Godzilla

Godzilla has been dubbed the "King of the Monsters", a phrase first used in Godzilla, King of the Monsters! , the Americanized version of the original film. Godzilla is an enormous, destructive, prehistoric sea monster awakened and empowered by nuclear radiation. With the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Lucky Dragon 5 incident still fresh in the Japanese consciousness, Godzilla was conceived as a metaphor for nuclear weapons. Godzilla sometimes has allies, such as Rodan, Mothra and Anguirus, and offspring, such as Minilla and Godzilla Junior. Godzilla has also fought characters from other franchises in crossover media, such as the RKO Pictures/Universal Studios movie monster King Kong, as well as various Marvel Comics characters, including S.H.I.E.L.D., the Fantastic Four and the Avengers. Gojira is a portmanteau of the Japanese words gorira and kujira , "whale"), owing to the fact that in one planning stage, Godzilla was described as "a cross between a gorilla and a whale", due to its size, power and aquatic origin. Kimi Honda, the widow of the director, dismissed this in a 1998 BBC documentary devoted to Godzilla: "The backstage boys at Toho loved to joke around with tall stories." Godzilla's name was written in ateji as Gojira , where the kanji are used for phonetic value and not meaning. The Japanese pronunciation of the name is ; the Anglicized form is /??d?z?l?/, with the first syllable pronounced like the word "god" and the rest rhyming with "gorilla". During the development of the American version of Godzilla Raids Again , Godzilla's name was changed to "Gigantis" by producer Paul Schreibman, who wanted to create a character distinct from Godzilla. Within the context of the Japanese films, Godzilla's exact origins vary, but it is generally depicted as an enormous, violent, prehistoric sea monster awakened and empowered by nuclear radiation. Inspired by the fictional Rhedosaurus created by animator Ray Harryhausen for the film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Godzilla's character design was conceived as that of an amphibious reptilian monster based around the loose concept of a dinosaur with an erect standing posture, scaly skin, an anthropomorphic torso with muscular arms, lobed bony plates along its back and tail, and a furrowed brow. Art director Akira Watanabe combined attributes of a Tyrannosaurus, an Iguanodon, a Stegosaurus and an alligator to form a sort of blended chimera, inspired by illustrations from an issue of Life magazine. To emphasise the monster's relationship with the atomic bomb, its skin texture was inspired by the keloid scars seen on the survivors of Hiroshima. Godzilla is sometimes depicted as green in comics, cartoons and movie posters, but the costumes used in the movies were usually painted charcoal grey with bone-white dorsal plates up until the film Godzilla 2000: Millennium. In the original Japanese films, Godzilla and all the other monsters are referred to with gender-neutral pronouns equivalent to "it", while in the English dubbed versions, Godzilla is explicitly described as a male. In the 1998 film Godzilla, the monster is referred to as a male and is depicted laying eggs through parthenogenesis.