Memories of Godzilla on the Earlier Internet
I began using the internet, basically, because I like Godzilla. Really, the internet is what enabled me to like Godzilla as much as I do. Of course, I had some of the movies on video before I ever got online, played with the toys, excitedly ran into the room every time my parents found Godzilla on TV, but without the internet, my experience of Godzilla would have been pretty limited. Back then, Godzilla wasn't something that you could really talk about with your friends who weren't into it. Like, the things that people knew (or assumed to know) about Godzilla back then basically boiled down to stereotypes of the movies being Chinese, low-budget, with bad special effects and strings on planes, or loose memories of people who saw Godzilla 1998 and didn't really like it. Going online allowed me to see the opinions of the initiated, the fanatical, to learn more about the franchise than I ever could have without it. A lot of my formative experiences online come from reading Godzilla sites, and a lot of my memories of the internet are wrapped up in my fandom. As such, it feels important to me to try and sort through those memories and pay tribute to some of the sites that made me a fan.
While I’ll try to maintain a kind of chronology, the things I discuss are not strictly in order. Please consider this more a nostalgic psychogeography than a comprehensive history. Some of my recollections may also just be wrong, but hopefully nothing too important. As ever, email corrections and other comments to this address.
My family first got online when I was about six years old. We’d had some computers in the house before this, but they were mostly “Frankenstein” machines my father brought home from work to repair. My mother entered a contest at her job where she had to guess how many jelly beans were in a jar, and being the closest, she walked away with some anonymous beige prefab computer. It ran Windows 98 well enough and we had internet through AOL. My brother and I took turns on the computer until our mother told us it was time to stop - usually after an hour or so.
| I think the first two Godzilla sites I ever visited were Barry’s Temple of Godzilla and one I only remember as “Cool Stuff Godzilla Toys” (unrelated, I think, to Cool Stuff Inc.). What immediately attracted me to both sites were the pictures of toys. At the time, American Godzilla merchandise was at its nadir - the classic Trendmasters toys were long gone, the 1998 movie line had been exorcized after shelfwarming rather hard, and it would be a few years before Bandai Creation could pick up the slack. So while I had (and loved) a few figures from those earlier lines, my drive to see new, different toys could only be sated by low resolution bitmaps of Bandai Japan imports. | 
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Cool Stuff Godzilla Toys, which (reasoning that the good stuff would be hidden just out of view) I found by going to the second page of Google results for “Godzilla toys,” was basically a catalog of Bandai figures. The site felt amazingly huge to me at the time, probably because there were so few images on each page and, consequently, so many pages to click through. The American toylines I knew were of course dominated by Toho’s “big five,” but there were tons of other monsters whose toys were either hard to find or just weren’t made at all. With Bandai, it seemed like they had made everybody that I could possibly wish for, even characters I had never heard of. I think this site is where I first learned about Mechani-Kong, Baragon, and Jet Jaguar, for instance.
Barry on the other hand didn’t have a ton of traditional figures, but he had all kinds of other weird merchandise, all of which is still visible on his site today. There was something extraordinarily exciting to me about how I had to first click on a description of an item before its picture would pop up, which of course would load supernaturally slowly. Anticipation, you know.
Of course, Barry’s site had a lot more than toys. I loved downloading the little Quicktime video clips, especially those from movies I hadn’t seen yet, reading reviews, and looking at rumors about Toho’s upcoming films. One thing I remember is seeing the poster for Godzilla x Mechagodzilla without any information about the plot. For some reason, I assumed the movie would be about 2000 Godzilla fighting a ragged Showa Mechagodzilla who I thought had been buried in the ground for 25 years. I also assumed that, like Godzilla 2000, it would come to American theaters, leading me to stare eagerly at the marquee every time my parents drove past. When it never did and the Millennium DVDs started appearing, I think I assumed I had just missed their theatrical releases, though I soon knew better.
I feel like it was a little while before I had the stroke of genius to try just going to “Godzilla.com,” but it must have still been in 2000 or 2001. I remember the site was divided in two, with the landing section dedicated to Godzilla 1998, and then a slightly-hidden section for “classic Godzilla.” The former part really didn’t have much on it at that point - maybe a couple blurbs imploring me to buy it on home video, cast and crew notes - but the classic section was extensive. It had profiles for every monster, replete with images and statistics that I studied extensively.
