My latest Pop Culture-centric post is now live on Substack. Today, I’m taking a look at Destroy All Monsters, the movie originally intended as the grand finale of the Godzilla franchise.
Obviously, it didn’t take…
Long story short, as the franchise continued, Godzilla got progressively goofier and more heroic and, with a few exceptions, the films themselves got more and more lighthearted and kid-oriented.
This era of the franchise culminated with a film that was initially intended as a potential grand finale to the entire franchise (clearly, that didn’t happen).
That film is 1968’s Destroy All Monsters.
By this point, Toho, the studio behind the Godzilla movies had comfortably settled into a formula for the franchise: aliens are planning to invade Earth for reasons with inconsistent degrees of satisfactory explanation, the aliens somehow mind-control the Earth monsters and set them loose, the human heroes find a way to undo the mind control and free the Earth monsters, and then Godzilla and whichever other monster he’s teaming up with this time around beat up the aliens’ monsters and save the day.
Destroy All Monsters! doesn’t upset this formula, so much as take it to its obvious conclusion.
Plus, I take a look at some of the other standouts in the long history of our favourite giant, radioactive dinosaur.
If you’ve enjoyed my content, please consider supporting me through Ko-fi or Patreon, or through Paypal by scanning the QR code below:
Follow Realmgard and other publications of Emona Literary Services™ below:
Subscribe to the Emona Literary Services™ Substack newsletter here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The author prohibits the use of content published on this website for the purposes of training Artificial Intelligence technologies, including but not limited to Large Language Models, without express written permission.
All stories published on this website are works of fiction. Characters are products of the author’s imagination and do not represent any individual, living or dead.
The realmgard.com Privacy Policy can be viewed here.
Realmgard is published by Emona Literary ServicesTM
