a retrospective of the first 15 Godzilla movies (1954-1975)

Having just finished watching all of the Godzilla films from the Showa period (1954-1975, the first fifteen movies) I decided to take a break from the movies themselves and write a brief recap and retrospective of that chunk of the Godzilla franchise. This era started with the quite serious first film, which had no humor and no other monsters - it was more of a testament to the horrors of war and the atomic bomb. The focus soon shifted to other giant monsters, and the fights that would inevitably result. This idea was done somewhat weakly in the franchise's second film, but got better in the third when they brought in a big-name monster from another franchise. The fourth film repeated this formula with a different big-name monster. At this point, Godzilla had always been the bad guy, or at best, neutral. That began to change with the fifth film, when the most famous bad-guy monster debuted, and the Earth monsters had to team up to fight it. This then became the norm: Godzilla and at least one ally had to deal with one or more enemy monsters. The motives of the latter varied (sometimes they were just running wild, but mostly they were controlled by aliens) and the battles often used recycled footage from earlier films, as well as cutting back and forth between monster action and human drama/action. Around this time, the monster fights began to include comical elements such as monsters dancing, taunting each other, displaying karate or boxing moves, and so on. With the seventh movie, the human plots began to get more complicated and entertaining, which I didn't expect but ended up enjoying. In fact, it made the eleventh through the fifteenth films a lot more watchable. Despite a couple of oddly- or poorly-done entries and some weird elements (Godzilla vs Hedorah comes to mind) some major new foes (Gigan, Mechagodzilla) were introduced in this span and the battle action tended to be pretty entertaining.

All in all, the fifteen films of this first era varied widely in any metric used to measure their quality, although I hope that my fairly-detailed reviews will enable readers to say things like "oh, yeah, that was the one where people got dissolved" and "that was the one with the aliens wearing goofy hats" and "that was the one with the bad disco dancing" and "that was the one where Godzilla did the Riverdance." I've tried to note which of the films had good giant monster battle scenes, as opposed to bad ones (due to being short, recycling footage, etc.)

Lastly, here are the patterns I noticed in these first fifteen films:

there were often two versions, and the original Japanese was always the better one to watch

there was frequent re-use of actors from previous films, in new roles

there was rampant recycling of footage from previous films, which I found irritating

there was usually intercutting of giant monster battle scenes with human scenes, which I also found irritating

there was an early shift in focus to giant monster battles and sci-fi elements (aliens, space travel)

And now...on to the second period of Godzilla films, the Heisei era (1984-1995, the next seven movies.)

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