Rodan Our rating: four LAVA® motion lamps. "Up from the depths, forty stories... Hey, waitaminute here!" After the success of Godzilla and Godzilla's Counterattack, Toho figured out that giant monsters could put bums in seats. Rather than continue exclusively on the Godzilla trail, they diversified, introducing a new monster named Rodan. Rodan was Toho's third giant monster movie, and the first one to be filmed in color. After some obligatory stock footage of nuclear explosions and some expository voice-overs for the benefit of stupid American audiences, the movie opens in the Japanese mining town of Kitamatsu. When the deepest shaft floods, trapping several miners, the mining company brings in Safety Inspector Shigeru, a.k.a. the Homer Simpson of Japan -- although, to be fair, Shigeru is much more earnest and sincere than Homer could ever be. After determining that the flooded shaft is filled with water, Shigeru finds something not usually found in mining shafts this side of My Bloody Valentine: a mutilated corpse. A murderer is suspected, and suspicion falls on Goro, who happens to be the brother of Shigeru's fiancee, Kiyo. "Is this the where the auditions for the part of Mothra are being held?" Soon it becomes obvious that no human agent was behind the death. The town comes under attack by huge caterpillar-looking things called the Meganuron. The authorities immediately move a machine gun into the mine to take care of the monsters, but after a freak earthquake, Shigeru is separated from the rest of the group. Some time later Shigeru is found alive in the mine, but he has totally lost his memory. Meanwhile, a high speed UFO is terrorizing the Pacific Rim. The UFO travels too high and too fast for anyone to get a look at it, but it is destroying planes and ships all over the place. An experience with some hatching bird eggs restores Shigeru's memory and he relives his experience in the cave: he was present at the hatching of a giant pteranadon egg! We're supposed to believe that the trauma of witnessing Rodan's birth caused Shigeru's amnesia; more likely it was the shame at running like a coward at the sight of Big Bird. Ok, maybe baby Rodan isn't exactly like Big Bird, but he's pretty darn close. Sure, we might not hang around for long after the appearance of a thirty-foot tall Baby Huey impersonator, but we'd certainly retain the memory of the event. In desperation, Shigeru turns to the magic bird's nest fortune teller to predict Rodan's movements. All it would say was: "Ask again later." In any case, Shigeru's convenient memory loss allows Rodan to grow to full size and to start mysteriously terrorizing the Japanese islands without hindrance -- the screenwriters must have clapped themselves on the back a few times for figuring out how to keep Rodan's presence a secret and place someone at the scene of the hatching. By the time anyone knows exactly what they're up against, Rodan is a big bruiser with a 500-foot wingspan and -- ulp! -- there are two of them! It is soon determined that the Rodans are hanging around Mount Toya ("My name is Mount Toya, you killed my father, prepare to die!"), so the Japanese military, which apparently employs not a single person who did the childhood experiment that involves a hornet's nest and a stick, decides to bomb the giant monsters with some light artillery. As one might expect, the two monsters fly out of the mountain, mad as hell. They head to the city of Saseba (Fukaoka in the original Japanese version) for some light afternoon stomping. When the scientists had failed, and the military could go no further, Japan's Special Defense Force called in their attorneys. Rodan succeeds admirably on the level of giant monster entertainment. (In fact, if giant monsters aren't your thing, you should probably scale the rating down one lamp.) The special effects are top rate for the time, effectively combining life-sized props with scaled miniatures. It turns out that those little models look great in color! The special effects are so good that they would show up as standard stock footage in Godzilla movie of years to come. We really hope that the one soldier guy we see try to hold onto a tree in the face of Rodan's wind assault got residuals, because he showed up in so many films! Rodan isn't a particularly deep movie, with little of the subtext that Godzilla (1954) had, despite some stock footage of the nuclear bomb tests at the very beginning. In fact, we were a little confused at the preachy anti-nuclear sentiment when Rodan is not, in fact, radioactive at all. Sure, the atomic tests caused the earthquakes that set free the monsters, but the monsters might as easily have been uncovered by the town's strip-mining. Still, the overly long English introduction allows for lots of recycled minutes of mushroom clouds and other devastation, which must have been worth something in 1956. After drinking the entire beer factory, Rodan no longer relied on his wings to create hurricane force winds. Speaking of that stock footage, we're pretty sure that King Brothers, the company that dubbed the film for the US, added the big booms to the film. Because of the straightforward nature of Rodan, their changes are fairly minor, though we couldn't help but detect some editing shenanigans. The dubbing is pretty good (including the voice of Keye Luke as Shigeru), but some of the new dialogue, especially the monologue stuff given to Shigeru, is pretty arch. Here's some of what our hero shares with us as he watches Rodan die at the end of the film: "As Kiyo-chan turned to weep on my shoulder, I realized the Rodans were doomed ... Like moths in those rivers of fire they seemed almost to welcome the agonies of death... The last of their kind, masters of the air and earth, the strongest, swiftest creatures that ever breathed, now they sank against the earth like weary children. They were dying together. I wondered if I, a 20th century man, could ever hope to die as well." Is it just us, or does it sound like they somehow got T.S. Eliot to write this speech? Rodan would go on to become a regular monster in the Godzilla mythology, even being resurrected for the Heisei series of films. Perhaps more surprising, Toho recently announced that they're bring back the Meganuron to be Godzilla's opponent in Godzilla 2001. It proves that even a small role can lead to big roles later on -- 45 years later in this case. Review date: 5/12/00 This review is © copyright 2000 Chris Holland & Scott Hamilton. Blah blah blah. Please don't claim that it's yours blah blah, but feel free to e-mail it to friends, or better yet, send them the URL. To reproduce this review in another form, please contact us at guys@stomptokyo.com. Blah blah blah blah. LAVA® , LAVA LITE® and the motion lamp configuration are registered trademarks of Haggerty Enterprises, Inc., Chicago, IL.                                   * Almost certainly this name is derived from Meganeura, an extinct genus of giant dragonflies. Go back!                                                                                               ** The original Japanese name (Radon) certainly derives from the name pteradon, an apparently incorrect alternate name for a pteranodon. Before the film reached US shores the monster's name became Rodan. Go back!                                                                         * "Every time Rodan shows up I happen to be next to this tree!" Go back.