Better Title: The one where Godzilla dances
By this point in the franchise history, Godzilla was getting to be pretty big in America. His movies were pulled from Japan theater, edited badly, then dubbed badly, and the American audiences were like ‘yessssssssssss’. So one American production company decided that maybe they should try and get in on the ground floor of all that. So they rolled up to Toho, started getting involved in some monster movies, then when it came time for another showing of Big G to pop up, they were like “Yo, here’s a giant bag of cash.” And the rest was history.
With United Productions of America bankrolling half the cost of this film, they were wanting to make sure it’d do well with their target audience, so this is a bit more Americanized than most of the other Godzilla films are. Godzilla usually has a rather slow build, with a lot of mystery and people just kind of chilling before it’s finally revealed that all the weird stuff happening is really because of the monster whose name is in the title and also Godzilla is there too and they’re going to fight! Instead, here, the action starts right away. There’s a decent amount of human action and romance, there, and there’s even a western lead character for the first time in the series. And, probably a bunch of other subtle changes, too. I’m not really a film guy. I can’t really say much about the cultural differences in media there. Maybe Red Metal can, he’s the movie dude.
In any case, this is Godzilla with an extra dose of AMERICA! In there. Let’s see how that goes.
Lost to the Aether 