Godzilla
It’s hard to argue with the badassitude of a gigantic, hundred foot tall, irradiated lizard with giant spikes sticking out of his back who spends his nights and weekends shooting atomic fire out of his mouth, pummeling large industrial metropolises into cinderblock dust, and punching the shit out of anything larger than an elephant until it explodes into giant globules of monster goo. Godzilla (binominal name Godzillasaurus Monstrum) is just the sort of monster who fits that particular bill, and he’s been doing it better than anyone for over half a century.
Godzilla is the prime example of why you should never fuck with the power of scientific evolution – the legend goes that when the goddamned Americans dropped Fat Boy and Little Man on Japan back in ’45, the colossal nuclear fallout and intense radiation turned a regular every-day foul-tempered prehistoric flesh-eating lizard-dinosaur on a remote island somewhere in the Pacific into a gigantic airplane-crushing monster capable of head-butting skyscrapers into the next time zone and obliterating an entire city block by ripping a really loud nuclear-powered EMP fart. Now he shows up and terrorizes the countryside every so often(kind of like the Terrasque) in a crazy drunken rage, bashing everything he sees and flexing his nuts before returning to the murky depths of the ocean to hibernate underwater somehow.
Godzilla is huge. And by huge, I mean really fucking huge. He’s so big he makes the T. Rex from Jurassic Park look like something out of one of those fruity calendars with pictures of newborn kittens on them, and unlike a lot of epically giant things out there he has the good sense to use his massive size as a means with which to destroy anything that crosses his path, smashing buildings with his giant fucking tail, punching pagodas until they become giant flaming explosions, and using commuter trains as nunchucks with which to pummel the life of out other giant mutated monsters that get in the way of his mission to completely eradicate all human life on the planet.
Another sweet thing is that Godzilla is completely unpredictable, and as such represents the Ultimate Duality of Awesome: When he leaves the warm beaches of Monster Island and emerges from the dark waters near the Japanese coastline you don’t know if he’s there to smash orphanages or save the universe from a rampaging giant space monster who shoots lasers out of his forehead and spits acid on hot Japanese babes. That’s just how he rolls. One minute he’s Earth’s savior, the next minute he’s grabbing handfuls of cheering humans and grinding them between his massive pointy teeth.
The most daunting thing about Godzilla is that he’s virtually indestructible, and his scaled hide is tougher to penetrate than a home-schooled Mormon chick. Tank shells, surface-to-air missiles, and armored-piercing ammunition only succeed in making him angry. You can crash jet fighters into his eyes and he won’t even blink – he’ll just clench his fists and start breakdancing in the middle of downtown Tokyo. Even shooting him in the fucking face with a nuclear warhead only makes him EVEN MORE POWERFUL, because he sucks up radiation like a Geiger counter in Chernobyl and it has roughly the same effect on him as if he drank the contents of a gasoline tanker filled with Red Bull, Viagra and pure Columbian cocaine. Shit, every once in a while he gets randomly struck by lightning for no reason, and the next thing you know he’s fucking shooting bolts of electricity out of his hands like a malfunctioning stun gun or a 5th-Level Evoker. Even on the off-chance that some monster gets a lucky shot and knocks Godzilla out of action, or the humans come up with some crazy fucking Sleep Ray and send him into hibernation or some shit, Godzilla has a mutant healing factor that makes Wolverine look like a hemophiliac and he comes back to life more regularly than Jason Voorhees. You can’t finish him off – the guy has been around for almost sixty years with no signs of slowing down – and he’s never going to get bored of stomping asses across the Tokyo skyline. The dude’s completely leveled that city like a hundred times, yet those crazy Japanese just keep re-building it only to somehow still act like they’re really fucking surprised when Godzilla shows up and does it again.
Of course, Godzilla’s not just out to destroy the entire population of Japan – he also enjoys beating the fucking shit out of the vast array of bizarre mutated monsters who dare to step on his turf. It doesn’t matter how crazy the thing is, how many heads it has, or how impractically gigantic it is, Godzilla just emits his trademark ear-piercing, window-shattering scream, beats his chest like a giant green Tarzan, and starts Greco-Roman wrestling the giant cockroach until it’s arms break off and it gets it’s limbless body hurled into an erupting volcano on the surface of the Moon. He’s got madBruce Lee Kung Fu skills and a tail that delivers more force than the demonic love-child of an F5 tornado, a 10.5 Earthquake and a Category 5 Hurricane, and if that doesn’t knock his enemy out of action he shoots a giant beam of blue atomic energy out of his mouth and burns the fucking shit out of anything he wants with more effectiveness than a Disintegration Ray. Nobody can fuck with him – he’s taken Ghidrah, Mecha Ghidra, Jet Jaguar, Megalon, Rodan, Mothra, Gigan, Anguirus, Biollante, Space Godzilla and Mecha Godzilla, and a bunch of other beasts with crazy fucking names that may or may not feature the word “Mecha” and turned them into giant bloody smears across the Japanese countryside. He’s the fucking King of the Monsters, bitches, and he’s willing to prove it to any giant two-hundred foot tall carnivorous, fire-breathing, flying eating machine that thinks it can front on him. Sometimes when he gets bored he even joins up tag-team with other monsters in epic four-way giant monster fights, which is pretty fucking rad.
Now, as I’ve done previously with the illustrious Captain James T. Kirk, allow me to attempt to summarize the mighty Godzilla in four awesome pictures:
As if it’s not badass enough that Godzilla is an insane fucking huge-ass lizard that levels cities, eats Humvees and judo throws giant floating moths into the sides of Mount Fiji, he’s also accomplished what few actors in history ever have – he’s got his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Links:
Barry's Temple of Godzilla
Godzilla at petcaretips.net
Godzilla on DVD (where I found most of these pictures)