Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of iHeartRadio.
Guess What, Mango?
What's that? Will?
So?
I know, these days it feels like we can't start any conversation without talking about the quarantine and without coronavirus unfortunately. But one of the things I've noticed right now in terms of how people cope with the quarantine, I find this interesting is that they watch a bunch of virus based content like this is a real thing. Like tons of people have been watching that new pandemic documentary series on Netflix, and Contagion is one of the most watched
streaming titles right now. Have you noticed this?
Yeah, I mean, it is such a strange phenomena to me, because that is not my idea of escapism. I turn to things like the Muppets movie in times like this, And I know you're.
Not lying about that that's actually true, you know.
I guess if our stuff does make sense, if you're looking for a way to remind yourself that it could be worse.
Yeah, And I guess I get that feeling like it's good to keep our discomfort in perspective. But if you're like me, viral disaster movies probably hit a little too close to home. But thankfully I have come up with a far less upsetting option, and that's to just watch a giant monster movie instead. Like, throw one of those on and you'll be thinking, Sure, things are tough right now, but at least there's no Godzilla, you know.
So does that really give you any peace of mind?
Oh, it totally does. I mean, it's probably the last genuine source of comfort that we have left Mango. I mean, I think you'll agree a Godzilla attack definitely would not improve our situation. And that's not just because of the smashed up buildings and rolling blackouts either, Like there would be way worse things to consider if Godzilla came to town.
Well, I mean, smashed up buildings sound pretty awful, and so to blackouts.
But what else are you thinking about?
All right?
Well, think about it this way. At the end of the day, Godzilla is a giant animal, right Like. He started out at around a hundred and sixty feet tall during his first appearance. This was back in nineteen fifty four, and over the years he's been scaled up in order to keep pace with the increasing size of skyscrapers. So nowaday, the modern Godzilla is three times as tall as the original almost five hundred feet. So, not to be gross, but can you imagine how much waste an animal that
large would produce? Can you imagine this, Mago, stop and think about it just for a second. So forget being crushed like the cities would be flooded, and get this. I looked this up. There's actually some science behind this. So, according to a marine researcher named doctor Craig McLain, an animal of Godzilla's height and weight would produce a truly monstrous amount of europe nearly thirteen million gallons per day. That's like a quarter of an oil tanker raining down
for every day of Godzilla's rampage. So this is what I now have to think about Mango and my quarantine.
That is so gross, And you're right, things would be way worse with Godzillar around.
It is true. I'm glad you finally understand this, so it really puts things in perspective. And that's just the first of nine godzill effects we've got on tap today. So let's dive in. Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend mangesh Hot ticketter and on the other side of our Zoom conference wiping his mouth and punching at the air for some reason. That's our good friend and producer Lowell. So I'm not sure what
all the wiping and punching is about. But luckily Gave Lucier is back with us today. He's our resident Kaiju or strange creature fan, so hopefully he can shed some light on this. And what is little doing over there? Does it have anything to do with Godzilla?
Uh?
Yeah, so that's actually a deep cut Godzilla reference, so nicely done.
Loll.
There was a point in Godzilla's career. I think he was about eleven movies deep at the time. It's kind of hard to keep track. And anyway, at some point, the powers that be decided that Godzilla should have his own signature move, and I guess the idea was that, you know, he would taunt his opponents by making this like insulting menacing gesture and for whatever reason, wiping his mouth with his right hand and then jabbing at the air. That's what they came up with.
It's great for video games, I feel like, but why do that? Like, is there some cultural significance for it.
Not that I know of.
Like my guess is the actor in the suit was just like pretty limited mobility wise, so like a mouth wipe and a punch was the best he could must sure either way, I mean the move. They only like stuck with this for a couple movies and then they phased it out, So I mean it did leave an impression though obviously at least Lowell and there are some fans out there they refer to the movies where Godzilla does this as the wipe your mouth and punch the air trilogy.
You know, it's fun as we do these things, learning things about each of us that I never knew you and Lowell were such big Godzilla fans. That's pretty awesome.
Yeah, yeah, I mean this is kind of a new thing for me. Like I had seen a few of the old ones, you know, when I was a kid, and I thought they were cheesy and you know, good time or whatever, but I hadn't watched one in a
really long time. And then last year, I guess it was actually Godzilla's the sixty fifth anniversary of Godzilla, so he's technically a senior citizen now, and a bunch of movies were coming back to little independent theaters around here, so Aaron and I got a chance to watch a few on the big screen, and we just kind of fell in love with how silly and over the top
they were. I mean, it's weird to say, but Godzilla is an oddly endearing character if you really watch some of his movies, Like, I mean, he wipes his mouth, he punches air, herec stuff, he dances like what more do you want?
You know?
