Godzilla, Godzilla 1985, and Piracy vs. Preservation

The film industry flourished out of piracy. From the moment a score of upstart studios and East Coast hucksters absconded from the New York backyard of Edison and his patent trolls to set-up their operations in the balmy, perennially filmable (and, via the Mexican border fewer than 100 miles away, escapable) city of Los Angeles before proliferating into the cultural scourge of Hollywood, piracy has defined the industry and been inextricable from its founding and evolution into a cultural and financial institution. Early nitrate films were bootlegged as studios vertically integrated. Flyover country’s second-run theaters screened unlicensed films as East Coast money wrestled away control from West Coast studio barons. Home video democratized bootlegging for anyone with a VCR as the entertainment industry consolidated into an oligopoly. And then the internet came and elevated the art of piracy again just before the streaming monoliths flattened all visual signals into the indecipherable noise of Content. 

Despite the inextricable natures of Hollywood productions and their piracy, the latter has always been cast as the dark shadow that looms over the former. But more than acting as a (contested) economic counterweight to the development of the film industry, piracy has often acted as a form–sometimes the only form–of ad hoc preservation for the films distributors can’t, or won’t, preserve themselves. 

Take, for example, the Godzilla films. Despite being a cultural monolith in Japan and the longest-running film series of all time–putting it with the likes of Star Wars or James Bond in the firmament of cinematic film franchises–the original Gojira did not even see a Toho-official, unedited cinematic release stateside until 2004, fifty years after its original release. Prior to that, the original version was mostly seen from questionably-sourced copies screened primarily in the local cinematheques of Japanese-American neighborhoods of a select few cities and the occasional film festival. 

For nearly half a century, one of the most famous films in the world was only available to one of the world’s most significant film markets in its original form through unofficial, pirated channels.

What most Americans–from Dick and Jane down the lane to Steven Spielberg himself–got instead was Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, a 1956 remix of the contemporary Japanese film with re-shot scenes inserting Raymond Burr (who would later achieve fame in Perry Mason) as foreign correspondent journalist Steve Martin. 

Though not without its charms, this film is considered by many to be a bastardization of the original source material and appreciated as a piece of kitsch and nostalgia. It might also, in its own way, be considered a piece of cultural piracy with its revisions, redubbing, mistranslations and (mis)interpretation solely justified by a $25,000 tribute payment to Toho studios–who for decades regarded international markets with little more than a shrug of the shoulders anyway. (A similar process would play out in Italy decades later, with Luigi Cozzi’s colorized and re-edited version of the original film being released in theaters there, a version now affectionately known as Cozzilla.)

This Americanization would continue. Most Shōwa era Godzilla films–when they received an American release at all–were dubbed and extensively re-edited, including King Kong vs. Godzilla, Mothra vs. Godzilla (retitled as vs. The Thing), Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (retitled as vs. the Sea Monster) and others. I’ve seen a few of these edited versions and they’re almost always for the worse. But, the thing is, none of those films went so far as to splice in an American actor into a universe of fake Japanese Shemps to recalibrate the whole film as though it were taking place from the perspective of one Anglo character. King of the Monsters! remained singular. A quirk. 

Enter Godzilla 1985. 

What’s easy to lose track of in the endless milieu of ’80s nostalgia and revivalism that has seemingly gripped American pop culture for the better part of two decades now is the fact that the decade itself was one of intense nostalgia for the bygone ’50s. Back to the Future, Peggy Sue Got Married, Family Ties and countless other films and media of that decade are explicitly culturally revanchist in their mindset to the lost glory days of American postwar empire predating the confusion, trauma and occasional liberation that had taken place across the ’60s and ’70s; the yuppie age of the ’80s saw a revitalized American conservative and capitalist tradition reasserting itself as the dominant American mode (embodied most obviously and superficially in the election of former ’50s B-movie star Ronald Reagan to the presidency). Given this, it makes sense that American distributors might see Toho’s revival of the Godzilla franchise across the Pacific and think back fondly on the Americanized version of their ’50s youth and wonder if maybe some wells weren’t worth dipping into twice (and it’s not like Burr was busy). 