A lot of the Godzilla sites at this time followed this same sort of template, and many of them were very similar to each other, with a lot of images and information mirrored across them. As well, probably half of the Godzilla sites I saw at the time featured some variation of “kaiju wars” - transcriptions of fantasy roleplay battles in the vein of e-fedding. And almost every site that had these was bound to have a fight between the “real” Godzilla and the 1998 version, which was inevitably a brutal squash to prove the ultimate dominance of pure, innocent Japan over greedy, ignorant Hollywood or whatever. Oh, and Godzilla 1998 would usually be referred to as “GINO” (“Godzilla In Name Only”) or else Devlinzilla or something like that. Even when Final Wars came out and (sort of) codified the character as “Zilla,” I saw many online continue to call him GINO for many years after, as if referring to him by an apostatic derivative of the original was too generous.
As an aside, another website I loved visiting at the time was Newgrounds, for which I was definitely too young. The only Godzilla content I remember being on it was the esteemed Godzilla vs. SARS animation. I did not know what SARS was at the time, but later there was an older girl I went to middle school with who wrote either “I LOVE SARS” or “I HAVE SARS” in block letters on her jacket with a Sharpie. I never spoke to her but admired her from afar, in the way that middle school boys do.
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Anyway, with all this repetition, I began to favor the sites which I regarded as either the most comprehensive or the most unique. Of the latter category, my favorite was Space Godzilla’s Crystal Palace. This was the first example I saw of a kind of “character shrine” website, where the focus was less on oft-repeated general fandom knowledge and more on a single character and the author’s relationship with it. Looking back, there’s really not that much on the site, but you have to consider that in 2001 I had never actually seen fan art before. Seeing that anyone would draw Godzilla beyond my infantile level was both shocking and exhilarating to me. I saved a lot of the pictures on the site onto the hard drive of my family computer so that I could enjoy them even when my mother had to use the phone.
Another thing I enjoyed on the Crystal Palace were the “Kaiju Kids” comic strips, which appear to be utterly lost to time. They were basically just bog-standard kids’ school stories with Godzilla characters instead of the Disney Channel’s hottest new stars. The fact that they were kaiju seemed to have only the most marginal impact on the stories (there was maybe talk of a class about learning to use their powers or something), and their personalities were very, very, very vaguely informed by what we saw in the films. Well, ostensibly anyway. Where Gigan in the films was violent and cruel, the Gigan in Kaiju Kids was a meek victim of Godzilla’s bullying. In hindsight it was all very stupid, but for a brief window in my adolescence I thought it was cute.
I think it was reading those stories that made me really like Gigan, even though I hadn’t seen a movie with him yet. I was delighted to discover, then, that the same person who made the Crystal Palace had another website devoted (kind of) to Gigan: GIGAN SPECIES - ALTERNATE HOMEWORLD.
Gigan Species was a joint project between Des, the webmaster of SGCP, and a guy named Spaceghidorah. The premise was essentially that Gigan was a member of a whole species (a GIGAN SPECIES, if you will), who were bred and modified for intergalactic conquest by the Black Hole Aliens, who I don’t think ever actually appeared in the stories. From that, the creators made a whole swath of Gigan-likes, giving them powers and anthropomorphic personalities. Then they would basically roleplay as the characters, and form stories out of their roleplays. Some of the stories were cleaned up into prose paragraphs, but several were just straight copies of the chat transcriptions. In hindsight, the stories had a great deal more to do with, like, furry fiction than Godzilla, but I liked the drawings and the OCs were surprisingly varied, if still not wholly original.
Now, the funny part that I didn’t learn until a few years later: Des and Spaceghidorah had a massive falling-out over the site, which resulted in Des closing the whole thing and hosting her own version that made her out to be the sympathetic one in the situation and, if I recall, baselessly gave herself a great deal more credit than SG. Because I had reached the site through the Crystal Palace, I only saw this jaundiced version for a long time, and as such I had a really negative opinion on Spaceghidorah. It wasn't until a little bit later that I found the original version of the site, which included SG’s (and Des’, to his credit) perspectives and learned the whole of the MAJOR FANDOM DRAMA.
Des also had a website dedicated to Professor Frink from the Simpsons, with an extensive guide for The Simpsons: Road Rage. However, for some reason she added a “feature” to the site where if you tried to use your right or center mouse buttons it would launch a pop-up (with an annoying Simpsons voice clip) chastising you for trying to “steal” her artwork or something. It was actually really, really annoying. I wish I could get a screenshot.
