Sing it, Sven!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSHomyt0 ... re=related

I can't speak for content quite yet, but as far as the tone of the piece goes, it'd be a little something like this.

So, ho you guys think the ongoing radiation/nuclear plant crisis in Tokyo could be a spring board into a "good" American Godzilla?

The "warning" isn't shipwrecks, but a rash of underwater earthquakes and tsunamis?

Too soon?

A bit.

Certainly the death of tens of thousands of innocent people can be used to advertise a monster movie! There is nothing at all horribly tasteless about this plan!

You are righteous in your outrage, but you can also be sure the possibility has seriously occurred to at least one marketing exec, somewhere.

By my reckoning, it was about seven to eight years after Hiroshima/Nagisaki that Toho studios green lit a giant monster movie that featured a nuclear explosion and, without much subtlety, evoked the destructive power and aftermath of an atomic bomb explosion on a major Japanese city.
I hear it spawned a few sequels.

The difference, naturally, being that that movie painted the atomic horrors as having lasting consequences, further destruction, etc. It had a moral.

Here, we're talking about advertising.

Here is a link to the original Japanese trailer for Gojira. I found one with subtitles. According to the subtitles, the announcer mentions high levels of radiation and that Godzilla was born of an H-bomb.
Interestingly, when I was on You Tube, the trailer for the American edit Godzilla: King of the Mosters features a rubble strewn Tokyo but doesn't mention anything about radiation or destructive atomic force.

Still, as we all well know, the US film industry invented scare movies about the effects of radiation and embiggened beasties a year or two before Gojira. I assume that dubbed or subbed features of Them! and The Creature from 20,000 Fathoms were featured in Japanese movie theaters, too. So I'm not sure how radical/unsettling a Gojira trailer mentioning nuclear radiation and atomic testing really was as compared to current circumstances involving very real recent and terrible calamities.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I heard somewhere that Tanaka's actual inspiration for the original Gojira cam from an incident when a Japanese fishing trawler wandered into the waters of some atomic testing area and caught some irradiated fish that may or may not have made it to the market.

I didn't know it, but yes - and it seems to be a well documented incident.



As far as inspirations go, Gojira is also inspired by Harryhausen's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and key scenes of Gojira's attack are meant to invoke the devastation of the two atomic bomb drops.