Showa Series: Head Canon & Theories

[Legion1979]

Also the Xians more than likely knew it was going to be much harder to get ahold of Mothra than Godzilla and Rodan. Mothra wouldn't have made sense in that story.

To make some of this head canon work you need to ignore or rewrite what the actual films tell you.

[Rando Yaguchi]

To make some of this head canon work you need to ignore or rewrite what the actual films tell you.

Or just accept that the Showa movies are loosely connected at best, and that no amount of mental gymnastics is going to change that.

[Legion1979]

That works too.

[miguelnuva]

To make some of this head canon work you need to ignore or rewrite what the actual films tell you.

Or just accept that the Showa movies are loosely connected at best, and that no amount of mental gymnastics is going to change that.

The solo ones are. While no where near as tight as the Heisei series the showa Godzilla films do a good job of dropping Godzilla off in a similar place that last movie left him.

[Rando Yaguchi]

Hell, I wouldn't even describe the Heisei continuity as 'tight'. There are too many inconsistencies.

[szmigiel]

This type of head canon is sometimes difficult to accept because it goes against years of fan theories trying to link the films together. In my younger days I was all about trying to figure out how the films all link together into a coherent epic storyline.

There was easy mental leaps you could make
The end of GRA the ice Godzilla was trapped under became a solid glacier, then fell into the ocean to become an iceberg. Even though he was trapped inland in a valley between two mountain ranges.
The Xillians didn't need Mothra, Mothra become a cocoon. Even though Mothra never stays in the cocoon very long in any movie. Also it a still a pretty big omission to not mention Mothra as part of the events that drove King Ghidorah from the Earth. Side note, GTTHM has fight footage during the opening credits, IOTAM has no flashback footage from GTTHM.
By Godzilla Vs Hedorah they just except Godzilla as the hero of Earth and forget about all the destruction caused in the 50s and 60s.

Then there was the harder stuff
How DAM takes place at the end of the 20th century, yet in all the 70's movies he and most of the Earth monsters all hang out on an island together and don't even need special measures to try and keep them there.
I already went over the drastic changes between GvMG and TOMG.

This stuff doesn't get addressed in the films because this type of backstory information isn't really important to the plot of the movie. Which is why I just choose to look at each film as its own continuity, previous films may or may not have happened, or happened differently then what we saw. The reoccurring kaiju are more like actors reappearing in roles then a will put together narrative. It's funny how the films that are kind of direct sequels to the one before often have the biggest inconsistencies between events.

[CrimsonBloodX]

The end of GRA the ice Godzila was trapped under became a solid glacier, then fell into the ocean to become an iceberg. Even though he was trapped inland in a valley between two mountain ranges.

I actually came on this thread today to say that the thought of the ice that Godzilla was buried in breaking away from the Kamiko Island, which is said to have actually happened according to Wikizilla, sounds too far of a fetch. I mean, how the hell does that happen? It's not like the ice was hanging off the edge of the island because, like you said, Godzilla was between the mountains. I like to think that some years after the events of Godzilla Raids Again, an earthquake occurred at the location of Kamiko Island and the island sank into the ocean, and the ice that trapped Godzilla, which has formed into a single iceberg, broke off from the sinking island and drifted away.

[miguelnuva]

This type of head canon is sometimes difficult to accept because it goes against years of fan theories trying to link the films together. In my younger days I was all about trying to figure out how the films all link together into a coherent epic storyline.

There was easy mental leaps you could make
The end of GRA the ice Godzilla was trapped under became a solid glacier, then fell into the ocean to become an iceberg. Even though he was trapped inland in a valley between two mountain ranges.
The Xillians didn't need Mothra, Mothra become a cocoon. Even though Mothra never stays in the cocoon very long in any movie. Also it a still a pretty big omission to not mention Mothra as part of the events that drove King Ghidorah from the Earth. Side note, GTTHM has fight footage during the opening credits, IOTAM has no flashback footage from GTTHM.
By Godzilla Vs Hedorah they just except Godzilla as the hero of Earth and forget about all the destruction caused in the 50s and 60s.

Then there was the harder stuff
How DAM takes place at the end of the 20th century, yet in all the 70's movies he and most of the Earth monsters all hang out on an island together and don't even need special measures to try and keep them there.
I already went over the drastic changes between GvMG and TOMG.

This stuff doesn't get addressed in the films because this type of backstory information isn't really important to the plot of the movie. Which is why I just choose to look at each film as its own continuity, previous films may or may not have happened, or happened differently then what we saw. The reoccurring kaiju are more like actors reappearing in roles then a will put together narrative. It's funny how the films that are kind of direct sequels to the one before often have the biggest inconsistencies between events.

Your free to have your own head canon but all the movies are different continuites is just as much mantle gymnastics as the showa films fitting together.

Godzilla and Rodan provided the power to battle Ghidorah, Mothra is what was need to win. The Xillians only needed the raw power st that time.

Mothra would have provided noting other than the Shobojin would have likely figured out what was going on.

[szmigiel]

Really the head cannon isn't that hard, you just enjoy each movie as a stand alone film and don't worry about how the others fit in or don't. No mental gymnastics needed.

[LegendZilla]

Also the Xians more than likely knew it was going to be much harder to get ahold of Mothra than Godzilla and Rodan.

