King Kong vs. Godzilla (1963) Saturday Monster Movies

Something that Hollywood will repeatedly do with the Toho horror movies going forward, but perhaps never on this scale, is to totally remake the movie for American audiences. In this case, the result is only 5 minutes shorter, but about half an hour of new footage is cut in. Much of the character development and humor is taken out and replaced with a news anchor story, that makes much of the film (particularly the beginning) a much drier, more documentary-like story. It also adds in a nuclear weapons threat that is not original. (And in a way, a betrayal to the original themes of the Godzilla movies.) Also, inexplicably, they remove the original score and replace it with music from the Universal monster movies, notably, “The Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Apparently, American audiences needed to be told that the movie was horrific, and they could only recognize a limited auditory palate!

This is the last time I will consider the Japanese and American versions of these films separately, but they are quite different in this case. (Much as “Gojira” and “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” were.) Suffice it to say, either audiences in the 1960s were not sophisticated enough to enjoy Japanese cinema, or the executives in Hollywood thought so. (Based on today’s audiences, they may have been right, to be fair.)