I recently finished a draft of an article about Pacific Rim (2013) that required re-watching both Gojira (1954) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters! (1956), which I thought were permanently etched into my brain because I wrote numerous papers including them as an undergrad studying the Cold War and Nuclear Culture.
Criterion remastered both movies and put them together as a BluRay set (also available on some streaming services). It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Gojira, I was surprised how much I’d forgotten. This is probably because I’ve seen Godzilla so many times it’s pretty much over-written the other movie in my brain.
It’s fascinating to watch them back to back again. Both are melodramatic and slightly nonsensical, but Gojira is artistic and intensely political, while Godzilla is generally just silly and over-wrought.
More than 1/3 of Gojira’s scenes were cut to make room for the insertion of new scenes featuring American actors, and, to be fair, it’s impressive how well Godzilla works.
It’s always interesting to see how much of the story was changed, re-arranged, or simply obscured through the omission or lack of translation for some of the original dialogue.
After you watch those two movies, you’ll be ready to move on to Godzilla Raids Again (1955), which is a delightfully bonkers piece of movie-making. I’m certain the original movie must be wacky, but it’s the epic amount of narration added to the American version that truly elevates this movie to instant classic status.
Godzilla Raids Again makes a perfect double feature with King Kong versus Godzilla, which was re-edited to make a strange movie even stranger, although I’m not certain that was the intention.
The actor playing the American scientist doesn’t pronounce reptile properly. He keeps saying “reptull,” which is odd since he’s supposed to be a specialist in reptulls, er, I mean, reptiles.
The plot: someone decides it’s a swell idea to go get a giant gorilla and bring him to Tokyo to fight a giant prehistoric dinosaur. Sure, why not? And then there’s a whole pharmaceutical company subplot, the racist depiction of natives in the King Kong acquisition scenes, something involving hallucinogenic red berries, and a giant octopus attack.
Don’t miss the Interpretive Kong Dance Extravaganza!
Husband and I are definitely ready to see the new Godzilla Thursday. I’m going to be very sad if it sucks like the 1998 Godzilla did. It’s okay for a Godzilla movie to be Bad, but it should never be boring and stupid.
That movie was boring and stupid and let us never speak of it again.
As a child, I ran a bit hot and cold on the whole Curious George issue. I loved him when I was 5 and devoured all the books in short order (I was a precocious reader). In the first grade, much to the chagrin of our school librarian, I found the situation of a monkey in an urban environment problematic. Which was odd considering I lived in a weird place that – in addition to the wide-range of eccentrics, roadside attractions, and sanctuaries, was the winter home of the circus – and didn’t give much thought to the variety of exotic animals all over town.
In the present, discussions erupt now and again in the MeanLouise Lair about whether George is a monkey or an ape. Sometimes other people are involved in these debates, other times I’m just talking to myself.
I think we can retire the subject once and for all because bioanthropology blogging heart-throb Kristina Killgrove has written a truly fab post on her blog, Powered by Osteons, that explores the question, “Is Curious George a Monkey or an Ape?” in fascinating detail.
I bet the Fabulous Miss P. and Heather will both find the post interesting, if not for the science than for the cultural context of those books.
precious. precocious. one of those. my proofreader failed me today ;-)
A Siamang, photo courtesy of JunglePete Corradino.
Technically, it wasn’t a monkey, it was an ape called a Siamang, but I wouldn’t learn that detail for many years. 30 years, to be precise(ish).
Back on that day in the late 1970s, dad and I stopped at Wendy’s.
I guess we were there for lunch. We definitely weren’t there for primates.
We chose a table and I sat down. Dad was about to go to the counter to order when I noticed there was a bag behind my chair, presumably left by the recently departed occupants of the next table.
(This isn’t the weird part of the story).
In my memory it was one of those canvas totes like they sell at LL Bean, but I honestly can’t recall much about the bag.
Other than the fact that the bag was moving.
The bag was moving because there was a monkey inside.
Long hairy arms reached up out of the bag and grabbed the back of my chair. A small furry head followed and the two of us had what seemed to me to be pretty meaningful moment.
The events that followed probably unfolded quickly, but in my memory they happened in slow-mo:
My dad matter-of-factly instructed me not to talk to strangers or feed the monkey, since it might have a special diet.
My dad was very practical.
My dad went to call a deputy to come and pick up the monkey, since dad figured mom would kill us both if we took it home. Plus, it’d be wrong to take a lost-and-found monkey home.
