CPB Writes

This is a preview of the blog's first Patreon-exclusive essay. As a backer, you'll be granted access to this essay and other exclusive content, as well as also early access to each regular essay before they're published on this site. Kindly consider backing for as low as $2 ! Enemy Monsters is a sub-series focusing on non-Toho films inspired by, intended to compete with, or otherwise relevant to the Godzilla movies. Daiei Film’s 1956 Warning from Space, known in Japan as Spacemen Appear Above Tokyo , is a highly significant entry in the history of Japanese tokusatsu (special effects) films. This is even though Warning from Space (I shall use the international title for the sake of brevity, even though the Japanese title is obviously way more awesome) is not a giant monster movie in the traditional sense - monsters are featured, but they are more or less human-scaled. Nor was the film even the first major science fiction production by Daiei; way back in 1949 the company had ...

Info Also Known As: Jû jin yuki otoko  aka Beast Man Snow Man (Japan) Director: Honda Ishiro. Screenplay: Murata Takeo, from a story by Shigeru Kayama. Director of Special Effects: Eiji Tsuburaya. Composer: Sato Masaru. Runtime: 94 minutes (Japan), 63 minutes (U.S. Re-cut) Release Date: August 14, 1955 What’s It About? When two zoology students go missing on a ski trip in the Japanese Alps, their classmates and professor launch an expedition to the area on the evidence that an unknown animal was involved in the disappearances. The expedition discovers the existence of two Abominable Snowman-type creatures, an adult and child of the same species, similarly the last of their kind. They also discover an unknown village whose deformed, backwards residents surely couldn’t be based on harmful stereotypes of the Burakumin caste in Japan, you guys. An exotic animal dealer and his goons are also hunting the creature, with tragedy sure to ensue… Monster Appearances: Adult Snowman, Junior Sno...

Other Shores is a sub-series focusing on Godzilla’s appearances in non-film media. Shigeru Kayama was a prolific genre writer at the height of his career when he was tasked with developing Tanaka Tomoyuki’s pitch for Gojira into a full story outline. He would do the same for its first sequel. More to the point, he would adapt both finished films into novellas that were published in 1955, long before home video made it easy to revisit the films themselves. These novellas have remained in print in Japan ever since, as part of Kayama’s enormous body of work that remains popular in the country to this day. However, In the english-speaking world, these novellas were only made available for the first time in October 2023, via translations by Jeffrey Angles for University of Minnesota Press. Therefore, We Call It Godzilla is proud to be one of the first series retrospectives in the west to feature this important part of Godzilla’s media history: the first two films, filtered through the lens...

  Info Also Known As: Godzilla’s Counterattack (Original Japanese translation); Gigantis: The Fire Monster (U.S. cut); [Just] The Fire Monster (Argentina and Brazil); The Volcano Monsters (Canceled U.S. re-edit) Director: Oda Motoyoshi. Screenplay: Murata Takeo and Hidaka Shigeaki, from a story by Shigeru Kayama. Director of Special Effects: Tsuburaya Eiji. Composer: Sato Masaru. Runtime: 82 minutes (original), 78 minutes ( Gigantis ) Release Date: April 24, 1955 What’s It About? A pilot in a Japanese fishing company is forced to make an emergency crash-landing on a rocky island. When his friend and coworker flies in to rescue him, they discover a pair of giant monsters in a fight to the death: one Godzilla, the other a mutant and inexplicably carnivorous Ankylosaurus named Anguirus. The monsters’ battle takes them into the sea and on a course toward the city of Osaka. Without Dr. Serizawa and the Oxygen Destroyer, does Japan have any hope of protecting itself from not one but two...