While it was absent from Japanese cinemas in the late fifties, Godzilla became an international star. Producer Joseph E. Levine acquired the rights to the original 1954 film, and after it was famously altered with newly filmed scenes starring Raymond Burr as a reporter caught in the monster’s path, the “Americanized” Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956) became a smash across the U.S. This version, distributed far more widely around the globe than the original Japanese cut, introduced the world to the transliterated name Godzilla, and, perhaps more significantly, it created a template for U.S. distributors to acquire (cheaply) Japanese genre pictures, dub them (often poorly) into English, and make other edits and deletions as they saw fit, sometimes to the films’ great detriment. In Japan, kaiju eiga were regarded as mainstream genre pictures with relatively big budgets and big stars; overseas, the films became laughable B movies, thanks largely to American distributors’ mishandling of them. (Among the most egregious cases in point is Godzilla Raids Again, which was severely reedited, dubbed, rescored with library tracks, and retitled Gigantis, the Fire Monster.)

After World War II, Japan was decimated by poverty, food shortages, crime, and a general malaise that continued into the fifties. But by 1962, the country’s “economic miracle,” a rapid recovery fueled by robust overseas trade and other factors, had changed the national mood to one of optimism. Fittingly, Godzilla’s return to the big screen exchanged the black-and-white pessimism of the first two films for color-and-widescreen action comedy. Toho had secured the rights to star King Kong in a film and needed a worthy opponent for the big ape, and thus came King Kong vs. Godzilla (released in Japan in 1962 but presented here in its 1963 international version). It was one of Toho’s banner thirtieth-anniversary releases, and it was a blockbuster, placing fourth at the box office in an exemplary year for Japanese cinema; it remains the most highly attended Japan-made Godzilla film of all time. Honda directed the film in the vein of Toho’s popular salaryman comedies and parodied the banality of Japanese television programming, which a prominent social critic worried at the time was turning Japan into a “nation of one hundred million idiots.” Even so, Honda still viewed Godzilla as an antiwar, antinuclear symbol, and he was uncomfortable with the studio’s insistence that the monsters engage in humanized behavior and physical comedy, harbingers of future developments. The final battle has Kong—portrayed by an actor in a furry costume rather than with the stop-motion techniques of the original King Kong—and Godzilla mimicking comical professional-wrestling moves. The severely recut version that Universal-International released in the U.S. the following year was a big box-office hit as well. Following this film’s success at home and abroad, the Godzilla franchise truly began. Other studios soon produced copycat kaiju eiga, the most famous being Daiei’s films featuring the giant flying turtle Gamera, the first of which came out in 1965.

The Godzilla movies of the sixties show evidence of Japan’s continuing economic growth—a rising consumer culture, amusement parks, massive construction for the 1964 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo. Meanwhile, Godzilla and its monster costars evolved from existential threats into Japan’s protectors. Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964) marks the last Showa appearance of a truly hostile, destructive Godzilla; later that same year, in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra begrudgingly team up to fight the titular threat. American producers now began investing in Toho’s monster films and bringing faded Hollywood stars to Japan in order to make the films even more salable abroad. Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965) has Godzilla starring opposite Nick Adams of television’s The Rebel. Unburdened by war symbolism, the monsters now evince even more of a comic streak; after a skirmish in Invasion of Astro-Monster from which it emerges victorious, Godzilla does a silly jumping dance made popular by a manga character around the same time.

The Godzilla series was by now indulging in vague continuity and tonal shifts from film to film—inconsistencies that would continue throughout the remainder of the Showa series, and that reflect the influences of two principal screenwriters, each with a very different style, who wrote the majority of Toho’s kaiju eiga. The affable, young-at-heart Shinichi Sekizawa (credited on ten Godzilla films, starting with the King Kong crossover) penned more lighthearted, fantastical, and upbeat monster movies; the more pessimistic, antiauthoritarian Takeshi Kimura (a.k.a. Kaoru Mabuchi) wrote stories with darker themes (including 1968’s Destroy All Monsters and 1971’s Godzilla vs. Hedorah). As Godzilla transformed from public menace to heroic figure, the monster was given more personal characteristics; Haruo Nakajima, the principal “suit actor” to play Godzilla from 1954 on, relished the part and gave the monster recognizable traits and tics—a menacing stare, a cocky attitude, a courageous determination—that were a big part of its appeal around the world. Nakajima would continue to play Godzilla until retiring in 1972.