Spaceghidorah’s own site, by the way, was also cool. He had a lot more OCs on it, most notably Trajan, a Gigan character who, near as I can tell, spawned the whole Gigan Species concept. He was basically just Gigan if he went Super Saiyan, but when you’re about 10 reading that, you know, it’s still pretty cool. Trajan starred in two stories there: Godzilla vs. Trajan (where I’m pretty sure Trajan whipped Godzilla’s ass), and then Trajan vs. the Eliminators, a sequel where the Nebulans decide that their creation is too powerful and send these three deformed mutant monsters to assassinate him.
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| Besides sites like this, a lot of my web-browsing time was spent looking at Godzilla toys. Over time I had lost Cool Stuff Godzilla Toys, so I had to seek out other avenues to get my fix. One such site was Cryptoys.com, a shop more generally dedicated to horror and monster toys but also featuring a decent section on Godzilla merchandise. I think it was through here that I first learned about Daimajin, saw the name X-Plus, and realized that it was actually possible for someone in the west to get their hands on Japanese merchandise. |  |
A similar site was Clawmark toys, which I am always surprised to see is still online. One part of that, naturally, is that there are just very few 25-year-old web shops still up and running. The other is that, as I recall, even back then Clawmark was grossly overpriced. Like, I was a stupid little kid with no concept of the relative value of money (I might only get $10 of my own spending money over the course of a year in those days), but when every other site listed something for $40 and they were listing it for $80, even I could reach that conclusion pretty quickly. Still, they seemed to get some things that no other shop did, so I could understand the appeal. Besides, I had no way of buying these things anyway - what did it matter if something was overpriced or underpriced, in or out of stock, rare or common? I was just enjoying the pictures and fantasizing that one day I might somehow be able to get these figures. I probably hoped that Target would start stocking them—which, like, they do now, but back then I might as well have been asking them to start selling pieces of the True Cross.
The only member of my family who was willing to buy things online at that point was an aunt, and of course I could only ask her to do that either for Christmas or my birthday, and of course on those occasions I might get one figure, two if I was lucky. I’m not certain of the order, but the first three import figures I received were:
I still have all of them today. I really cherish them - relics of a time when things were a little more difficult but a lot more special.Anyway, my favorite online store was ChibiGojiToys. For one thing, their catalog was more extensive than almost anyone else’s, with a huge variety of Bandai figures, X-Plus, Marmot, Bullmark, candy toys, finger puppets, and other strange merchandise. Another thing was the creativity on the site - the figures in the listings would always be acting out little comic scenes, with goofy captions. And finally, as I got a little older and was able to start earning more money, this was the only store that I could actually order from, because they would accept cash wrapped in construction paper sent through the mail as a form of payment. I made maybe two or three orders through them at the time, always after incredible deliberation owing to my general lack of funds and diverse financial needs (I had to save up for that Darth Vader voice changer helmet, damnit), but for years I would browse the site and basically imagine what my next purchase would be, debating the merits of different figures but never actually biting the bullet on most things. I actually visited the site so much that I had the entire thing saved in my browser cache, so I could effectively keep browsing it, experience unchanged, even when I wasn't connected to the internet anymore.
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I’m not sure where to add this detail, but at some point my brother and I got computers of our own, which were kept in our bedrooms instead of in my mother’s office. Even though we had our own computers, we still had to share dial-up service, so only one of us could be online at a time. This caused a lot of conflict, as you can imagine - we couldn't even play Neopets at the same time! Probably two or three years later we finally got broadband, which was not only faster, but meant that I could waste considerably more time online. I remember the first thing I did on broadband was go to Google Video and watch a Friday the 13th/Halloween crossover fanfilm - before that, my brother and I had been limited to watching videos no longer than a minute or two because they would take so long to load. Over the course of an hour, we would watch the videos in increasingly-long segments, our anticipation building as the gray playback line slowly lurched towards the end of its track. I’ve seen the first ten seconds of “Real Ninjas” over 200 times. I have seen the last ten seconds maybe twenty times.
