Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #176 Godzilla Vs. Megalon (1973)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

I recently started writing about the films of Oliver Stone for another patron recently but I am always up for writing random Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 pieces because, as I am prone to mentioning, the Patreon for this website has nose-dived over the past year and I desperately need the money these articles bring in just to survive. 

Of course it always helps if a Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 selection ties into a big new movie that people are talking about and, of course, if the movie sparks the curiosity of my inner thirteen year old, the one who makes most of the decisions regarding this website and its contents. 

The wonderfully bonkers 1973 monster movie Godzilla Vs. Megalon goes even further in its nostalgic appeal. Watching stunt men in rubber kaiju suits grapple clumsily over the fate of humanity reconnected me with the eight year old me who loved watching shitty Godzilla movies on syndication as a small child. 

The Godzilla of Godzilla Vs. Megalon is the one that I grew up with, a big, dumb, cheesy goofball hero for small children and the easily entertained rather than the terrifying, nightmarish embodiment of nature’s fury towards the arrogance and over-reaching of man he was initially.  

Godzilla mythology insists that he is, to use the subtitle of the 2019 Godzilla sequel, King of the Monsters, a veritable God with the power to both destroy our planet in a fit of righteous rage and save it. 

But in Godzilla Vs. Megalon he cuts an unintentionally comic, even bumbling figure. Godzilla here is a bit of a lumbering oaf, an old-timer getting by on name recognition. 

Godzilla Vs. Megalon ends with Godzilla politely shaking hands with Jet Jaguar in recognition of the fine work they did together defeating Megalon and Gigan before he lurches away in triumph. 

Shaking hands! Godzilla shakes hands with a giant robot! Somewhere between’s 1954’s seminal, fundamentally serious Godzilla and Godzilla Vs. Megalon the character went from being an unstoppable force of apocalyptic fury to a guy who does his job, shakes hands, then waits for humanity to call him again when they need him to fight another giant monster. 

Godzilla doesn’t even need to be in Godzilla Vs. Megalon. He’s not the most important character. That would be Jet Jaguar. He’s not the second most important character. That would be the titular Megalon. 

Despite the title, in Godzilla Vs. Megalon, Godzilla is only the third most important character by a fairly sizable margin but he’s on hand because his name sells tickets and puts butts in seats and Jet Jaguar and Megalon were both introduced here, and consequently did not come into it with a sizable following. 

It’d be like if D.C wanted to introduce a new superhero named Strong Guy and it wasn’t going well until they decided that maybe Strong Guy could call up his good buddy Superman for help because The Thrilling Adventures of Superman and Strong Boy promised to be WAY more popular than a solo vehicle for Strong Boy by himself. 

So even though Godzilla Vs. Megalon would more accurately be titled Jet Jaguar Vs. Megalon the big green guy is in the mix all the same.

Godzilla Vs. Megalon opens with an underground nuclear explosion that irritates the fuck out of Godzilla and the rest of his contemporaries on Monster Island. But the inhabitants of the underground kingdom of Seatopia are much more than unsettled by these nuclear blasts near their underwater haven.

The Seatopians are not happy about foolish surface-dwellers threatening their watery paradise with their awful weapons of destruction.

So Seatopians decide to fight this atomic aggression by sending a monster of their own to avenge them in the form of Megalon, a giant, beetle-like kaiju who can fly and level large cities with bolts of electricity and the fire bombs that it spits from its mouth. 

But that’s not enough for the Seatopians. So they decide to hedge their bets by assuming control of Jet Jaguar, a super-powerful robot ostensibly created by a small child as part of as contest Godzilla mavens Toho Studio threw to come up with a new character for their movies. 

Apparently Toho changed the boy’s design so dramatically that when he saw the finished project he wept. That’s crazy because the version of Jet Jaguar that appears in the movie very much looks like he was dreamed up by someone under the age of ten. 

He’s a garishly painted flying robot with a head shaped like a shark’s fin with a vaguely ghoulish smile that never changes. 

The Seatopians are a technologically advanced race that created its own oxygen supply and sun so that it could live underwater indefinitely yet somehow lacks the know-how to create a super-powered robot of its own. 

When the scientist who created Jet Jaguar asks the Seatopian intent on stealing control of his creation in order to help guide Megalon in his destruction why Seatopians aren’t able to create a robot of their own if they’re so damned smart and superior he does not have an answer at all, let alone a good one. 

Godzilla Vs. Megalon opens by raising raising fascinating and thorny ethical dilemmas it then proceeds to ignore entirely. It begins by positing the Seatopians as an advanced, even super-human race that has been devastated and nearly destroyed by the sociopathic destructiveness of the human race. 

Then the Seatopians disappear pretty much entirely so that the movie can focus on the more crowd-pleasing spectacle of giant monsters and robots beating each other up. 

Godzilla Vs. Megalon is hilariously inconsistent in its production values. Stock footage of real tanks firing weapons are followed by shots of Megalon “destroying” what are clearly plastic toy military vehicles. 

The movie’s treatment of Jet Jaguar is even more mesmerizingly insane and all over the place. First he’s a robot controlled by his creator. Then he’s a robot controlled by the Seatopians.

Jet Jaguar’s inventor programmed him for survival so at a certain point he decides that to operate at peak efficiency he will need to become sentient and follow his own will instead of relying on orders like literally every robot before him. 

Jet also makes the wise decision to become Godzilla-sized for the sake of battling giant kauji because that somehow is also part of his programming. So if it seems like Jet Jaguar is man-sized in some scenes and as big as a skyscraper in others that’s because he is, something that totally makes sense within the context of the film and isn’t at all jarring. 

The Seatopians don’t stop there. To help Megalon in his quest to destroy humanity, they recruit one-eyed, horned monster Gigan. If Gigan’s suit were capable of expressing emotions it’d undoubtedly convey the kaiju’s confusion as to what exactly he’s doing in the movie, beyond adding more monsters to the mix. 

In its last twenty minutes Godzilla Vs. Megalon becomes the royal rumble its title promises, with good guys Jet Jaguar and Godzilla facing off against Megalon and Gigan in a battle over the fate of our planet.

Even by the exceedingly lenient standards of a Godzilla movie, this is gloriously, even transcendently ridiculous, a b movie fever dream filled with hot jazz, martial arts, chases and of course lots of monster on monster action. 

I know Gigan and Jet Jaguar only as monsters MF DOOM referenced extensively in both his King Geedorah project and his Monsta Island Czars posse album, where he assumed the title/persona of King Geedorah to MF Grimm’s Jet Jaguar and Tommy Gunn’s Megalon. 

So I was tickled pink that DOOM, in his warped genius, not only appropriated much of Godzilla Vs. Megalon for his own ends, mythology and character-wise but also sampled the movie’s surprisingly jazzy, terrific score for one of his songs. 

Of course it helps that Godzilla Vs. Megalon only lasts about eighty minutes. Unlike the 2014 Godzilla, this doesn’t last over two hours and take itself way too seriously. 

Godzilla Vs. Megalon made me feel like a stupid, silly kid again, which is the highest praise you can give a movie like this.  

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