[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gdp8yqtWy8g]
Don Draper and I turn out to have something in common. In a recent episode of Mad Men, Don takes fellow divorcé Lane Pryce out on a bender that includes a trip to a Japanese monster movie. Which took me back: not to 1964, but to the late ’70s / early ’80s or thereabouts, when the highlight of my year would be Monster Week on channel 7’s Four O’Clock Movie in Detroit.
I never liked horror movies as kid, or as an adult. I’m not sure why. It wasn’t the scariness (or the grossness), but for some reason, Freddy Krueger, zombies or—Buffy et al. excepted—vampire stories have never done it for me. Giant radioactive Japanese lizards totally did, though. It was probably partly that I liked science fiction, and maybe the pseudo-science of these creatures’ origin myths hooked me.
That, and the fact that they were giant, and radioactive, and Japanese, and lizards.
And they were special, because in those days—gather ’round, children, Gramdpa James is going to tell a story!—there weren’t video stores, or BitTorrent or OnDemand. You did not demand anything of television! You sat in your place, you ate what television served you, and you were grateful!
So when Monster Week rolled around, with a Mothra movie, or a Gamera, or even one of the crappy ones with Baby Godzilla—ah, bliss! (There was also a Planet of the Apes Week. But an ape is superior to a lizard only in strictly evolutionary terms.)
My favorite, best as I can remember, was the movie clipped above: Godzilla on Monster Island. Because, come on, an entire island of monsters! Those weeks that Godzilla was not in business, though, all was not lost: one of the local UHF stations reran an English-dubbed version of Ultraman, the Japanese man-vs.-giant-monster series. Or was it a man? Best as I can recall, a member of the Science Patrol was able to use a special capsule to summon a giant monster-fighting alien, but he also somehow became the alien: I was never entirely clear on it, and even reading this doesn’t clarify matters much for me.
Oh, whatever. Just watch this clip. Is there anywhere you can see this show anymore?:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jzMOkdMWgI]