Anyway, as strange as it sounds, in the early days I got a lot of my “Godzilla news” through toy websites like that, or else just by reading the blurbs on Barry’s homepage. When I saw that new figures were out, I would know the new movie was out. When Barry said the DVD was in stores, I would ask my mother to take me somewhere to look for it. I knew that there were more “mature” or otherwise in-depth resources where people would discuss news and rumors (or just argue their opinions), but as a kid I couldn't really motivate myself to read that kind of thing on the computer. As such, the only site from this category which I really remember is Monster Zero News, which for me at the time held the same stature as CNN or something, just solely focused on Godzilla. Eventually they became SciFi Japan, which is still around today.
As the years went by, things started to change, of course. Sites that I had visited in years past ceased updating or went offline entirely. Naturally, a lot of new sites came to fill in the gaps. Many of them were basically copies of the old sites, but on the whole this second generation was much more sophisticated. Gone were the days of primary-color HTML hell, “under construction” GIFs, and frames within frames within frames. It was a new world: the world of Cascading Style Sheets and div layers…
One site I treasured in that era was Rodan’s Roost, part of a larger family of sites called Kaijuphile. The site had a pretty slick layout for its time, and many unique sections that I hadn’t already seen on a thousand other Godzilla pages, like overviews of films that influenced Godzilla and summaries of the American comic series. Other sites in the Kaijuphile network included American Kaiju (featuring a comic adaptation of the original 1994 American Godzilla treatment), the Fan Nest (a repository of fan art and fiction), and Guidolon the Giant Space Chicken, the creator of which I have since learned to pity and dislike.
| One unique feature on Rodan's Roost were its listings of Kaiju role-playing and war games. I had a burgeoning interest in that kind of thing at the time, but the ones I had been exposed to back then (D&D, Call of Cthulhu, Werewolf: the Apocalypse) didn't have much potential for intersection with my Godzilla fandom. I’ve still never actually played the games listed on Rodan’s Roost, but I remember searching high and low for them at comic shops and used book stores. I think the closest I ever got was playing Horrorclix by imaginary rules with some of my friends. I never got the big Cthulhu one, though, sadly... |  |
Looking back, Rodan’s Roost is the site that introduced me to the idea of “cringe” content. Of course, I had looked at (and made) plenty of cringy stuff on my own up to that point, but Rodan’s Roost was the first site I saw which had a dedicated section , the “Pit of Filth” making fun of other, more inept sites and so forth. Mostly it was websites about Godzilla 1998, which as noted was the object of massive scorn.
Another site I liked as I got older, I unfortunately can’t remember the name. I know the webmaster was from Michigan, as the splash text mentioned the ten thousand lakes - does this ring any bells for you? Anyway, this site had a regularly-updated news column and the usual stuff mentioned above (including particularly vicious GINO beatdowns), some toy reviews (I think it’s where I first saw the 50th Anniversary Memorial Box), fan costumes, and, most tantalizing of all, descriptions of unmade films, something I had never even considered the possibility of before. A lot of the projects they wrote about are ones the fandom is still familiar with today (Godzilla vs. Bagan, Heisei King Kong vs. Godzilla, etc), but I also remember reading some that seem almost farcical looking back, like a Guilala vs. Gappa movie supposedly being developed in the 90s. Apparently this was a rumor reported in G-Fan, but I've never found any other source for it. Besides that, there was a good smattering of misinformation, most notably that Gamera vs. Garasharp was meant to be a fully-fledged film after Gamera vs. Zigra and not just a bonus feature for the Laserdisc box set.
While I’m thinking about it, I should talk about how Gamera was treated by much of the fandom online at this time. Besides Godzilla 1998, Gamera was certainly the biggest target of scorn among Godzilla fans in the early 2000s. The prevailing narrative was that Gamera was nothing but a cheap ripoff, that the movies were all awful and all failures, that Godzilla would beat him in a fight and steal his woman, etc. I even remember seeing this sentiment extended to the Heisei films, no doubt by people who hadn't actually seen them yet. It was a strange case of “fan loyalty” which thankfully we don’t see as much of today. I think it’s all been replaced by arguments about the Monsterverse, which may actually be worse.