Mind explaining why?

Showa King Ghidorah is a formally divine being who was cursed by the "Deity/God", Princess Salno briefly refers to during GTTHM, to be stuck in the form of a (relatively) powerless asteroid.
However Ghidorah's spirit was strong enough to defy this curse and become a form of his own, but doing so shattered his mind into three pieces, the pain and rage he felt towards the deity drove him to destroy everything he saw, summon the universal force of gravity to his will, and take on the three headed form we know today.

That's a backstory for Ghidorah that I can get around! Would you care to elaborate on it?

[Legion1979]

Well let's think about it for a second. Mothra is a god that lives on an island, is worshiped by the natives and has a telepathic connection with two faries. Wouldn't have been easy to include Mothra in this plan, would it?

[JAGzilla]

Well let's think about it for a second. Mothra is a god that lives on an island, is worshiped by the natives and has a telepathic connection with two faries. Wouldn't have been easy to include Mothra in this plan, would it?

I mean... the islanders and Shobijin had absolutely no ability to stop the Xians from just flying in and picking Mothra up in one of those containment forcefields. There really was no reason for the Xians to communicate with humanity to begin with, either. They already had the power to do what they wanted.

[eabaker]

Well let's think about it for a second. Mothra is a god that lives on an island, is worshiped by the natives and has a telepathic connection with two faries. Wouldn't have been easy to include Mothra in this plan, would it?

I mean... the islanders and Shobijin had absolutely no ability to stop the Xians from just flying in and picking Mothra up in one of those containment forcefields. There really was no reason for the Xians to communicate with humanity to begin with, either. They already had the power to do what they wanted.

Sure, they can put her in a force field, but that's not the same as being able to wield her like a weapon the way they do with the other monsters,

[Legion1979]

And it's one thing to use Godzilla and Rodan, who are burdens on mankind in the first place. You can't pull that same stunt with Mothra

[szmigiel]

Let see Mothra caused a lot of destruction in Tokyo and New Kirk City, ranking up there with Rodan previous destruction. So I don't see how Mothra is any different than Godzilla or Rodan at that time. Also the Kilaaks have no issue controlling Mothra and making the larva do their bidding, destroying a train and participating in the attack on Tokyo in DAM. Being worshiped as a god by infant island didn't make her divine, that is more a Heisei onward concept. Kong was worshiped as a god on Faro island, didn't make him divine.

[godjacob]

Speaking of Kong, given he never appears again in the mainline Godzilla continuity after KKVG even with global alien invasion plots involved, my theory is that he died from injuries during his battle with Godzilla after swimming back home.

[Terasawa]

2. Godzilla was trapped in ice at the end of GRA… it doesn’t alter any events.

Trapped in ice inland on an island, not an iceberg floating in the Pacific, that is an alteration.

It's actually an iceberg floating in the Bering Sea (whereas the island in 1955 was in the Sea of Okhotsk), but yeah, this is a classic example of a continuity error that's almost never acknowledged. It's not very consequential, obviously, but it's a continuity error nonetheless (and thus a good candidate for head canon, nice job).

[szmigiel]

I will also admit that a sinking island, while absurd now, is an old trope and quite common at the time in pulp fiction novels. Hell Mu and Atlantis are supposed to be continents that sank. But it is still a bit of a stretch that something powerful enough to sink a whole island, crumbling mountains, would leave the ice untouched to become a floating iceberg with Godzilla inside.

[eabaker]

Let see Mothra caused a lot of destruction in Tokyo and New Kirk City, ranking up there with Rodan previous destruction. So I don't see how Mothra is any different than Godzilla or Rodan at that time. Also the Kilaaks have no issue controlling Mothra and making the larva do their bidding, destroying a train and participating in the attack on Tokyo in DAM. Being worshiped as a god by infant island didn't make her divine, that is more a Heisei onward concept. Kong was worshiped as a god on Faro island, didn't make him divine.

DAM is a monster rally that largely disregards the contexts in which its creatures originally appeared. Mothra is in the movie, but her identity and character traits are no more specifically relevant to the story than are those of Manda or Gorosaurus. Monster Zero, on the other hand, was a more direct continuation of previous movies, that was still someone invested in the characteristics of its specific monsters.

And whether or not she is regarded as divine (which I would say is very much implied in the original film), she is more consistently presented as intelligent, self-aware and capable of direct communication than most other kaiju, which could make it much harder to simply exercise direct control over her.

Kilaak technology is also capable of controlling human beings, but we're given no reason to assume the same is true of X-seijin technology.

[Terasawa]

DAM is a monster rally that largely disregards the contexts in which its creatures originally appeared. Mothra is in the movie, but her identity and character traits are no more specifically relevant to the story than are those of Manda or Gorosaurus. Monster Zero, on the other hand, was a more direct continuation of previous movies, that was still someone invested in the characteristics of its specific monsters.

Maybe not a coincidence that Monster Zero and the 1961-1966 Mothra movies were all written by Shinichi Sekizawa, whereas DAM was the only time Kaoru Mabuchi (at this point in full hack phase) wrote the Mothra character.

Mabuchi probably would have known about the Shobijin and the loose mythology, but if his assignment was to write a scenario which includes X, Y, and Z monsters, he wasn't going to give it much more thought than that.