second oversized, imaginary
dinosaur, awakened and presumably mutated by atom-bomb tests, very similar to the first
- Anguirus (Japanese: “Angirasu”; also called “Anguiras”, “Angilas,” “Anzilla”, “Angurus”, and “Angiras”) – another oversized, fictional dinosaur, this one an ankylosauroid quadruped; also awakened and mutated by atom-bomb tests
Principal Cast: - Godzilla – Haruo Nakajima
- Anguirus – Katsumi Tezuka
- Shoichi Tsukioka – Hiroshi Koizumi
- Hidemi Yamaji – Setsuko Wakayama
- Koji Kobayashi – Minoru Chiaki
- Dr. Kyohei Yamane – Takashi Shimura

This isn’t the building you ordered?

Background

As the truly clever and on-the-ball reader will have noticed above, Gojira no Gyakushu was released in Japan less than six months after the debut of Gojira. Now, one could argue that there were some unanswered questions at the end of Gojira - but they certainly don’t get answered here. Rather, this sequel was put out to capitalize on the success of its predecessor, simply and plainly. Now, Gojira had received mixed critical reviews, but it had also received almost two and a half times its cost in ticket sales, so who cared? Not Iwao Mori, who had greenlit the first film. In November 1954, he instructed its producer, Tomoyuki Tanaka, to make a second film.

He apparently also instructed Tanaka to make it snappy. Ishiro Honda (Gojira’s director) was already on another project, and so it was decided not to wait, instead going with Motoyoshi Oda, a relatively minor director with a reputation for, um, getting things done in a timely manner. (Which is not, say, Stanley Kubrick’s reputation.) Similarly, the composer for the first film, Akira Ifukube, was busy, and replaced with Masaru Sato, who had a somewhat better public image; he was well-enough thought of that he would go on to score Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. Eiji Tsuburaya, the special-effects master of the first, did return, and was in fact given a larger studio to work with than before.

I want my edge trimmers back!

What he didn’t have was much time. Shot through the winter, Gojira no Gyakushu debuted the spring after Gojira. (There was enough time, however, to come out with some bizarro promotional material, using stock footage and concept models of Godzilla and weird maquettes of his new, monstrous foe, Anguirus, in which this ankylosaurine dinosaur’s shell flaps upwards, like it’s the shell of an extra-soft beetle.) The rush would, regrettably, show.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 8:00 am and is filed under Godzilla Project. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.