What I mean by this, is that if I had not grown up on these films, I would have never really thought much of Nuclear Bombs, testing or world issues. As a child of course, I was interested in the films because there was a "big dinosaur", but as I got older an started to understand things more so did my appreciation for the films messages. Godzilla opened me up to a world I would have never understood prior.
While I am not Japanese, and I never experienced Hiroshima or anything, I believe that the Godzilla franchise gave me a peek into the horrors of nuclear weapons. A peek. A peek is just a peek, but it is enough to emphasize and sympathize with what had happened. It made me realize that power art, transcends race and ethnic backgrounds, or even language barriers that others would completely never be able to understand. While I`m using Godzilla as an example here, certainly more art is capable of doing it. It`s why Cloverfield is an important film to someone that lived in NYC during 9/11. While many others won't understand fully, many people can now at least have a semblance of an idea of what happened. This of course just doesn't apply to monster flicks, but pretty much any film. I can assume the same things applies to films like Schindler`s List and other such films about tragedy. And while yes, facts are always important, I think sometimes the emotional route can really make someone interpret or understand something better then simply reading about it; Godzilla rampaging through Tokyo and setting it on fire, as we cut to the mother cuddling her children, and the next day aftermath, has more of an impact then simply X amount of people died from the atomic bomb; or at least gave me an entryway into understanding it. Sometimes these days, when we read something in history, we really can`t understand it. This is why art is so vital in understanding history.
And while yeah, the Godzilla series got more Outlandish, the films, despite what people say, never completely dropped their social relevancy. Yeah, Godzilla vs. MG2 is pretty much braindead, but films like Mothra vs. Godzilla, Godzilla vs. Hedorah, G1984, Godzilla vs. Biollante, GMK, and of course Shin, all had some tie-in to current social issues. And many of them, in fact, are Kaiju Kino
.Spoiler:
I remember my dad bringing home a subtitled, possibly bootleg in retrospect, version of Mothra vs. Godzilla when I was maybe 5 or 6. I think also growing up on these films, made me realize that good films are timeless, I don't really segregate films into OLD MOVIES. While I couldn't watch it as a child, I wasn't able to fully read, yet alone read subtitles then, this was my first challenge of "not everything in the world is catered to you". I think this is why I see value in having more diverse films, multicultural films, and more "foreign films", both inside and outside of your own individual culture .It challenged my beliefs as a child. I`m more comfortable in being uncomfortable. In late HS and College I would of course go on to study Japanese, and eventually move there. I hope that if I ever become a parent, I can expose my children to other things outside their respective culture, so that they have the ability to understand and see the world from a unique perspective.
To be clear, I wasn`t thinking of any of this as a child, but as an adult I can see clearly how the franchise impacted me. I hope that all art, be it literature or cinema, can have the same impact on others as it did on me. I hope this also explains why I get so routinely annoyed by people on this forum, when they bog Godzilla down to a big dinosaur that HAS TO FIGHT another monster. This applies to film in general. Of course its fine to enjoy a film thats fun: I love it when Godzilla fights Rodan, Angurius, and King Shisa in Godzilla Final Wars, and I like a lot of "dumb movies" like John Wick or the MCU, but I`m saying don`t be the Jabroni that tells someone, "it`s just a movie bro, you should relax," when they clearly have some deep intellectual or emotional investment in something.
