Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 46

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Popular Culture Review

films as camp were often at odds with the films themselves. This is most clearly
seen in Godzilla 1985, which Toho had originally planned as a re-make of the
original Gojira. Toho had envisioned this film as a radical departure from the
Godzilla films of the ‘70s, which had been marketed primarily to children, and a
return to the serious horror and social commentary of the 1954 film. This intention
was directly at odds with New World Pictures’ American marketing campaign,
which included campy promotional trailers and the screening of Marv Newland’s
humorous cartoon Bambi Meets Godzilla (1969) before the feature presentation.
New World also filmed its own additional footage, in which characters often make
inappropriate jokes that undercut the seriousness of the Japanese scenes. Because
o f these deep contradictions, it became increasingly difficult to determine what
was intentional and what was coincidental, or what was comical and what was
simply unintelligible, and this situation contributed to a great deal of confusion.
For example, Detroit News reviewer Peter Ross, who wrote one of the few positive
reviews of Godzilla 1985, claimed that part of the success of the picture was its
“intentionally bad dubbing” (qtd. in Galbraith 270). Similar contradictions are cre
ated by the deletion of the films’ intended message coupled with a re-emphasis of
that message. For example, in two of the Godzilla films, Godzilla, King o f the
Monsters and Godzilla 1985, new scenes were filmed around an American re
porter named Steve Martin (played by Raymond Burr in both films) who narrates
the story. In both films these narrators plead for the audience to learn a lesson from
what they have witnessed, such as Martin’s closing statement in Godzilla 1985:
Nature has a way sometimes of reminding Man of just how
small he is. She occasionally throws up terrible offsprings of
our pride and carelesness, to remind us of how puny we really
are in the face of a tornad