By the latter half of the sixties, television viewership had exploded, and Japanese films were fast losing ground at the box office. Kaiju eiga, with their relatively big budgets, were prime targets for cutbacks. While Honda took a two-year hiatus from Godzilla films, the reins of the series went to action director Jun Fukuda, whose Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966) takes cues from the James Bond series and whose Son of Godzilla (1967) combines sci-fi technology, giant insects, Godzilla’s offspring Minilla, and a female castaway living in the jungle, Tarzan-style. Both films are set on islands, eliminating the need to build costly miniature cityscapes, and with Eiji Tsuburaya now dividing his time between Toho and his own television production company, Tsuburaya Productions, the special effects were directed by his protégé, Sadamasa Arikawa. There is a fresh energy and pace to the Fukuda films that contrasts with Honda’s more reserved approach; both also feature rousing, jazzy scores by Masaru Sato, the primary composer for Akira Kurosawa. The year 1967 marked Japan’s “kaiju boom,” as all five movie studios produced at least one giant-monster feature for the first and only time. But the genre’s popularity had peaked five years earlier.

Thus, Toho soon pulled out the stops for what was expected to be the Godzilla series’s finale. Destroy All Monsters features an unprecedented eleven monsters on-screen and marks the final collaboration by the creative team behind the original Godzilla and its most popular sequels up to this point: Honda, the serious, peace-minded war veteran whose even-keeled and epic-scale direction defined the tone and themes of the kaiju eiga; Tsuburaya, now acting as special-effects supervisor, whose imagination gave life to a world of monsters and aliens unlike any other; Ifukube, the renowned classical composer whose instantly recognizable motifs, inspired by the work of Russian composers such as Igor Stravinsky as well as the music of Japan’s indigenous Ainu people, provided the genre’s pounding pulse and underscored the power and awe of Godzilla, Rodan, King Ghidorah, and their fellow monsters; and producer Tanaka, who oversaw the creative evolution of Toho’s kaiju eiga as the mass audience became younger and younger. Destroy All Monsters sees Godzilla embracing its role as king of Toho’s monster-verse; the final battle, with the monsters assembled at Mount Fuji, is among the series’s most memorable. The film placed twelfth at the Japanese box office for the year, the last of the Showa Godzillas to make the trade journal Kinema junpo’s annual rankings. Destroy All Monsters remains a fan favorite on both sides of the Pacific, and as it turned out, its success was enough to keep the series alive, though the members of the genre’s talent nucleus would not all work together again.

Godzilla’s evolution into a children’s entertainment figure had begun with King Kong vs. Godzilla and continued as Toho sought to expand the kaiju eiga audience and maintain box-office viability. By 1965, most fan mail Honda received was from primary-school students, but it was not until All Monsters Attack (1969) that a Godzilla movie was made expressly for children. Directed by Honda and written by Sekizawa as a cost-saving project that would utilize stock scenes from previous Godzilla movies, this low-low-budget affair is a gem in the Godzilla franchise, a universal growing-up story and a meta–monster movie acknowledging that kaiju are make-believe. It’s also a film about the trade-offs of Japan’s economic miracle, set in an area blighted by industrial pollution, where the rise of two-income families had left latchkey children like the movie’s protagonist unparented and lonely. It was released as part of the Toho Champion Festival, a monster-themed program of children’s entertainment that hit theaters when school was in recess; the rest of the Showa Godzillas would likewise be released this way.