Monster Zero x SciFi Japan - Archive Only

the closest American movies have ever come to the japanese monster movies are the films King Kong and the Universal monster movies.

the difference is personality...

Japanese movie monsters have personality, American movie monsters are soulless

But king_ghidorah, there should be some matters that have to be taken into account.

We are after all dealing with two very different film industries. Toho could get get A-list stars like Takashi Shimura, Akira Takarada and even Toshiro Mifune (certainly in The Three Treasures) to appear in a kaiju. By comparison, Ray couldn’t do that. If you’ve read Ray's book, you’ll know that William Holden was a consideration for Sinbad, since he was under contract at Columbia Pictures. But Ray and Charles Schneer simply could not afford him AND it was highly doubtful Holden would ever appear in a monster film (him or for that matter, any other big name star at that time). In the end, Ray did not have the A-listers in his movies he wanted, but the ones he did get for the most part, did a fairly good job.

Believe me, I don’t have a problem with preferences, but compare and contrasts shouldn’t really apply here if one takes certain factors into consideration.

Well, as I said before, I don’t have any problems with one preferring a Godzilla movie over a Harryhausen film. Everyone has a right to their own choosing. But then we always have this tendency to compare these movies despite differences in film and cultural backgrounds. Heck, we’ve gotten upset at Western film critics for doing the same thing regarding kaiju. Anyone remember the Roger Ebert review on Gojira? Without taking into affect the East-West differences, he was wrongly making the comparisons, especially on how he thought the special effects weren’t so special and thought that they were better in the original King Kong. I recall some G-fans wanted Ebert’s head on silver platter for saying such things! In the end, Ebert didn’t have to like Gojira. It was his prerogative. But some of his arguments against the film were indeed misguided.