There’s a new Godzilla & King Kong wrestling match in multiplexes right now: a tag team formation of the legendary monsters just three years after their last onscreen battle in the American production Godzilla vs Kong.  Do you know what’s never reached American theaters, though?  The original 1962 crossover film King Kong vs Godzilla – at least not in any wholly intact, wholly legal form.  It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that the 1954 Japanese cut of the original Godzilla officially reached American audiences, with the only widely available version being a warped American edit featuring awkward post-production inserts of actor Raymond Burr.  Twenty years later, that film’s second sequel, King Kong vs Godzilla, has still not yet been made wholly available for American audiences … but we’ve gotten damn close.  In 2019, The Criterion Collection released a gorgeous box set of digitally restored Showa Era Godzilla films, with every title dutifully de-Americanized except for King Kong vs Godzilla.  The original Japanese edit of that film is included in the set, but it’s stashed away among the supplementary Bonus Features on the final disc, not listed in sequence.  It’s also not fully restored to the image quality standards of the rest of the set; only the scenes left untouched by the American edit are in Blu-ray quality, while the reintegrated Japanese-only scenes switch to a jarring standard-definition DVD scan.  The reason for this choppy, half-complete restoration is somewhat mysterious to anyone who’s not an employee of Criterion, Toho, or Warner Bros, but I can at least say I’m grateful that it was included in the set at all, compromised or not.

The only reason King Kong vs Godzilla‘s muddled distribution history is worth noting in the first place is that the film was a significant creative swerve for both of its overlapping franchises.  If nothing else, it marks the first time either Kong or Godzilla were featured in color or in widescreen, three entries into both respective series.  The monsters’ onscreen crossover match being billed like a boxing PPV was a big deal, as it set the template for dozens of sequels to come: Godzilla vs. Hedorah, Godzilla vs. Mothra, Mothra vs. Godzilla, Godzilla vs. Megalon, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla … all the way to the aforementioned Godzilla vs. Kong.  More importantly, it was a major change in course for its titular monsters in terms of its intent & tone.  The original Godzilla film has obvious, deep roots in the cultural & historical contexts of 1950s Japan, but it also pulled a lot of narrative influence from the monster-movie template established by the 1930s American classic King Kong.  Kong’s second outing in 1933’s Son of Kong and Godzilla’s second outing in 1955’s Godzilla Raids Again—both rushed to market mere months after the success of their predecessors—were mostly just pathetic cash-in imitators of former glories.  Of the pair, Godzilla Raids Again feels especially superfluous, since it can only offer the novelty of seeing the pro-wrestling style kaiju battles of later Godzilla sequels filtered through the relatively elegant aesthetics of the original (through Godzilla’s fights with the dinosaur-like Anguirus, again recalling plot details from the original King Kong) with no other notable deviations.  Son of Kong is likewise shameless in its willingness to repeat the exact tones & events of its predecessor, but it at least introduces the adorably useless Little Kong of its title to keep the rote proceedings novel.  Together, they make for convincing evidence that both series would have to get goofy to keep going, which is where King Kong vs. Godzilla comes to the rescue.

1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla is a wonderfully goofy corporate satire that feels like it has less in common with previous Kong or Godzilla pictures than it has in common with more cartoonish titles like Giants & Toys and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?.  A lot of the early stirrings of my beloved Godzilla vs Hedorah seem to have originated here, from the psychedelic pop-art color palette to the tangential indulgences in Looney Tunes goofballery.  Our two skyscraper combatants are unleashed upon the modern world in ways that feel true to their origin stories but are heightened for comedic effect.  When an American nuclear submarine gets wedged on an iceberg in Japanese waters, a slumbering Godzilla explodes out of the ice to attack the crew onboard.  Meanwhile, Kong is once again collected from his island home to participate in low-brow vaudevillian entertainment, but this time it’s to boost the ratings for a television program that promotes the Japanese company Pacific Pharmaceuticals.  Shockingly, the island extraction sequence that sets Kong loose somehow feels even more racist than the 1930s film that inspired it (a sequence the original Godzilla copied with much more tact & grace), but if you can stomach the blackface humor long enough to get past it, the rewards are worthwhile.  Pacific Pharmaceuticals quickly establishes itself as the villain of the piece, exploiting their bungled extraction of Kong and the simultaneous emergence of Godzilla to craft the ultimate ratings booster: the world’s first televised kaiju battle.  Instead of nuclear proliferation or the exploitation of Nature, a novelty television program advertising Big Pharma drives the horror of the plot, damning capitalistic greed and bloodthirsty quests for increased ratings.  That theme can’t help but feel a little silly by comparison, and the movie smartly leans into the humor of its villains being incompetently evil in their selfishness instead of being knowingly evil in some grand mastermind scheme.  The world suffers for their folly regardless.

Of course, all of this plot detail and background context ceases to matter during the final act, when Godzilla & Kong finally start going at it in earnest.  I won’t spoil who wins that fight, but I will say that the result is bullshit.  There’s some great monster action throughout, though, including a sequence where a lightning-powered Kong fights an especially slimy octopus and one where Godzilla survives miniature missile fire from an army of toy tanks.  The most notable dynamic to the monsters’ one-on-one match-up is the difference in the care put into their respective looks.  Godzilla looks just as great as ever here, while Kong looks like his costume was left to melt on some forgetful production assistant’s dashboard on a summer afternoon.  I could not get over the bizarre, lumpy proportions of Kong’s hairy, apish body; it felt like I was standing naked in front of a full-length mirror, my exact body type finally represented onscreen.  The half-SD, half-HD lumpiness of the movie’s presentation had a similar kind of misshapen charm to it as well.  In truth, it was no worse than watching a movie on a streaming platform that frequently buffered down to a lower quality due to internet bandwidth constraints, which isn’t ideal for a Blu-ray purchase but also isn’t a total deal breaker.  However, it did have the unintended benefit of highlighting just how much of the original Japanese version of the film had been removed from its American cut, denoted by alternatingly crisped & blurred visual details.  It’s obviously a wonderful thing that Criterion was able to officially present King Kong vs Godzilla to an American audience for the first time in the half-century since it premiered in Japan, regardless of lumpiness.  It’s been so long since the film first came out that its titular combatants have since become tag team partners in fights against other, lesser monsters, so it’s somewhat embarrassing that their original outing together is still partially stuck in a distribution limbo.  King Kong vs. Godzilla is a deeply silly film, but it’s also a historically important one, and it should be treated as such.

-Brandon Ledet