Superhero Media: Gamera the Giant Monster (1965)

This one's going to be a bit quick, as Gamera the Giant Monster doesn't do much to make the titular Kaiju heroic, but in order to understand where the series goes, it is necessary to take a look at. When mysterious, high-tech jets drop nuclear bombs on the Antarctic, a prehistoric monster is unleashed and begins a rampage across the world. Much like many of the early Kaiju films, Gamera the Giant Monster is about governments and the military combating a monster and trying to minimise casualties and destruction. To a modern sensibility, the film is more than a little globalist in outlook, with international cooperation in the face of a global threat being a logical conclusion, rather than an exception to the norm. There's not even a scene where the Americans try and take control of everything only to stuff it up. Plans fail because the people involved don't know all the variables, so they regroup and try again, pretty inspiring stuff, in its own way. 

All of the essential elements of later Gamera films are here, he eats flames and radiation, flies by spinning and shooting flames from his shell and protects children. The character isn't quite the same as the one who will fight Jigger later on, but the obvious attempts to copy the successful Godzilla formula are to be expected. In hindsight, the flaws are fairly forgivable in the same manner as Golden and Silver Age comics recycling the same origins and story-beats over and over; it's just the way these stories were told at the time. If cliche and rubber monster costumes are too much of a boundary to your enjoyment, then this genre really isn't for you. That said, if you like scale models or model railways, the scenery in Gamera the Giant Monster is really well done and brilliantly precise. That's a trend for the entire Gamera series, but given the lack of cheap plastics and prefabricated kits at the time this film was made, the work is all the more impressive.

 

Due to trauma in my teens, I can't quite recall if it was Gamera the Giant Monster or Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (1995) that was the first real kaiju film I saw, though I did have a poorly-dubbed copy of Gamera the Giant Monster on VHS. Gamera got me into Kaiju and has always been more interesting to me than the Godzilla franchise, specifically because Gamera is heroic in the later films. I have all of the Gamera films, other than Gamera the Brave on DVD, so expect to see the rest reviewed here in short order, as well as more kaiju-related games and supers. Giant monsters work perfectly with caped avengers, from the classic Marvel Godzilla comics to the failed Adam West Batman Meets Godzilla film, the two genres are practically made to share the spotlight.