Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 44

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Popular Culture Review

Monster Zero from the very beginning, making the Japanese and American ver
sions nearly identical. King Kong vs. Godzilla was based on Willis O’Brien’s screen
play King Kong vs. Frankenstein; but when producer John Beck could get no fi
nancing in Hollywood, he took the project to Toho, who replaced Frankenstein
with Godzilla. King Kong vs. Godzilla has frequently been interpreted as a meta
phorical battle between America and Japan, but the basis of this interpretation
seems to lie in a false rumor that the film was made with two different endings, one
for Japanese audiences, in which Godzilla wins, and one for American audiences,
in which King Kong wins. David Kalat traces the source of this rumor to an article
in Famous Monsters of Filmland in the late ‘70s, which was possibly reported
from a press release by Henry Saperstein, and since then the rumor has become so
well known that it was even repeated in an article by James Stemgold in The New
York Times in 1995 (48). Stemgold also interprets time travelers in Godzilla vs.
King Ghidorah as a threatening symbol of the American computer industry: “[their]
aim is to force Japan to buy foreign computers. Sound familiar?” (5). This state
ment reveals an assumed anti-American sentiment, but Galbraith refutes this no
tion, claiming that while the film is “fiercely” nationalistic,
its American bashing is fairly slight....O f course, Wilson and
Grenchiko are supposed to be renegades from the future and
not representative A m ericans....A fter all, there are good
Caucasian characters in the story.. ..Instead, the film expresses
Japan’s uneasiness with its continued success in the world
market ...and its perception by the rest of the world. (289)
Further complicating the notion that Godzilla films are anti-American, American
filmmakers and distributors have influenced the creation and perpetuation of the
Godzilla series throughout its duration, and Toho has always been eager to partici
pate in the American market; the Japanese studio even owned several American
movie theaters.
However, while these films are not anti-American, the differences in their
American versions frequently alter their political significance in radical ways. For
example, by cutting several scenes from Toho’s original Gojira, the American dis
tributors of Godzilla, King o f the Monsters effectively erased its anti-war message.
One of these scenes depicts t v