In a World Without Godzilla: And Other Theories

Let's say that there was a world where Gojira wasn't made. What would be the farthest reaching pop culture implications? My argument is that Sailor Moon, and by extension Madoka Magica would not exist. There would of course be other ramifications, and I'd love to hear them, or your own alternate universes where X work doesn't exist.

Gojira may have been the first Kaiju film to be called such, but it wasn't the progenitor of the genre. In fact it was heavily inspired by The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which in turn was inspired by previous large monsters on film. Even King Kong predates Gojira. So why is Gojira so important to my theory? Beside being the first popular Japanese Kaiju film, it was the uniqueness of the way Gojira was portrayed.

See, pre-Gojira Kaiju were always stop motion animated. With Gojira a combination of budget and time constraints made stop motion animation an impossible feat. So the team invented suitmation a.k.a. People in Rubber Suits. This is the crux my argument relies on.

If People in Rubber Suits combined with Miniature Effects hadn't been invented with this particular crew then Eiji Tsuburaya wouldn't have gone on to create Ultra Q. That's not a big loss at first glance, Ultra Q isn't really groundbreaking, but it laid the foundation for its sequel series Ultraman.

Ultraman is the Ur-Example of the Henshin Hero trope. It's from Ultraman that Kamen Rider and Super Sentai^* sentai notice me are born, and it's from these shows that the Senshi genre, esp. Bishounen Senshi Saint Seiya.

While the foundations of the Magical Girl genre existed before Sailor Moon and it's conceivable that the concept of beautiful warrior girls would have found a foothold in Naoko Takeuchi's mind without Super Sentai paving the way, my theory rests on Sailor Moon being birthed from the mixture of the existing foundations of the Magical Girl genre and Super Sentai.

Quantum leap ^note that's a tiny leap over the gap and we see that without Sailor Moon creating the Magical Girl Warrior subgenre of Magical Girl then Madoka would have had no genre to deconstruct.

Q.E.D.

edited 3rd Nov '15 9:01:32 AM by ultramadscientist

we'd have no godzilla movies

And that's terrible.

I dunno though. Like the OP said, Godzilla's foundation came from earlier films combined with the Japanese experience with nuclear weapons. Even if Godzilla himself wasn't created, the ingredients were all there still. It's pretty possible that some giant monster or another would have made it to the big screen regardless.

I have a problem with your argument that "X invented Y, so without X, Y would not exist today". Who's to say that none of these tropes and genres could have appeared through some other way ?

Withou Godzilla, we wouldn't have mothra or gamera. Didn't Godzilla also play a big role in helping export Japanese culture ? Plus without the monsters attacking the city genre , we wouldn't have stuff like Evangelion

I thought the Angels in Neon Genesis Evangelion were more Lovecraftian.

The thing is, there is the "monsters attacking the city genre", even without Godzilla. King Kong is older than Godzilla, as is The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. There were plenty of Kaiju-like movies before Godzilla, but it's Godzilla using suitmation, rather than stop-motion that's important. I would say Gamera probably wouldn't exist, but I'm unsure when it comes to Mothra.

Also, I'm sure Godzilla had a hand in spreading Japanese culture, especially post-war, but there was a movement of Japanism around the turn of the century before that. You can even see a print of a girl kimono in the back of one of Van Gogh's self portraits.

But as you said, they used rubber suits to save on time and money. The vast majority of Japanese productions before and since have been on smaller budgets that those of contemporary Hollywood films. So they would hit on rubber suits at one point or another, and some of those works would become influential in popular culture. Super Sentai was obviously following the tradition from Gojira but their visuals are mostly the product of restrictions upon them. Maybe it would have hit it so big, but the genre was around for decades, Sailor Moon could have still picked it up and again, at some point some of this would have hit it big and become influential.

Also, there's a reason why the genre started by Gojira became so prolific. Audiences at the time were anxious about nuclear weapons and these films put their fears up on screen.

We would be deprived of both his roar and his theme song, taking away the most important elements of Samoa Joe and Montel Vontavious Porter's entrance music.