For my part, I fell into the Gamera-hating pit for a good part of my adolescence, at least in regards to the Showa films. Frankly, when your sole exposure to the films is Sandy Frank dubs and MST3K, it’s an understandable line of thought. However, I always thought that the Heisei trilogy figures I saw online, especially the early X-Plus ones, looked really cool, and so I was curious about those films and not willing to write them off entirely sight unseen - I mean, nobody would put that much effort into toys from a bad movie, right? One day my mother took me to Hastings, and I saw the ADV release of Guardian of the Universe, which she allowed me to get. Suffice to say, I really enjoyed the film. There was one disappointing thing, though - when my mother brought the DVD to the counter, the clerk took a moment to explain that the movie might be a little violent. He said, however, that during the monster battles the movie would go from live action to anime, so at least it wouldn't be real violence. I thought that sounded awesome, but of course it’s not true. I can only assume that he was just guessing that because ADV put it out, it had to be anime. Has there ever actually been a kaiju film in that style, live action blended with traditional animation? I suppose there’s that cut sequence from Godzilla vs. Biollante…
Anyway, Kaijuphile actually linked to the first site I saw which was sympathetic to Gamera: The Shrine of Gamera, which was naturally solely devoted to the turtle. It was refreshing to get a different perspective, and it was probably from there that I actually became interested in watching the earlier movies. The Shrine of Gamera also had a nice selection of wallpaper images, which I actually used on and off for many years across a few computers.
GAMERA DESKTOPS:
Choose from any of these desktop backgrounds (really!). Each zip file contains desktop images for 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024 & 1600x1200. Unfortunately, due to an error on the original site, one additional desktop, featuring Iris (ironically the one I used the most), isn't saved on archive.org. I may have it on an old computer - stay tuned. As a consolation, here is a Kiryu desktop I also used back in the day.
 Gamera 1995 |
 Gamera 1996 |
 Gamera 1999 |
 Gyaos 1995 |
 Legion |
 Gamera vs. Irys |
I’m not sure who linked to it, but another site I enjoyed was called simply Korean Monster Movies, which had descriptions of Yongary, Pulgasari, Wangmagwi, obscure dinosaur comedies which I’ve still not seen, and the legendary A*P*E*. Reading about Wangmagwi in particular, which at that point was still regarded as a lost film, was surreal to me. I knew about other lost films, like London After Midnight and The Werewolf (1913), but all of them were from the 1940s at the latest. I couldn’t understand how a movie from 1967 could become lost (how little did I know). It would be years before I saw any of those films, besides a half-attentive viewing of Reptilian on the Sci-Fi channel. And it would be even longer than that before anybody outside of Korean film festivals saw Wangmagwi.
Another site I liked was Gojistomp. The most interesting part of it to me was the overview of all the different Godzilla suits. I also thought that it was far and away one of the slickest-looking sites of its era.
One more I found back then was Queen Ghidorah’s Kingdom. It had some cute artwork, gifs, and even icon and cursor packs (unfortunately not archived). Honestly, I never read it much back then, except for one thing: It had a whole section dedicated to Godzilla Trading Battle, a game that had never been released in America and which featured a bewildering amount of monsters (even Barkley has a cameo). I read that guide over and over again, dreaming of the day when I could play that game. And, you know, I still haven’t. I also can't find that guide on the archive now. Was there another Queen Ghidodrah site?
But the king of Godzilla sites back then (and probably still today) was Tohokingdom. Not only did they have write-ups for every Godzilla movie, they had information on hundreds of other Toho films, plus video games, posters, DVD releases, soundtracks, comic books, concept art, and more. Tohokingdom was the most comprehensive of all the comprehensive sites. They had listings for video games and stuff that other sites never talked about. Nowadays, tons of sites feel cavernous and never-ending because millions of people are contributing to them every second. It was a real achievement back then to have a site that had so much on it. It was amazing to dig through Tohokingdom. There was always something new to learn. I remember TK is where I first saw pictures of Zone Fighter and learned about the legendary final Showa appearances of the Big G.
One of the coolest things on Tohokingdom to me was the games section. Like I said, Newgrounds and other Flash sites hardly had any Godzilla content. When I discovered the TK games, it was a revelation. However, there was just one problem - they weren’t integrated into the browser, so you had to download them directly, and with my internet speed at the time… I remember waiting an hour or more for each one to download, but thankfully once I had them saved I could play them whenever I wanted (unlike other Flash games). My favorites were probably the Beach Volleyball games, largely because of their massive character roster, the Gamera games, and Dimension Tide, a strategy card(ish) battle game. I enjoyed Dimension Tide so much that I printed out copies of the cards, created an approximation of the rules, and tried to get my friends at school interested. Eventually, the games section (kind of) gave birth to a series of Flash cartoons, which I’m amazed (but happy) are still hosted on the site today.