The resulting 1985 remix we have here is, like its ’56 relative, a hatcheted, splintered version of a much superior film (truncated by 16 minutes from the original), cut into pieces which could then be arranged for an American audience distributors assumed would be too provincial to handle the original film and its Japanese sensibilities. This cultural chauvinism extends so far as to recasting Return of Godzilla’s agonizing USA/USSR nuclear brinkmanship over the airspace of a defiant, terrified Japan begging them to reconsider into a more uncomplicated form of international saviorism wherein the US heroically shoots down a missile deliberately launched by the Soviets in a moment of rogue panic. Much of this recontextualization takes place in the one set New World Pictures (the film’s U.S. distributor) could afford for Americanizing reshoots (a Pentagon war room) and set against an obvious, obnoxious Dr. Pepper sponsorship whose $10 million tie-in ad campaign outspent the American budget for the actual release of this film by a factor of three–another sign of the times. It’s… all a decision, to say the least. And it leaves us with a film which really is left struggling to articulate a justification for existing. 

That being said, Godzilla 1985 does exist, and the film history enthusiast in me sees this bastardization as no less worthy of preservation (if maybe not celebration) than its original counterpart. Even as historical curiosity, it reflects the cultural and economic context of its release and is valuable in that regard alone. Finding a version of this film, however, has been difficult. In my quixotic quest to tilt at kaiju windmills and watch every Godzilla film ever released, 1985 continued to elude me, with every success I thought I had in obtaining a version resulting in hitting PLAY and seeing the Toho production card indicating that all I’d actually secured was yet another copy of Return. 

Because as it turns out 1985’s home release history is spotty at best. One VHS edition retailing for nearly $80 a pop in 1986 (roughly $250(!) in 2024 dollars) became New World Pictures’ highest-grossing VHS release up to that point, but its success was hardly capitalized on. When New World was acquired by 20th Century Fox the home video distribution rights passed over to Anchor Bay (itself the product of a merger between Video Treasures and Starmaker Entertainment and which would itself be acquired by Starz and then merged with its parent company into Lionsgate in 2016 before being shuttered the following year), who released the film on VHS again in ’97 in a package of other Godzilla films (including Ghidorah, vs. Gigan, vs. Megalon and vs. MechaGodzilla) in preparation for Sony/TriStar’s maligned ’98 Godzilla film. A DVD version of 1985 to be released by Kraken Entertainment was planned to coincide with its distribution of Return on DVD, but music rights issues prevented it and the American version was scrapped even as the Japanese version was released without incident.

A 1080i scan of the original 35mm film was eventually broadcast in the mid-00s by satellite TV station Monsters HD (a subsidiary of Warner Bros., who somehow held the broadcast rights for the film now in the endless piecemeal swapping of IPs and corporate mergers that have defined the entertainment industry). This version, along with pieces from the various other forms of both 1985 and Return’s spotty release record, formed the basis of the Red Menace reconstruction project undertaken by fans starting in the early 2010s. 

Much like the Despecialized editions of Star Wars (whose team and backers the project took direct inspiration and assistance from), this project was the result of fan enthusiasts wanting to reconstruct an object of historical (and personal) interest that the Byzantine game of IP musical chairs had prevented 1985 from ever getting a proper HD release. 

These people, dedicating countless hours of their lives for the purposes of reconstructing this film as close to its original American release as possible, are heroes in the history of film and further evidence that despite the naysayers, what is commonly regarded as “piracy” so often acts as the only form of preservation possible for so many films whose potential profitability hovers around the $0 mark. There are far more films languishing unrestored and unreleased for public access out there–all of them less famous than Godzilla and its endless history of sequels and re-edits, and in many of these many never see a legitimate re-release under the stasis of the current regime of intellectual property rights. The legal conception of piracy is outmoded, and it stands to reason that if markets are failing to provide the service of proper preservation, a nonmarket solution is required. 

Gavrilo’s Archive – Godzilla 1985