Kaiju

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"RUN! It's Godzilla!"

– What you should be screaming when you meet the fuckin' King of the Monsters.

Kaijus. Giant fucking monsters. Do you really need more to that description? Kaijus are awesome. There is simply no debate. Your mecha needs an enemy to fight? Bring in the fire breathing lizards. You need some eerie menace that looms over the jungle? Bring in le giant monke. You need dragons, but you want 'em bigger? Bring in the fuckin' giant dragons!

Erm.

In all seriousness, Kaijus are defined as giant monsters the size of buildings or even bigger. Since the term itself betrays it was popularized by Japan, some may deem liking them a small subset of being weeaboo. Not that /tg/ cares.

/tg/ relevance

Before they suddenly got a wider presence in the mainstream scene, Kaijus were pretty niche, and certainly amongst the nerdiest of shit. Some would prefer to watch wrestling and hear Vince McMahon scream the name of the new champion every month or so, some prefer to watch people in rubber suits pretending to be obese lizard charging lasers while throwing each other unto buildings. For the longest time, Kaiju films were a japanese exclusive and hardly accessible. Meaning that if you wanted to watch one of those flicks, you had to know where to look, but you also really had to be into it because a lot of those films were unapologetic sci-fi schlocks. People come in for the monsters, they stayed for the monsters.

Naturally, /tg/ being occupied by nerds, it's easy to assume a lot of them might be into kaiju shit. Usually speaking, Mecha-fans and Kaiju-fans tend to go hand in hand, sitting right there on the same spectrum of autism. That, or they fight for no particular reason on who's got the worse genre.

Also, there's probably a kaiju traditional game out there, even if, God forbid, it's just a Monopoly reskin. Not that it matters what that game is and how good said game is, since /tg/ could at any time get shit done.

Kaiju are also present within Pathfinder.

Japanese Kaijus

Creators of the genre, the Japanese are the most proud of their cinematic achievement that is the Kaiju genre. Because, believe it or not, but the creature literally originates from film, and not from Japanese folklore. It all started in 1954 with the very first Godzilla movie, and from then on, a full myriad of giant monster films popped up left and right. They turned out to be extremely popular with the public, teenagers and children. Hell, some even attended theaters to see a specific building being destroyed. Especially those associated with taxes and politics.

There are different eras of Kaiju films. Some might tell you that these are all based on what Toho was doing with Godzilla, but let's be honest; The Godzilla eras fit the entire japanese side of the genre well.

• Showa Era; The very first. Starting with the very serious and outright terrific Godzilla film. An heart-shattering anti-nuclear war film about the embodiment of mankind's folly to destroy itself made manifest rampaging Tokyo. Bear in mind that this was made in a time when the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki's bombin was still very, very vivid. The movie spokes volumes to the public of the time... And then Toho made sequels. Mountains of them. And they all dropped the serious and gritty tone of the first film. Yeah, the 60s and the 70s were wild times in Japan too. And every Kaiju movie turned out to be a massive wank fest. Godzilla goes to Space, Godzilla fights a mechanical clone of himself, Godzilla fights aliens and kicks their shit with his "friends"... And then kicks the ass of his friends! Godzilla fucks Barney the Dinosaur and spawns Minilla. And so on and so forth.
  • During that very same period, other Kaiju stars made debuts. And admitedly, it was the only period in which they really had a chance. Gamera is a famous contender and fellow rival of Godzilla, although the two never official met. Mothra, too, the giant butterfly thing that ended up becoming the good counterpart to Big G. Rodan, the reptile who had one film for himself and then nothing else but featurings with King Godzi. Few even had the privilege of starting franchises.
• Heisei Era ; Sometimes considered the best era. So one day, Toho was like "Man, we did a lot of shitty movies. So how about we crank the serious juice to never-seen-before levels and create an actual universe and continuity?". And they did just that. Starting with Godzilla 1985, the Heisei era redifined the Kaiju genre by doubling down on the special effects and catching up with the times. This time the monsters were actually monstrous and gave 0 shits about Humanity. Turned out that it worked for them, because having Godzilla being the friend and ally of humanity wasn't much of a good idea. All things considered. This time, Toho started a brand new cinematic universe where each film was a direct sequel to the previous one, or loosely connected to one another if they were spin-offs. This is where less new Kaijus were created and more ancient ones got a serious amount of polish. Some of the goofiest were event outright scrapped due to how ridiculous they looked; Hedorah, the literally TRESH monster, Gigan, the chicken-raptor thing from outer-outer space, King Caesar, the guy who needed a fucking opera to be summoned, etc. All of them disappeared. But then you have new ones introduced as well; Motherfucking Biollante, the plant monster who could make Nurgle run for his life, SPESS GODZILLA, WHO IS JUST GODZILLA FROM SPESS, and none other than the Devil himself; Destroyah! Yeah, that's his actual name: DESU-TORO-YAH!. On the Godzilla side of things, they capped off the era by killing the original Big G and finally saying "The End". Tough shit, but Toho felt like they had to move on from the King of the Monsters for good before they started to fuck shit up again like they did during the Showa era.
• Millenium Era: So, the Americans really, really, really fucked up your baby monster bad. What do you do? Well, you enter the new Millenium by continuing the Heisei Saga by making Godzilla Junior the main protag! Around this time, Godzilla was pretty much the only one still in the Kaiju ring. Mothra had a few films here and there and Gamera definetely tried to catch up to his rival, but to not avail. Even Mothra struggled, so much so that she had to resort to go back to featuring in his films to even stay relevant. That isn't to say the Millenium films of the Godzi franchise were good. Well, they were to some extent, but let's say that the entire era is pure Skub material. Toho to shove as much shit as possible, even coming to the point of trying to capture the original spirit of the first film while still retaining the power-crazed style of the new movies with GMK. Arguably one of the best movies, but one that is hardly mentionned outside of discussions surrounding the Millenium era.
• Shin Era: So the Americans really, really, really, really fucking suck at getting Godzilla right, so you get the guy from Neon Genesis Evangelion to set things right. So far, only a few films came out. And there's only one major feature. Hard to tell now if Kaijus are going to get back into a popular fenzy again. Only time will tell. What's for sure though is that now Horror and social commentary are back on the menu, and it's gonna get downright eldritch from now on.