Another of my favorite sites back then was Neo Monster Island, which hosted the webcomic Twisted Kaiju Theater (a play on a feature from Toyfare Magazine). The comic mostly centered on Shin Goji, a self-insert for the author, and his friends the Toxic Pirates, who were themselves avatars for the author’s real friends. All the characters were portrayed by toys, mostly SD finger puppets and the like, and stories alternated between metaphors for events in Shin Goji’s life, commentary on the popular internet talking points of the time (Fox News, Jack Thompson, the Bush administration), and simple gag strips. Eventually a lot of other characters were added, like Mazinger Z, Shin Goji’s arch nemesis Tyrant (portrayed by the Ultraman monster), and Murugu, Shin’s girlfriend (portrayed by a Yu Yu Hakusho character). The humor was pretty simple: vulgar turns of phrase, poop jokes (the classic gag being that the lemon candies packaged with Godzilla toys were Ghidorah’s shit), toys raping each other, calling people gay, and Shin and Murugu having sex. I am under the impression that the appearance of Murugu, and the subsequent wild all-night fuck sessions between her and Shin Goji, was something akin to Grant Morrison using chaos magik to write himself into The Invisibles in an effort to manifest improvements in his sex life. Then again, Murugu was also a huge whore who openly slept with tons of other characters right in front of Shin, so maybe there was some other attempts at wish-fulfillment going on.
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Part of the appeal of Twisted Kaiju Theater to me still was seeing the toys. Shin Goji had a large collecting spanning many different lines and categories, and it was an opportunity to see many rare figures outside of the ordinary package shots or default poses you might find on webstores. I remember being particularly entranced by the Trendmasters Varan figure that made rare background appearances - that release was, for many years, the only Varan toy outside of high grade figures and I seldom saw it for sale. Another part of the appeal, though, was frankly that the comic was very, very vulgar. When you’re that age, it’s easy to mistake vulgarity as indicators of both maturity and quality. The strips and story arcs often fell into dumb melodrama and pastiches of Dragon Ball Z, which even then I found distasteful, but soon enough the gag strips would renew my interest and I would be back on board. Some of the big storyarcs I remember include the cast being hunted by Cyber-Zillas (portrayed by the Transformer figure Cruellock), Tyrant taking over the site and rebooting the comic to be about him and his friends, and lots of stories where Shin Goji”s girlfriend gets kidnapped or brainwashed and he has to go Super Saiyan.
There was also this strange thing on Neo Monster Island where, with every new strip, you were asked to “vote” daily for the comic on some large ranking of various webcomics. It was really less voting and more registering that you read it, and then whichever comics had the most registrations would be at the top of a ranking. I remember TKT progressively climbing through a number of these ranking sites, besting all who came to oppose it, until in later years it was always second to some strange 3DCG erotic sci-fi comic that looked, even then, outrageously awful to me. I don’t really know what these rankings were for outside of bragging rights - maybe it helped them reach advertisers or increase their click-through rates, but I don’t even remember advertisements running on the site, so who knows. This was probably a really common thing that I look like an idiot for not understanding, but other webcomics I read at the time didn’t have that! Mind Flayed and Ugly Girl did not have that!!! Regardless of how stupid I am, these rankings showed that the comic had a pretty big audience for its day. I have to imagine many of the people who read it weren't even particularly big fans of Godzilla.
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Of course, a big draw of the site for many people were the Kaiju Girls. These are a sort of anthropomorphic representations of Godzilla characters as fat-tittied anime babes, falling somewhere between “dangerously furry” and “dangerously cheesy” on the anthro art scale. This kind of artwork is still around today, and it’s not like it was a wholly original concept to begin with (even the aforementioned Shrine of Gamera hosted some), but when I tell you that the Neo Monster Island Kaiju Girls were a phenomenon in the fandom I implore you to believe me. I think it helped that they were presented as actual characters in a connected universe rather than just one-off drawings of sexy Godzilla girls. Anyway, large debates took place across various forums over the morality and ethics of creating blatantly-sexual characters out of something that was initially a metaphor for the atomic bomb, whether Godzilla sites, ever-popular with children, should reasonably host that kind of material at all, which ones were the cutest and the sweetest, etc. For a while, it was really a discussion that you could not get away from. |
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Eventually, even though they were one of the most popular sections of the site, the Kaiju Girls were removed from Neo Monster Island proper in an effort to make the site more respectable or something. Supposedly Shin Goji claimed that he never actually cared for them and only had them on the site to drive views, but I think that’s just coping. Frankly, I think he was probably a little assmad that their popularity often eclipsed that of the comic itself. They were given their own site called Kaiju Girl Academy, but by then the wind was out of the sails and soon enough it all went away. TKT itself followed suit eventually, too, with all of the site’s strips being deleted.
