Do you think you know everything about Godzilla? It’s time to challenge yourself. Are you looking to fill in the gaps in your knowledge of Toho’s most enduring export? Or maybe you’d like to learn more about the old Showa era films and go behind the scenes?
Famous Monsters Ack-Ives: Godzilla offers a chance to do all that and more. It features over 100 pages of essential Godzilla coverage from FM’s early archives, never-before-translated content, a cover painting by Sanjulian, and an exclusive interview with Mike Dougherty, director of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019).
Full List of Credits
Honorary Editor-in-Chief: FORREST J ACKERMAN
Publishers: PHILIP KIM and DOMINIE LEE
Executive Editor: HOLLY INTERLANDI
Art Director: JENN PHAM
Associate Editor: JORGE MARRERO
Cover by SANJULIAN
Published by MOVIELAND CLASSICS, LLC © 2019
Letter From the Editor
It’s hard to imagine a world without Godzilla. Thankfully, many of us never had to.
65 years is just a blip on the landscape of human civilization, but in pop culture terms, it’s an eternity. Ishiro Honda’s Gojira was released in 1954. In 1954, computers were the size of a warehouse, color televisions were the latest fancy home gadget, and JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was on the “new release” shelves at bookstores.
Of course, Westerners would not be privy to Honda’s masterpiece until 1956, when it was sufficiently spliced together with scenes featuring American actor Raymond Burr so that world-naïve audiences might not feel threatened by a still-recent World War II enemy. That’s how vastly different the landscape was.
But as the attitudes of the past fall away, Godzilla endures: through redesigns and new enemies and collectibles and and comic books, through three different suit actors and various CGI incarnations, through Mechagodzilla and Space Godzilla and Shin Godzilla. He keeps marching along to the beat of that undeniable theme music.
This Ack-Ives offering could never claim to be a comprehensive Godzilla reference. Such a thing would require a set of leather tomes bearing thousands of entries in a similar arrangement to a hard-copy set of encycopedias (remember those?). It should, instead, tell a story: a story of how a reptilian metaphor for atomic catastrophe expanded well beyond the shores of Japan until he eventually became the kind of world-reknowned character that merited a star on the Hollywood walk of fame. It’s a story of the kids who watched him take that journey, from their black and white TV screens and Super 8 reels to the massive local movie marquee and eventual flawless resolution on internet streaming services. After all, Famous Monsters has been there almost every step of the way. (61 years of it—close enough!).
We also hope that the Ack-Ives: Godzilla manages to reflect on each stage of the big green guy’s domination with equal parts nostalgia and perspective. For truly, we can be wisful about classic monster movies and appreciate the cultural atmosphere that produced them, but as genre fans, we should also be grateful for today’s more digital and open-minded world where the Japanese cut of Gojira, in all its subtitled glory, is readily available to anyone who wishes to watch it. In 2019, the newest overseas gems are brought to us relatively intact with minimal philandering on the part of distributors, and that is worth all the nostalgia in the world.
Our “Monster World” has expanded a great deal in 65 years. Here’s to 65 more.
LOOK INSIDE:
HOLLY INTERLANDI 