Word: godzilla
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Japan's all-time box-office champion is 150 ft. (46 m) tall and has gray skin, opposable thumbs and very bad breath. Since he first lumbered onto the silver screen more than half a century ago, Godzilla has been the star of 27 feature films and countless documentaries, television series, animated cartoons, video games, comic books, T shirts, action figures and lunchboxes. There have been other Japanese movie monsters - lots of them - but only Godzilla has his own star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame...
...Behind this successful movie monster there is a formidable special-effects man. His name: Eiji Tsuburaya. He created not only Godzilla, but also Rodan, Mothra, Ultraman and a pantheon of fire-breathing reptiles and aliens. He also inspired a generation of imitators and ushered in the golden age of monster movies, or kaiju eiga, of the 1950s and '60s. If you were young and Japanese back then, you would know Tsuburaya's handiwork, perhaps even his name. He has been the subject of three or four biographies in his home country, and such contemporary movie giants as Steven Spielberg...
...scale models of Tokyo just right, Tsuburaya surveyed the city from rooftop elevations (on one occasion, when he was overheard talking with a colleague about how exactly they planned to destroy the neighborhood, the two were detained by security guards). Instead of filming a puppet of Godzilla in stop-motion, as O'Brien had done for King Kong, Tsuburaya put an actor in a rubber suit and ran the camera at high speed, making Godzilla's movements seem appropriately ponderous when played back. The suit, however, weighed 220 lbs. (100 kg), and the actor inside it lost...
...take themselves too seriously: think less prep-schooled Strokes and more a down-home Modest Mouse. Their video for the song “Wild Mountain Nation” is a mash-up between a Best Week Ever skit and Warhol kitsch. Much like a disjointed nightmare, a Godzilla-sized lead singer dwarfs the skyscrapers around him, a cut-out plane flies overhead, and a man parachutes into a giant flower pot. Sound like a trip? At the very least, it was probably inspired by one at some point along the creative process. And then the band plays...
...history. Adding to the tinder were those Santa Ana winds, which strike regularly in the autumn but rarely with the power of the past week. "They usually come in small, medium and large," says Bill Patzert, a climatologist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "These were Godzilla winds...