The author had a number of changes of heart over the years and evidently grew ashamed of his work, instead devoting his time to making progressive-liberal Godzilla toy comic strips that he posts on Facebook.
Which is, you know, quite the transformation from the guy who did things like this:
While I can understand being ashamed of your old work like this, and certainly respect one’s right to change their opinion, I do think it’s a mistake and, to a degree, dishonest to run from your past by deleting it, particularly when you still use your old viewership channels to promote your new work. In my opinion, if you want to be “accountable” for things you said in the past, you need to actually be willing to show people how bad it got, rather than just smudging over the details by saying “I was immature.” Further, while I don’t doubt the sincerity of McGuinnes’ progressive identity, the tone of his new comics to me reads as a massive “mea culpa” for the things he wrote twenty years ago. I mean, I don’t know. It is what it is. In twenty years I’ll probably want to delete this entire website and I’ll just be a huge hypocrite, huh?
Anyway, I enjoyed reading the TKT forums as well. Besides discussion of the comic strip, there were sections for general kaiju film discussion, the recent Godzilla video games, Kaiju Girl fanfiction, and of course the dreaded off-topic discussion. It’s a little strange to think back on now, but at one point the TKT forum was one of the “main” places to discuss Godzilla online, with hundreds of posts each day and thousands of users at its peak. It reminds me of that anecdote Lowtax shared in his University of Illinois talk (when people still liked him) about how the Volkswagen car owners board was once one of the five most active forums on the entire internet, and most of the discussion was only tangentially related to car ownership. Or that joke about how Twitter was founded as a Brats of the Lost Nebula fan site and just really got out of hand.
When I think back on Godzilla forums, there are a few that really stick out:
Each of course had different merits. The Atari board and the Toho Kingdom forum seemed to me the most active for a while, while Neo Monster Island allowed for a slightly wider field of discussion and was perhaps not so judiciously moderated (an important feature when you’re a stupid kid posting your stupid kid thoughts). Kaijuphile was probably the most serious forum as I remember it, but it wasn’t as active and certainly was not welcome to dumb, typo-spamming children. And, frankly, I remember the posters on that board being almost overwhelmingly negative about just about everything: Final Wars was terrible, the Millennium films (save GMK) were terrible, the Heisei films (save Biollante, maybe) were terrible, the Showa films (save ‘54) were terrible… It was just a real drag, you know.
The Atari/Pipeworks board was actually pretty big, at least for a time. Even though it was ostensibly just about the games, there were large sections of the forums where people wrote about the classic films and speculated about the future, as well as sharing their collections and so forth. Even though Godzilla was announced as being in hibernation after Final Wars, it really didn’t feel like it for a while in America. The Pipeworks games (well, the first two) did a lot to keep interest alive in those early years, and besides that there were still DVD releases, the Bandai Creation toyline, etc. Honestly, besides the hype around the 1998 film, the period from 2004 to 2008 was probably the most active, alive, and even mainstream that Godzilla felt in my lifetime until the Monsterverse films started coming out. But, of course, it tapered off after a while, and until the 2014 film came out Godzilla felt very, very dead to me.
Anyway, with the games. These things were a real dream come true for a kid at the time, and probably even moreso for older American fans who had to live through the disappointing 80s and 90s Godzilla games. Destroy All Monsters Melee and Save the Earth weren’t just great Godzilla games, they were great in their own right. A lot of my friends who didn’t even like Godzilla would rent Save the Earth and thought it was awesome. So, when a third game was announced, of course the hype online was off the charts. Basically, all anybody wanted them to do was put out Save the Earth again, but with more characters and maybe better graphics. How could they screw that up?
