"Scooby Doo at sea with Giant Monsters". That effortlessly sums up this animated adaptation based on the famous Godzilla franchise. This is Godzilla, stuffed into every 70s cartoon cliché you can think of. Yet despite its unoriginal premise, dated production values, and formulaic nature, Hannah Barbera's GODZILLA does showcase some tremendous monster fights with an old school charm.
Here is how the formula works. Bunch of perpetual travellers and their goofy talking animal friend stumbles onto this week's plot and our new creature of the episode. They get into a scrape, creature appears. Bunch fends off creature with the help of Godzilla. They get chased around a bit by human (or humanoid) foes and somehow the plot device to summon Godzilla becomes useless. Finally they get some convenient twist that allows them to once again summon Godzilla, just as the big monster re-emerges. Giant monster battle ensues, Godzilla wins, and the bad guy would have succeeded if it were't for those meddling kids.
Minus off the giant monsters and it is your typical Scooby Doo plot. Instead of travelling in the Mystery Machine, our bunch consisting of no nonsense leader Captain Majors, science exposition person Dr Quinn, her assistant the token African American Brock, irritating kid Pete and the Godzilla's goofy cousin Godzooky, all travel in the research vessel Calico. These characters are as one dimensional as executed from cartoons of the era. Their dialogue serves only for exposition purposes, literally explaining the plot to each other, or for comedy purposes; especially when it comes to Godzooky. Godzooky is Scooby Doo, right down to his cowardly demeanour, his interactions with the crew, even his voice. Credit goes to the voice actors who do rather well given the material they had to work with and the overall juvenile tone.
On the production side, this cartoon suffers from bad cases of off-model artwork, recycled animation, and the now-infamous ever-changing scale of the monsters and backgrounds. Art detail ranges from hilariously bad and flat to the occasional impressive level of detail (mostly in the reused stock footage). The infamous scale issues have monsters like Godzilla seemingly changing size at random. At one point, the whole Calico ship can fit in Godzilla's palm, the next scene shows him having to hug the ship with both arms to carry it. Or perhaps a scene where Godzilla walks up to an airport control tower to smash it. The next scene shows him stomping his foot down on not just the control tower (which was previously shown to be up to Godzilla's waist) but a couple of plans parked on the runway too!.
Despite these glaring shortcoming, there are some particularly awesome episodes and edge back to the spirit of the Godzilla movies. And in some ways, this is an improvement over some of the more horrid Godzilla movies like Godzilla Vs Megalon.
For starters, there's Godzilla himself and the monster fights. Yes, they replaced Godzilla's roar, and yes the monster fights sound like grown men making beastial noises at each other. But damn if they weren't awesomely storyboarded. When our titans clash, the entire scene rumbles and shakes with every gargantuan blow, the ground trembles with each giant step. At close-ups, Godzilla's own roar rattles the screen with his sheer power. Animation allows more mobility for the characters compared to actors in suits, and this cartoon makes good use of the animation medium, delivering fantastic fight sequences that would have been near impossible to pull off in live action with rubber suits. All this is set to powerful background music, some of which are reused from previous Hannah Barbera productions, but used here to good effect. Godzooky is also an improvement from the live action movies' "Minila", Godzilla's supposed dim witted, possibly deformed, son.
For every cartoony episode, you have those that return to the live action film's nuclear power cautionary tale. For every crappy monster design like that cyclops thing, you have designs that illicit pure terror like the Breeder beast. Some episodes deal with isolated incidents while in others the fate of the entire world hangs in the balance. Then, the series closes on a powerful high note with Godzilla taking on heavily armed military forces like in the original Japanese classic.
Compared to other cartoons of its time, Godzilla does stand out among the better ones. As a Godzilla production, it is right there in the middle. It has its flaws, but it has some good redeeming factors as well. While it may not hold up to today's standards, Godzilla would no doubt fascinate kids and anyone's inner child with majestic monster mayhem.