But I'm curious maybe that's just me. What about you guys? Any fond memories of the King of the Monsters.
It's funny whenever like monster movies would come on on like Saturday mornings.
That was our que to go outside. Like so that's what I think of them, Like mm hmmm. Will.
I don't know if you remember this, but we went to toy fair like years and years ago, and the company that we were doing a board game with was also doing King Kong.
And this was like two thousands and so big deal.
They had the King Kong board game behind this like curtain and there were like guards there because they didn't want to show anyone what the monster looked like. And I thought, you know, I'm a part of this company, I can like go back and sneak in, and they would not.
Let me in. And I remember I wasn't even that insulted.
I just remember thinking it was like so stupid, because how different can King Kong look like you?
In the end, you basically know what he looks like.
Well, I don't know, Mega. I think maybe in the end they knew like what a blabbermouth you were, and they just needed to keep you out of there. The rest of them, they would sort of whisper to us like do you want to come see it? But then when you showed up, they were like, guys, guys, we can't come back here.
Wait.
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find the link in the podcast episode description. So if you want to not get hacked, watch lots of sports and do it on multiple devices, nordvpns for you. As I mentioned, I do not love monster movies, but I do have a fondness for facts about monster movies. So this is my first one, and it's about the guy who helped bring Godzilla to life in the early movies.
So obviously today's Godzilla is computer generated, but that wasn't always the case, and while multiple actors have donned the scaley suit over the years, the first to do so was this Jepanese actor named Haruo Nakajima, and he starred in the original nineteen fifty four movie, and then he reprised the role for I Think Like eleven sequels. But when Nakajima first landed the role, he didn't know what
the character would look like. All he knew was that would be some kind of ancient sea creature that would be awakened by this underwater test of the hydrogen bond, So, you know, with nothing else to go on, he actually prepared by spending ten days at the zoo. So he watched elephants, he watched gorillas, but strangely, it was the bears.
That really captivated him.
And this is what he told a reporter at the time quote, I used to take two lunches with me. One was mine and the rest I throw to the bears. When one of them snatched it up and shoveled it into his mouth. I'd wash the way he did it. But no amount of research could have prepared Nakajima for
the reality of being stuffed inside a lizard suit. Like the original costume was notoriously difficult to move, kind of like what Gabe said, because it was made from ready mixed concrete and reportedly it weighed about two hundred and twenty.
Pounds at the time. Why would they use concrete instead of something like rubber.
So the later suits were rubber, but it was hard to come by in the early postwar years in Japan, so they went concrete for the first one, and that made the suit super super heavy, but it also made it suffocatingly hot. In fact, Nakajima said he sweated so much in the suit that after a day of filming, he would wring out the perspiration from his undershirt and it would actually fill half a bucket.
Can't believe he did that. He kept that up for twelve movies, Like that is some serious dedication.
Yeah, I mean, I guess he was a trooper and he's actually kind of a pioneer when you think about it. What he did generated this whole new type of acting. All these actors were wear giant monster costumes and reek havoc model cities. You think, like there are hundreds of movies and TV shows all made using that process, and Nakajima was actually at the forefront of all of that.
All right, well, here's a bit of film history that I like. You mentioned that Nakajima wasn't sure what kind of creature Godzilla was going to be initially, but he wasn't the only one. The producers of the film also weren't sure what look they wanted for their ancient sea creature. And originally he was just going to be a giant mutant octopus, which you know, would have put Nakajima out of a job since they could have just set a
real octopus loose on their miniature cities. But then the creative team decided to take an even weirder approach, and it was the second approach that actually gave us the character's Japanese name. And you know, remember Godzilla, that's just something the marketers came up with for the American release. In Japan, he's actually known as Gojira, and that's because at one point during development, the plan was for the monster to be a cross between a gorilla and a whale.
And you want to know that idea. It sounds weird, right, but I mean, even though that idea was eventually scrapped in favor of a more dinosaur like design. They did keep the original name, which is actually a portmanteau of the Japanese words for gorilla and whale.
I've always wondered what kind of creature Godzilla is supposed to be. I mean, he's obviously some kind of reptile or maybe amphibian, I guess, and not a gorilla whale, that's for sure, But what kind of reptile is he?
Like?
Is he an unknown species of dinosaur that secretly survived underwater or is he just a regular lizard that got you know, irradiated and grew into a giant or something else. Like these are again in addition to the things I was thinking about before with like Godzilla waste, I have to think about this.
Did you figure it out?
Well?
