MONSTERS OF THE UNIVERSE

GODZILLA

Not called the King of the Monsters for nothing. At once ghastly and cuddly, the atomic amphibian is a pop-culture phenomenon.

SPECIAL POWERS Atomic breath. And, in some movies, flight.

FIRST APPEARANCE Gojira (1954)

KING KONG

Giant gorilla labelled the Eighth Wonder of the World. Discovered on Skull Island, he’s a lover and a fighter.

SPECIAL POWERS Scaling skyscrapers, seducing blondes.

FIRST APPEARANCE King Kong (1933)

Godzilla is Year Zero of kaiju. No, we don’t mean Gareth Edwards’ 2014 blockbuster, and we certainly don’t mean Roland Emmerich’s “size does tatter” 1998 travesty, though more on both of those movies later. We are referring, naturally, to Ishirô Honda’s 1954 stonker-stomper Gojira, in which a huge beast (art director Akira Watanabe mashed up a Tyrannosaurus, an Iguanodon, a Stegosaurus and an alligator) is roused from the ocean by American nuclear testing, and soon targets Tokyo.

Not that Godzilla came out of nowhere. In the 1925 adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel , dinosaurs reared into roaring life courtesy of the genius stop-motion effects of Willis H. O’Brien, with a Brontosaurus busting loose in London to snap Tower Bridge like so many matchsticks. Eight years later, in 1933, O’Brien’s wizardry gave wide-eyed viewers the Eighth Wonder of the World in the form of King Kong, a giant ape who has a good old rumble in the jungle with assorted creatures on Skull Island before scaling the Empire State Building in Manhattan to swat at was awakened by an atomic bomb detonated in the Arctic. Pissed off, it headed to New York.