Godzilla, Gojira: What's in a Name?

Fully understanding the charm and timeless appeal of a movie monster like Godzilla may not be entirely possible. It's campy Japanese old school FX allure is at times inexplicable. Is it the ungainly rubber suit?  Is it the film-makers' conscious pandering to fans with silly vulgarity? Here at MovieFanCollectibles, the fun starts with the name. We love the name. It has a power all its own. Anything that is ungainly or uncooperative in a mildly annoying way, for us, gets "-'zilla" attached to the end of its noun or proper noun (like "cat-zilla).

Where did such an evocative name come from? According to recently deceased (February 2010) pop culture historian and pulp SCI-FI writer Jim Harmon, there is much lore flying around about the naming of Godzilla. Apparently it all started, as these things often do, as a nick-name turned working title for the designers and writers developing the film's concept.

In film, concept often comes before plots, names of characters, or titles of finished movies in the can. A recent example was with the wonderfully bad disaster movie "Snakes on a Plane," or "SOAP" for short. SOAP was the working title for a high concept (i.e. light on plot) Hollywood action movie being shopped around to well-known actors. Samuel L. Jackson agreed to do the film, but only if they kept the silly working title.

The dynamic dino was first known as "Gojira," which Harmon says was a play on words from the first film's crew at Toho International productions (東宝株式会社 Tōhō Kabushiki-kaisha), who married the English word gorilla with the Japanese word for whale, "kujira." There you have it. To the Japanese, Godzilla looks like a big old "moby-kong."

For Western audiences, Gojira was translated by distributors into Godzilla. Harmon recounts further naming legend which says that Godzilla is supposedly a cross between a "god" or awesome creature of impressive size, and "zilla,"  which refers to the monster's lizard-like qualities.

Even if none of this is true, Harmon deserves major chops for spinning a good yarn in his tome, "The Godzilla Book."

Fun factoid: Toho International also produced the films of Akira Kurosawa.