Over the years, there have been a few Godzilla "resurgences" in the USA, and the time period of 1977-78 was certainly one of them. Marvel had launched a new GODZILLA title, Mattel was cranking out some show-stopping toys and games, but that wasn't all (see it all here at our chronological list of American Godzilla merchandise!), not to mention Hanna-Barbera's animated series that was about to start. This album was part of that wave of merchandise. I've said this before, but in short, it was a good time to be alive.
If you are a fan of the old Power Records/Peter Pan/etc., book-and-record type dramatic stories, you will enjoy this. It's not an easy task to produce audio stories about Godzilla, when the main character can't talk, narrate to himself, or interact directly with the cast. It would be a little easier if this were one of the products that came with a book or comic, but we don't have that luxury (or budget) here. All in all, the cast and writers do an admirable job.
Another characteristic of the 1977-78 time period was that the image used for this album cover (Herb Trimpe's cover for Marvel's GODZILLA #1) basically became Godzilla clip art, and was used in lots of places. It's an iconic piece of art. (I've always thought that the man in the lower right-hand corner looks a lot like S.H.I.E.L.D.'s "Dum Dum" Dugan, who actually made several appearances in the comic, so who knows.)
Two different, side-long adventures are presented, each less than 14 minutes: "Godzilla vs. Amphibion," and "Godzilla vs. The Alien Invasion." It would have been interesting to have included some sort of artwork showing us what some of this looked like, especially with Amphibion, an invention made just for this album.
This LP was re-released in 1998 (another "resurgence" period, because of the dumb American in-name-only movie) on CD by Golden Drive, which included some tracks of rather dull techno music to fill out the already-short disc. This disc went out of print, and may have been re-released in 2001 according to Amazon, but is once again believed to be out of print...if I'm wrong about that, the link you're about to see will disappear, and this post will become an "album review," so here goes:
1 comment:
Interesting find! Focusing more on the humans and their reactions to the creatures above them due to the format, but entertaining still.
It keeps with the campy feeling in both audios, and keeps the way that Godzilla is always near an event even going so far away from the ocean. I definitely would have loved to see more episodes of the Hanna Barbera show that took Godzilla away from the larger waters and put him further inland.
So the general idea was that he would be around 400 feet tall. His opponents usually met that height. Many big creatures in and out of this world.
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