How many dinosaurs have atomic breath? Have you ever woken up next to one?
I know, I know, strictly speaking, Godzilla is not a dinosaur. Don’t give me any guff. All I’m looking for is an hour’s worth of “fearfully great lizards” (from the Greek), and I don’t care how I get them.
This week on “Picture Perfect,” with Godzilla back in theaters, I thought it would be a good time for Godjira to rise from the surf yet again for another day of sand and fun.
We’ll hear music from the film that kicked off the latest American attempt at a Godzilla franchise, titled, simply and leanly, “Godzilla” (2014), a “reboot” of the long-running Toho series. Since every Hollywood blockbuster these days seemingly aspires to emulate comic books, the film was planned as the cornerstone of yet another cinematic Tower of Babel. Reportedly, next year Godzilla will finally fight Kong (again). I kind of miss when he was just a guy in a suit, though…
As these things go, “Godzilla” was not too bad, with at least some show of restraint in not revealing too much of the titular monster too soon (some felt it couldn’t be soon enough), especially in the film’s marketing. Also, the producers managed to assemble an A-list cast, including Bryan Cranston, Academy Award winners Juliette Binoche and David Straitharn, Japanese Academy Award winner Ken Watanabe, and soon-to-be Best Actress (for “The Shape of Water”) Sally Hawkins. The music was by Alexandre Desplat, in recent years everywhere at once.
Of course, Godzilla is not the only pre-historic being to sport fashionable beachwear. “One Million Years B.C.” (1966) featured special effects by the legendary Ray Harryhausen and an equally legendary fur bikini, worn by Raquel Welch.
Not to be confused with the recent “10,000 B.C.,” this was actually a Hammer Studios remake of a 1940 Hollywood film, “One Million B.C.” – a fact as little known as the well-kept historical secret that man and dinosaurs did indeed co-exist. With its stop-motion dinosaurs, fur bikinis, and Peter Brady-style volcanoes, this cheese ball classic is a guilty pleasure indeed. The music was by Mario Nascimbene, who wrote one of my favorite scores for Kirk Douglas, “The Vikings.”
Some kinder, gentler fare will be served up by way of the animated film “The Land Before Time” (1988). Executive produced by Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Kathleen Kennedy, and Frank Marshall – all of whom were involved with “Raiders of the Lost Ark” – this Don Bluth-directed opus about anthropomorphized dinosaurs spawned a profitable franchise, with at least 12 direct-to-video sequels. The music for the original was by James Horner.
Spielberg turned to B-movie source material for his visual inspiration for “Jurassic Park” (1993), based on the novel by Michael Crichton. The herky-jerky dinosaur effects of yore were replaced with state of the art computer-generated effects, in this story of a safari park gone wrong.
The premise this time takes advantage of the most recent scientific thinking, albeit filtered through a prism of speculative wonder and horror – DNA extracted from mosquitoes trapped in amber, cloning, and the theory that dinosaurs were not lizards, after all, but rather birds.* John Williams music proved to be the Tyrannosaurus rex among his film scores of the 1990s.
Join Godzilla and me for a dinosaur clambake, on “Picture Perfect,” Friday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
*If we’re going to drag science into the thing, here’s an amusing article I discovered in Smithsonian Magazine, in which paleontologists speculate what dinosaurs may have been a part of Godzilla’s DNA. Before his radioactive mutation that is.
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