One thing that was relatively unique about Godzilla Unleashed was how much of the game was shown off before its release. There were a lot of developer logs, along with map and character showcases, put out in anticipation of the game’s release. Of course, these were all dolled up to look presentable, but I thought the game looked awesome. The most notable part of Godzilla Unleashed’s development, though, was the fan voting. For the first (and, in hindsight, only) time, fans would get the opportunity to vote on an original monster to be in the game. The choices were, in order of my preference:
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LIGHTNING BUG, a crazy Evangelion kamacuras thing capable of absorbing energy. I imagined it being able to deflect beam attacks to their source like King Caesar in the movies, or maybe just being powered up when an opponent used them, ala Fire Rodan getting healed by fire in Save the Earth. |
| FIRE LION, who was basically King Caesar but, uhm, on fire. I think by the time of the poll they had already shown that King Caesar himself was in the game, so I kind of didn’t understand why they would want to add someone so similar, but for a slightly generic design I still thought it was pretty cool. It reminded me of Scooby Doo or Jackie Chan Adventures. |  |
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THE VISITOR, who had a fat, awkward head and a pretty generic and uninteresting backstory. Really, though, it was the head that kept me at a distance. I just couldn’t imagine this thing going around the stages, its bloated jaws bobbing up and down with each step, and take it seriously at all. |
| And MAGMOUTH, an even more generic lava monster. If Fire Lion reminded me of Jackie Chan Adventures, Magmouth reminded me of old Hanna Barbera cartoons. Like, this dude just looks like he would job to the Herculoids after two minutes of screen time. I thought of all the options, this guy was the least likely to make it into the game - I mean, who would choose something so boring? |  |
Anyway, the game came out, and while I enjoyed it it was an obvious step down from Save the Earth. I remember a thread on the Pipeworks forums where people reported bugs and glitches that was over a hundred pages long. Others online have done a good job analyzing the game postmortem, if you’re interested. For me, I just knew that there probably wouldn’t be another Pipeworks game. And, somehow, that was kind of the sunset of the “classic” Godzilla period as I think of it.
Having written all this, it may seem like reading about Godzilla was all I did online as a kid. Really, that’s not the case. There were myriad other things that took up my time on the internet back then - Neopets, Mocpages, Rotteneggs, MUGEN, Wikipedia, and eventually Youtube, ED, 4chan, etc. Godzilla was just one of many persistent threads. But, of course, as I got a little older and as the fandom lost steam in the wilderness years, I found myself intersecting with Godzilla online less and less. I’d still check out Tohokingdom every week or so, see if there was any update on Godzilla 3D to the MAX, emailed Barry a few times, but I was never quite as involved as I was when I was younger. I mean, you know how it goes. Godzilla was still one of my favorite things, but other favorite things were just closer to the forefront of my mind.
| Of the things closest to the forefront, I was an avowed fan in those days of the Angry Video Game Nerd, Cinemassacre, and other videos made by James Rolfe. Everything he put out those days felt like gold - for those days of Youtube, his videos were very high-effort, with actual writing, editing, and special effects - and the fact that he was an avowed fan of Godzilla movies really cemented me as a fan. One of my favorite series of his was Monster Madness, an annual celebration of classic horror films. These were just short, simple videos - not even reviews - but they came from a place of genuine passion and intense love for the films covered. In 2008, Cinemassacre’s Monster Madness centered on the Godzilla films, covering the entire series up to that point. To me, watching those videos felt like a swan song to my fandom. It reminded me of everything I loved about the series, made me reconsider things that I just glossed over as a kid, and even gave me something nice to show the friends I had who were interested in Godzilla but found two dozen-odd films daunting. |  |
When I think back on it, that was kind of the end of things in many ways. Of course, I only ever got older, more and more other bullshit took up my time (only some of it by deliberate choice). Godzilla, as much as I love it, just couldn’t mean as much to me as it did when I was a kid. All I’ve got now are the memories, things like this. Oh well.
Nowadays, I still read about Godzilla online. I mean, the franchise is probably more popular than ever, with multiple concurrent film series, swaths of merchandise, and booming discussion online. But, still, I don’t think anything will ever match the fun I had as a kid, waiting for dumb websites to load, excited to learn about my favorite thing in the world.
If you have other memories of Godzilla fansites and fandom, let me know. I will happy append this article with your recollections. Barry, thank you to responding to all my emails over the years. If you’re Sean McGuinness, I hope that you will one day be able to forgive yourself. If you’re looking for more Kaiju Girl artwork, I can’t help you. Besides that, take it easy!!!
