Pride is one of the most unusual kaiju on record. There’s a few things that make it stand out. While it can fire a boiling stream of ink, Pride has something not seen on any other kaiju. All kaiju have thick, rough skin dense with melanin that’s covered cracks where skin would normally fold, through which exposed flesh can be seen. Pride however, has soft spots on some parts of its body where it can change the texture of its skin, often opting for sharp spikes.
What makes Pride dangerous enough to be ranked among the seven deadly sins, is its intelligence. Pride is the smartest kaiju on record, and has been seen crafting tools to help it fight off other kaiju or dig into underground cities. Pride has even constructed a makeshift “throne” out of buildings in the center of its territory. Pride has even communicated with humans via radio frequencies. From the handful of interactions humanity has had with Pride, it can be inferred that it has something of a superiority complex, as it has stated numerous times that all life is “below” it. When attacking underground cities, Pride has even gone out of its way to tell the populace that those who worship it as god will be spared.
It’s quite obvious that Pride gets most of its DNA from cephalopods, but there is some evidence suggesting that it might have acquired DNA from the mass produced “Cephalids” that were created by the Guardian known as Khelken.
To recap my problem with SpaceGodzilla for those who don’t remember since I’m pretty sure I haven’t talked about the character in ages:
My biggest problem with SpaceGodzilla is that there really isn’t anything he brings to the table that another monster doesn’t do better. Evil doppelganger of Godzilla? MechaGodzilla does it better. Strange Godzilla hybrid monster? Biollante and Orga do it better. Space Monster? Gigan, Ghidorah, and Hedorah have him beat. Godzilla’s worst enemy? Oh man, he is outclassed six ways to sunday there – Ghidorah, MechaGodzilla, Hedorah, and Destoroyah all utterly kick his ass in the arch enemy department.
SpaceGodzilla just doesn’t have a niche to fill. It even extends to his design – he’s just a blue Godzilla with crystals, a funky horn, and some sort of glandular disorder. He feels less like a solid concept and more like a late season Ultraman monster that was hastily cobbled from parts of better monster suits at the last second – except he wasn’t! There are actually dozens of concept sketches for weirder SpaceGodzillas that didn’t make it into the film. They chose to make him this way, and I don’t know why.
I don’t know what the thought process was behind this character, and I seriously wonder if the movie creators did.
To fix SpaceGodzilla, we need to give him a niche that no other monster fills in the narrative. And I think there is an obvious element he could bring to the table that no one else can fill. Namely, he’s the only villain who’s also another Godzilla.
Godzilla’s isolation is a key aspect of his character – he’s both the last and first of his kind, mutated beyond recognition and trapped in a world that has long since left the prehistoric monsters of his era behind. It’s one of the reasons Baby Godzilla is so important for Godzilla’s slow transition from villain to hero – by finding another of his kind (albeit one that often doesn’t share his level of mutation), Godzilla is finally allowed to heal from the wounds dealt to him at the beginning of his story.
SpaceGodzilla could represent the opposite side of that coin – a foil for what Baby Godzilla represents. Maybe that was even the original intention, given that SpaceGodzilla abducts Little Godzilla in his debut film (although that could also have just been done to give Godzilla a reason to pursue the big blue bastard).
Have SpaceGodzilla arrive fairly late in the narrative – after Godzilla has adopted Baby Godzilla, perhaps even after the formation of Monster Island. Play up the idea that these are two adults of a social species – that Godzilla is a creature that has been driven by desperate loneliness and actually wants a friendly connection with this new, differently mutated godzillasaurus that has appeared. Have them strike up a friendship, or even a romance.
And then the kid gets in the way.
In this way SpaceGodzilla could actually play a foil to Godzilla even better than King Ghidorah, MechaGodzilla, and Destoroyah can. Godzilla in this story has grown significantly from the vengeful ravager of civilization he began as, but SpaceGodzilla is still stuck in that vicious, aggressive mindset. Baby Godzilla, meanwhile, keeps Godzilla rooted in his current heroic mindset. There’d be a draw to side with both of them – they’re both his kind, after all.
SpaceGodzilla, meanwhile, would quickly catch on that the kid is making Godzilla soft. And if they have a sort of romance, well… there’s a pretty disturbing trend in the animal kingdom of a suitor offing the children of the creature it wants to mate with.
Or, in short: if Godzilla were Batman, then one should make SpaceGodzilla his Catwoman – a character that he’s attracted to (platonically or romantically) but who also shows a dark reflection of who he is and could be.
A shepherd finds his lost sheep in an unfortunate predicament. Another watercolor illustration from my sketchbook.
I remember liking Baragon a lot when I was a kid. In Frankenstein Conquers the World, he was the culprit in consuming livestock in the countryside, so I guess that is where the idea came from.
Unlike Ganimes and Kameobas, Gezora is hinted by legends of the locals to have already been gigantic before coming under the control of the space amoeba. Its cold powers do seem more on the supernatural end than the purely natural powers the other two kaiju, Perhaps from occupying Gezora the space parasite learned how to turn its hosts into kaiju, allowing it to create Kameobas and Ganimes.
On an unrelated note: I found this little tidbit while looking for a picture
Assistant special effects director Teruyoshi Nakano has openly expressed dissatisfaction with the names of Gezora, Ganimes, and Kamoebas, even rather jokingly suggesting “Gesoi” as a better name for Gezora, saying at a panel at G-Fest in 2004, “We made a mistake in naming those kaiju! One reason that [Space Amoeba] was not successful was because no one liked their names. Since Gezora is a big squid, it would have been better to call him Gesoi because that’s what people say when they order sushi! But then everyone would think you’re ordering sushi! So the names of the kaiju were bad” and “The names of these kaiju in Japanese are lousy. The names don’t fit, and the kaiju just aren’t scary. Maybe if we named the three differently, the movie would have been better. It was the names that killed the three kaiju.”
This was apparently Toho’s first color tv show, and its classified as a drama.
(I suspect only one episode had anything to do with a studio sadly)
Interesting how Gaira is fighting the Ultraman monster Kiyla. I suppose for once Toho was allowed to borrow a suit from them, rather than the other way around
Monsters and Stuff 