*. I posted separate notes for Gojira and the American version, Godzilla, King of the Monsters! Godzilla Raids Again had an Americanized version as well, Gigantis the Fire Monster, but I’ll talk about both movies together here because there’s not as much to say.
*. It was a very quick turnaround for Toho to get this movie out, I think taking only six months from greenlighting it to having it in the can. As you might expect from that kind of schedule, they pretty much replayed Gojira (without, as Steve Ryfle points out, the same political or moral depth). The repetition even extends to a curious echo effect with the climax. What I mean is how, in both Gojira and Godzilla Raids Again, the action actually hits a peak midway through the film, which is when Godzilla destroys Tokyo in Gojira and Osaka here (an echo that may have been meant to recall Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The big confrontation at the end then plays out as a letdown. Burying Godzilla under an avalanche of ice is a little more impressive than having him disintegrated by the Oxygen Destroyer, but it isn’t nearly as fun as his wrestling match with Anguirus the ankylosaur.
*. On the commentary track Ed Godziszewski says that this is the only time in the franchise that Godzilla is actually beaten by humans without the use of any special technology. An observation which just underlines how useless the usual attempts by the army to take him out are. We’d see tanks rolling in and rocket launchers firing at Godzilla throughout many other films in the franchise, but the generals never appear to realize how pointless such efforts are. I guess if you’re a hammer then everything looks like a nail, and perhaps there’s a message about wasteful military spending being made too, but it does get silly after a while.
*. The back story isn’t very interesting, and even in the original Japanese (reading subtitles and not being confused by the awful dubbing) I found it hard to follow exactly what was going on. With the trio of escaped convicts stumbling around like the Three Stooges we can see the beginning of a comic turn that would become a lot more developed in the next film in the series, King Kong vs. Godzilla.
*. This is a movie that still wants to engage our feelings a bit, what with Kobayashi’s death accidentally (?) showing the way to defeat the monster. But this is another diminished echo from the first film with the death of Serizawa, and it doesn’t play nearly as strong.
*. Not a giant leap forward then, but a small step in the direction the franchise was going to take. In the monster brawl between Godzilla and Anguirus you get a foreshadowing of everything essential to the series that was to come. They just needed to add colour and some eccentric secondary players and they’d be set.