Svengoolie Movie: “King Kong vs Godzilla”

I watched the 1962 movie “King Kong vs Godzilla” on the Svengoolie show last night and woke up this morning thinking it had to be a parody. So, I looked it up on the web and sure enough, there’s a Wikipedia article about the film stating director Ishiro Honda said it was a satire of the television industry in Japan.

This movie was pretty ridiculous and there was so much over the top slapstick comedy in it that I couldn’t believe anyone would see it as anything but satire. But the internet has many articles that don’t call it satirical.

I remember Sena watched some of it and asked me last night how I was going to rate it. I said “Zero!” at the time, before I found out it was satire. That was after I’d seen the two characters, Kinsaburo Furue (Yu Fujiki) and Keji Sahaka (Kazuo Fujita) encounter with the island natives who accepted gifts of cigarettes and a transistor radio as a bribe to gain their cooperation.

So, it seems superfluous for me to poke fun of it like I usually do with most of the films on the Svengoolie show. Even he joked about the poor dubbing in this movie.

I’m seeing this as satire and I’d give it a 2.5/5 Shrilling Chicken rating.

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Author: James Amos

I'm a retired consult-liaison psychiatrist. I navigated the path in a phased retirement program through the hospital where I was employed. I was fully retired as of June 30, 2020. This blog chronicles my journey.

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