While dad was at the counter asking for the manager and I was chatting with my new simian friend, a Wendy’s employee began to wipe down the table, saw the monkey, and freaked the fuck out.
The memory may be slightly murky, but I’m pretty confident in the sequence of events because I thought the employee was screaming because she saw me.
Which was more than a little upsetting. I was wearing my favorite dress! I loved that dress! Why was the woman screaming at me? Didn’t I look adorable in my favorite dress?
A girl came running in from the parking lot, panicked because she’d left her sister in a bag.
I swear that’s what she said.
“I forgot my sister. She was in the bag.”
She grabbed the diaper-clad creature and the bag, and then she ran back out.
I immediately stopped caring about the Wendy’s employee who was still staring in my direction and screaming, for I had just had an epiphany.
Wow! My parents can trade my baby brother in for a monkey! I knew this had to be possible!
My parents didn’t trade in my brother, but I guess in the long run that worked out okay.
(Still not the weird part).
Now that I think about it, this incident probably precipitated both my lifelong love of primates and my lifelong wariness around fast food.
Fast-forward a few years.
I was at a new school and one of my classmates lived on a monkey sanctuary. I was at his birthday party or something. We’ll call him JunglePete, because that’s his name.
(Calling a kid JunglePete would be weird, but at the time he was still just plain “Pete,” so in the final analysis this isn’t the weird part, either).
I was talking to one of his sisters. This, I shit you not, is a pretty accurate approximation of the conversation she and I had:
Her: “My sister left a monkey in a Wendy’s one time!”
Me: “We found a monkey in a Wendy’s one time!”
Her: “No way!”
Me: “For real. A monkey!”
Her: “That’s crazy! I wonder if it happens a lot?”
For smart kids, we weren’t always very smart.
Fast-forward a whole lot more years, to last Saturday, June 15, 2013.
Husband and I were at the Central Florida Zoo with JunglePete, his wife and son, and his father and his father’s wife.
Our first stop was the Siamangs.
When we made plans to meet at the zoo, I didn’t understand there was a personal nature to our mission. I thought we were just too cheap to go to Sea World during the peak season and had chosen a more off-the-beaten track Father’s Day outing destination.
It turns out that in the 70s, the sanctuary had a rescued Siamang named Bridget. Eventually, Bridget went to live at the Central Florida Zoo, which had better facilities for apes and a mate for Bridget. Bridget had some babies over the years, but she rejected one of them. JunglePete’s parents took in the baby, who they named Topaz.
(We haven’t gotten to the moment of weirdness in the story yet, but we’re getting closer).
After we visited with the Siamangs, we wandered around the zoo for a few more hours.
JunglePete & I at the Central Florida Zoo, photo courtesy of Eric “Husband” Gordon.
(Whatever is happening in this photo may or may not be a little weird, but is otherwise unrelated to this post).
At some point, JunglePete and I ended up back at the Siamangs and I casually mentioned to Pete that my dad and I found a monkey one time in a Wendy’s in Venice, Florida.
JunglePete replied that his family once almost left someone behind in a Wendy’s in Venice, Florida. But they didn’t leave a monkey – they left Topaz! Fortunately, they remembered as soon as they got back to their van and JunglePete’s older sister dashed back into the restaurant to reclaim her.
Being older and a little bit wiser, we understood that we were remembering the same event.
Okay, to be honest, we didn’t realize it immediately.
We didn’t realize it until Husband started laughing at us for being idiots.
Then we realized it was the same incident. What. Ever.
The fact that our childhoods had intersected years before we met was, even to us, pretty weird.
Then I made JunglePete talk to the Siamang. (While I made a video so he couldn’t deny it later).
[embedded video: me forcing JunglePete to speak Siamang]
Then 6 full-grown adults crammed themselves into a 1951 1/5 size replica train operated by a dude in a conductor’s hat who probably didn’t even think it was weird to be wedging himself into a tiny car and driving grownass people around all day in a miniature steam train.
I bet you think I’m making that part up.
I’m not.
This post is full of hazy memories from the late 1970s and early 80s. JunglePete’s mom and my dad are both deceased, so you’re at the mercy of mine and JunglePete’s memories on some of the details (and may god have mercy on your souls) but we do have witnesses who can corroborate the important points.
While writing this post I realized that I still have a habit of automatically checking behind my chair whenever I sit down in a restaurant, hoping to find another monkey.
I haven’t ever found another one. It’s probably a rare occurrence, but if you ever find one, please let me know!