It turns out it kind of depends on who you ask, which maybe isn't a huge surprise. So the crew definitely looked at dinosaur illustrations for inspiration when designing the costume. But according to a scientist character in the original movie, Godzilla is kind of this transitional creature. So the quote was somewhere between the marine reptiles and the evolving terrestrial animal,
so technically not a dinosaur, but a close descendant of them. However, the waters get a little bit muddier when you go a little bit deeper on this. So, for instance, Godzilla's creator, a producer named Tamayuki Tanaka, has gone on record saying that his original intention for Godzilla to be a quote, dinosaur sleeping in the Southern Hemisphere that had been awakened and transformed into a giant by the atomic bomb. So,
I bet you didn't see that one coming. And that offscreen take on the origin was actually made explicit during the nineteen nineties run of Godzilla movies. So in one of these characters travel back in time, they go back to nineteen forty four, and there they encounter this dinosaur living alone on an island. Now it is the same dinosaur that eventually mutates into Godzilla after being hit with an h bomb.
But did you actually figure out what kind of dinosaur it's supposed to be?
No, I have no idea. I guess I just got tired of looking at much. More So, the dinosaur in the movie was completely fictional, and it kind of looked like this, more like a dumpy Tyrannosaurus I guess, but it was referred to in the movie as a Godzilla saurus.
Sure, I mean that makes sense.
It's super creative. But all right, but here's the thing. Five years later, this was in nineteen ninety seven, a paleontologist named Ken Carpenter discovered a new genus of bipedal dinosaur, and he lovingly dubbed it Gojirosaurus. So weirdly, Godzilla both is and isn't a real dinosaur.
Oh, that's actually pretty great, dolus.
It makes so much sense that, like a paleontologist would be a Godzilla fanatic. Right, totally, that makes a lot of sense. Here's one I definitely didn't know before this week. Did you know that Godzilla is the longest running movie franchise of all time? This year marks the sixty sixth anniversary of his first appearance and the release of his thirty six theatrical film. That puts Godzilla eight years and eleven movies ahead of his closest competition, which is the
James Bond series. What's really interesting, though, is how the series has managed to stay relevant for that long. If you look at the different periods of Godzilla movies, the tone of the series, and even the characters roll in it are always changing to kind of better align with the mood and what the audience of the times wanted. The first movie isn't actually some like goofy, campy monster movie.
It has action, and it does have cheesy effects, but it's actually the somber and really bleak movie, and it traced the disaster super seriously, and that isn't by accident. Like the director described Godzilla as the embodiment of the quote invisible fear that a nuclear bomb could be dropped at any moment, and that really resonated with audiences at the time, and many Japanese moviegoers left the theater and
tears after seeing the movie. It wasn't until the nineteen sixties, when Japan's post war economy was rebounding, that Godzilla started to loosen up a little, and for a while he was portrayed as kind of a cranky public menace like this bully you had to be chased off by the army or by one of the more good natured monsters like Mathra, and then he gradually became a more heroic figure who would fight off other giant monsters on behalf of Tokyo, even if he still did trash most of
the city in the process.
You know, for the record, I feel like that counts as a fact and a half there because there was really a lot in there. But it is wild how much mileage they've gotten out of that concept that many movies. It's incredible.
Yeah, it kind of makes me wish they would mix things up even more. Like Mego mentioned James Bond, Like, let's throw him in there. God deliversus double seventhly.
I mean, I feel like that fight would be over very very quickly. But we've got four facts left to go, so let's take a quick break and then we'll get back to it.
Welcome back to part time. Is now we're talking about Godzilla, who is the atomic fire breathing lizard with a heart of gold. All right, Gabe, you're up again. You like that I wrote that down. I was just ready ready to come with it. All right, Gabe, So what's your next fact?
Mango clute us in on just how long the Godzilla series has been around. So now I want to talk about how ahead of its time it's been. So take the Marvel movies for instance, they kicked off this big universe building trend in Hollywood, where you know, the goal is to crank out as many interconnected movies as possible.
And the way that plays out for superhero movies is you do a bunch of standalone movies, a Thor movie, an iron Man movie, et cetera, and then you bring all those characters together for a big team up movie like The Avengers. It's incredibly lucrative formula and one that some studios are falling over themselves to emulate. But here's the thing. They may think they're copying from Marvel, but
they're really cribbing from Godzilla. And that's because way back in the earth early nineteen sixties, the Toho Studio was working off the same two stage strategy. Alongside Godzilla movies, they were also creating other standalone kaiju movies like Rodin, who was basically a giant pterodactyl that lived in a volcano, and Mathra, who was kind of the benevolent protector of this secret island in the Pacific.
So, I know, Mathra and Rodin eventually fought against Godzilla, but you're saying they did an Avenger style team up movie too.
Yeah, exactly, Like after debuting in their own movies. The Trio Big grudgingly joined forces in nineteen sixty four, and of course that was to protect the Earth from the threat of King Godora, who I guess you could call like the Thanos of the Godzilla universe. I don't know. He's like a flying gold, three headed dragon from outer space, so there aren't a ton of parallels. But he's definitely Godzilla's arch nemesis.