So, what about other kaiju? Well, most of them got their chance to shine in the Showa era, and frankly almost none of them really had the chops to pull it off. The most well known are Mothra, Gamera and Rodan; of those three, Mothra and Gamera got the best deal, whilst Rodan at least managed to get his own movie and then get pulled into the Godzillaverse as a pretty important 2nd-tier monster. There were all kinds of individual kaiju movies in the Showa era, such as Varan (about a giant flying lizard that lives in a lake), Dogora (a carbon-eating alien jellyfish... this one is exceptionally bad, because the directors really wanted to do a goofy comedy-crime flick and just threw Dogora in as a background element), two Frankenstein Kaiju films, and Yog (a bodiless alien possesses sea animals and mutates them into kaiju), but they never made the real impact.

Of the Toho monsters, only Mothra really took off besides Godzilla, getting his own miniseries where she and her son got shonen-esque transformations and fought to protect the world from various kaiju threats, such as the most powerful incarnation ever seen of Toho kaiju arch-enemy Gidorah.

Then... there's Gamera. A giant, firebreathing, flying turtle monster. He started off strong as a rip-off of the original Godzilla flick, with one key difference: there was an annoying little Japanese kid in it that loved Gamera and didn't want him hurt. And for some reason, this obnoxious little shit gave Gamera's creators the idea to retool Gamera in his future films as a "friend to all children". Whilst the first sequel was actually pretty good, largely because it didn't have any of these annoying kid protagonists (sometimes nicknamed "Kennys" after the English dub's name for the original Gamera-brat) and was just a straight up rumble between Gamera and an ice-breathing, rainbow-laser-shooting chameleon monster (we shit you not: Gamera's kaiju are weird), the rest got worse and worse, with more and more emphasis on the stupid little kids. Luckily, after this iteration of the Gameraverse tanked, he got his own version of the Heisei era, which reimagined him as a much more badass character and gave him far darker, more terrible foes to face off against. And no more annoying little kid protagonists, too!

American Kaijus

Like Disney did with European folktales and mythologies from across the globe, Americans wanted a part of the Giant Monster cake, and we're gonna be blunt around here, they really did not do a good job. At all.

Which is a cruel irony, since technically America invented the giant monster movie genre. Kaiju as a concept stretch all the way back to the 1930s, when America created King Kong, the first ever kaiju. America also jumped on the "nuclear nasty" genre around the same time Japan did, releasing the actually quite awesome giant ant horror movie THEM! several months before Godzilla debuted on Japanese theatre screens as Gojira. Sadly, though America did its own share of giant monster movies throughout the 50s and 60s, most of them were basically exploitation films trying to clumsily ape THEM! without either the scriptwriter's talent or the budget, and the genre slowly died off around the 60s - ironically, perhaps in part due to the influx of (admittedly badly dubbed) Japanese kaiju movies.

But what really stained America's reputation was when they rented the license to Godzilla from Toho in the 90s and attempted to do a new spin on the king of the Japanese kaiju... unfortunately, they decided to go back to the kaiju genre's pre-Atomic roots, reinventing "Zilla" (as he is now derisively known) as more of an old-school Western-style giant beast; no nuclear breath, no regeneration, just sheer size, strength, speed and cunning, to the point he is ultimately brought down by sufficient firepower once he is immobilized. Now, if this hadn't been attached to the Godzilla title, it would have been a decent old-school giant monster movie...but since this was a Godzilla movie, and this creature bore no resemblance to the classic Japanese kaiju (hence the other nickname of Godzilla In Name Only, or GINO), it led to an enormous backlash from the Japanese kaiju fandom, to say nothing about Toho's reaction. The only time anyone from the land of the rising sun would ever see this mistake would be in 2004's Godzilla: Final Wars, where it appeared as a jobber that gets wrecked in one minute without even a mention.

The failure of the '98 Godzilla spelled the end of American Kaiju films for over a decade, save a few minor entries like Peter Jackson's King Kong remake from 2005 and the JJ Abrams produced found-footage film 'Cloverfield' from 2008. All this was to change with the one-two combo of 2013's Pacific Rim and Legendry's crack at Godzilla the year after.