On Saturday, standing there watching the relatives of the gibbon I met at Wendy’s several decades ago (and a hundred miles away), with the people who left the ape – that was weird. I think the word surreal is overused and often abused, but I’d go so far as to label the moment surreal.
Back in the 70s none of this was newsworthy. Or if it was, it didn’t occur to anyone involved to contact the press. Very few things in Florida are particularly odd to native floridians (except the weird & crazy crap that snowbirds and transplants do, but that’s a subject for another day). While writing this post I did, however, do a bit of googling and turned up a picture of Pete’s mom and Topaz from an unrelated news article about the sanctuary:
As for that day way back when? After lunch, dad and I went about our usual errands. We probably went to Lido Beach so I could play on the swings or up to Jungle Gardens to visit with dad’s friends. They’d shoot the breeze while I watched them milk the cobras to make anti-venom.
You know, the usual father-daughter stuff.
—–
editor’s note: I just changed some of the dates because JunglePete informed me I was off by a year or two here and there.
Also:
Full disclosure: obviously, it wasn’t a monkey. It was a lesser ape, but monkeys make better headlines. Plus, from 1978 to 2013 I thought it was a monkey so I use the word monkey a lot in this post even though I am well aware of the difference. Get over it.
This movie is so Not Good we hadn’t even gotten through the title sequence before a cocktail party broke out here in the living room.
So, BloodMonkey. A bunch of sociocultural anthropology graduate students go into the jungles of Thailand. Little do they know, BloodMonkeys live in the jungles of Southeast Asia. The students traipse into the jungle to work with megalomaniacal anthropologist Conrad Hamilton, played by Fidel Castro as played by F. Murray Abraham.
Sociocultural anthropologists who cavort about in the jungle collecting new species of wildlife?
Hint: this is not what sociocultural anthropologists do.
Technically, primatologists do something sort of vaguely not really kind of like what these people might possibly be doing, if gigantic bloodsucking gorillas actually existed and biological anthropologists or primatologists or biologists or zoologists were still chasing the idea of a missing link and those researchers got enough funding to randomly fly dozens of inexperienced grad students halfway across the world just so…well, it’s not really clear why they were chosen to fly to Southeast Asia.
Wait…I know…
This large group of inexperienced grad students were flown half-way around the world to die, bloody.
Yes, it all makes more sense to me now.
Clearly, I’m sober and it’s impairing my SyFy craptacular film judgment.
Hey! While I wasn’t paying attention the grad students developed some knowledge of anatomy and physiology, sort ot, but I think that’s just so when BloodMonkey shows up they’ll know what’s killing them.
Real primatologists would be able to tell that this thing that’s killing them all isn’t a BloodMonkey at all. It’s a BloodApe. BloodApe doesn’t have the same zing, does it?
What I really want to do here is move the “tags” from the footer of each post up into the byline, just below the “categories” list, but I can’t do that while BloodMonkey leeches away my IQ, so instead I’m just cleaning up the header and some of the navigation elements over there in the far-right column. This place is a mess. I’m a terrible blogger.
We’re also eating frozen custard. Banana pudding, in honor of BloodMonkey. Not really. We’re eating banana pudding frozen custard because that was the flavor of the day at the Dairy Godmother so I got some this afternoon and stashed it in the freezer for later because it’s awesome.
BloodyMonkey? Not awesome.
Wait, what just happened? Um, I guess that’s the end of the movie. I think it’s best to just let it rest in peace. BloodMonkey was bad, but it’s wasn’t Bad. And that’s too bad, because that means it was just boring when it wasn’t annoying us with it’s representations of anthropology, primatology, and with the way it besmirched the good name of BloodApes.
We should have made this a double feature with Congo but I think Husband is smart enough not to let that happen. Watching Congo late on a Friday night runs the risk we’ll be running around the house chanting, “Amy Good Gorilla” all weekend.
That’s a terrible quality clip, but it’s midnight and my brain has just been broken by BloodMonkey and the custard is wearing off and it’s the best I could do after almost 20 seconds of youtube searching.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know the news around the world has been bad lately. After days of unrelenting horror on the news, we’re all pretty worn down.
I hate to share a little more bad news, but learning about the death of Eduardo the Golden Lion Tamarin made me very sad. Sad enough to cry on the Metro. (Crying about the death of a monkey does get you a seat on the Metro even during rush hour).
Rest in peace, Eduardo. If there’s a monkey heaven, I hope you have a hot golden lion tamarin babe on your arm, an all-you-can-eat insect buffet, and all the poop you can throw.