That's the point.
And the monsters, you know, they've had the team up a few times over the years to fight him off.
That is a good fact. I feel like you guys really stepped it up with the facts today to come up with some good ones. But all right, well, I feel like I had a couple here in mind. But I'm going to take us behind the scenes again for my third fact, because I want to talk about Godzilla's iconic roar and more specifically, how the sound of that roar was made. And if you've never heard the roar I'm talking about, we're going to play a few of them here for you. Now, Loy'll stop stop putting your
fist up in the air and play I'm here. It's a strange sound, right, but where did it come? From. So in the nineteen fifty four original, the sound effects team tried to create Godzilla's roar using animal sounds, but none of them seemed to be like the right match. They were all too familiar and not otherworldly enough for or the monster that people were seeing on the screen. So then the film's composer, Akira Ifukube, had this great idea, why not use a musical instrument to make the roar instead?
So this is what he did. He donned a pair of leather gloves, coated them in pine tar resin, and then he dragged the sticky gloves up and down the e string of a broken down double bass. Isn't this so weird when they come up with these ideas to do stuff like this, It's like, you know what I think I'm gonna do with these gloves. But anyway, this sound he got from that became the sound of Godzilla and it's been the basis of his roar ever since.
That is incredible.
So we've talked about how prolific Godzilla has been at the multiplex, but he's also had his share of off screen successes. For example, he's one of a handful of fictional characters to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in nineteen ninety six, Godzilla became the first radioactive lizard monster to win the MTV Lifetime Achievement Award.
He was actually presented to him by Sir Patrick Stewart, who offered this touching tribute, saying, quote, We've all heard about his temper and about the people he stepped on on his way to the top, But in this world of stars and superstars, it would be no exaggeration to say that he is the biggest, which is I think very sweet. And he is so big, in fact, that his fame is even extended to TV roles which have
been equally strange. For instance, there was a time in nineteen eighty five where Godzilla appeared in a string of commercials for Doctor Pepper, of all things. In the ads, he's just doing his thing, wrecking building, stopping on cars, and then he comes across a giant can of Doctor Pepper, just sitting where a water tower should be, and he takes a big sip, and the ad ends with him burping all satisfied.
Am I alone in thinking like that ad was beneath the dignity of Godzilla?
Yeah?
I think you probably are game right fair.
Well, if you think that sounds bad, definitely don't watch the nineteen ninety two Nike commercial where Godzilla faces off with Charles Barkley. It quit Barkley dunking on Godzilla and then consoling him by offering him a spot on the Lakers team, which you know, the Lakers were having a very rough season that year.
Yeah, that's rough, all right.
Well, to close this out, I thought I'd cover what we all really want to know, which is how the military would actually tackle the thread of Godzilla in real life. This is important stuff, right, So to figure this out, a few years ago, Air and Space Magazine reached out to a US Air Force base in Okinawa, Japan, this is real And the response they got from the personnel there was a little surprising. They basically said, yeah, we
could take him, no problem. When they were pressed about, you know, how many aircraft they would need to mount a cohesive defense, the master sergeant just said seven, which seems optimistic at best.
I love how you take that as such a serious answer. Me, do you think maybe he wasn't taking the question very seriously, you know, with Godzilla not being real and all.
Yeah, that did occur to me.
To be fair, though, the sergeant did acknowledge that Godzilla would likely be expecting an aerial attack, which shows that he was at least putting some thought into what kind of strategy, you know, might work in this situation. Right, But again, the answer he came up with was to catch Godzilla off guard using quote four thousand segues and slingshots. So yeah, he might not have been taken it too seriously.
I mean, you do hate to see that kind of hubris, you know. I feel like he really should have taken that more seriously. But anyway, well, yeah, but on the bright side, it looks like Japan at least is taking the threat seriously. Back in two thousand and seven, the country's defense minister told reporters that even though Japan has a pacifist constitution, the military wouldn't have to wait for
Godzilla to attack first. According to him, quote, if Godzilla attacked, that would be a natural disaster relief operation, making military action legally permissible.
Yeah.
So I'm glad they have that all worked out just in case. It seems like they've really thought it through, and I feel like you really sued some nerves with that last fact, plus you explained what the heck Loel was doing at the top of the show. So I feel like you should take today's trophy.
I feel like we even stumped it flat for you there, Gabe, So just like God's Zilla, what it feels appropriate?
All right, Well it might be because I haven't left the house in four days, but that means a lot, guys, so thank you.
All right, Well that's going to do it for today's Part Time Genius for myself, Mango, Gabe, and Lowell. Thank you so much for listening. Stay safe, wash your hands. We'll be back soon with another episode. Part Time Genius is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the IHEARTRADI you out Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Mm hmm.