Establishing their base on the remote Letchi Island, the Red Bamboo needed to prepare a few defenses, without having to deploy much of their forces in the process. The answer was simple, though may have been arrived at as a complete accident. Having Ebirah defending the sea, the Red Bamboo needed to combat any stray aircraft, whether spy or civilian. So they used the Giant Condor to patrol the skies. How they avoided the creature assaulting their own forces, if there was a similar dynamic to the yellow liquid with Ebirah, is unknown.
Carried on feathered wings and sharp talons, the Giant Condor flew across the land mass. Mutated by the reactor's radiation, the winged creature circled the island, searching for prey to feed on. However, during one of its passes, the animal met up with a giant reptile-like creature. Godzilla roared his challenge to the bird, and the answer was soon met.
The battle that issued was short and brutal. The mammoth bird used its talons and beak to try and scratch at the King of the Monsters. The assault agitated Godzilla, but did little to seriously harm him. Suffering a few blows, the large bird made the miscalculation of trying to fly away to gain some distance for an attack run. The maneuver gave Godzilla enough time to aim his atomic heat ray at his aerial adversary. It only took one blast for the condor to falter, falling like a rock from the sky and sinking beneath the waves of the torrent ocean.
Powers / Weapons
Flight
The bird-like creature is able to fly through the air through the use of it's wings. The exact speed that the Giant Condor is able to fly at is unknown.
Background and Trivia
The Giant Condor originated as a Rodan prop from Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964). Following the closure of the 1964 movie, Eiji Tsuburaya's Tsuburaya Productions utilized the prop and dressed it up as the monster Litra on the 1966 show Ultra Q. That same year the prop was returned to Toho, where it was greatly modified by the Toho staff to create the Giant Condor prop used in the film.
Despite the fact that the footage of it's appearance was reused for All Monsters Attack (1969), the bird seen in the 1969 movie is supposed to be a totally different species from the one in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966). In Japan, the original is credited as a "Giant Condor" (大コンドル - Ookondoru). The second appearance, for All Monsters Attack (1969), is credited as a "Giant Eagle" (大ワシ - Oowashi) on sources such as the official Japanese Godzilla website. Not all sources are consistent on this. The 2000 publication The Giant Picture Encyclopedia of Godzilla: Toho Special Effects Movie World (ISBN: 4873765587), for example, list separate bios for each appearance and credit both to the Giant Condor. Most modern sources, though, that break out the bios for the two do use the "Giant Eagle" name for the 1969 "version". Because of this, the appearance in the 1969 feature is credited as a stock footage mistake on Toho Kingdom, as it was not intended to be the Giant Condor.
Most sources list the Giant Condor at being 2,000 tons. Two exceptions are the 1992 publication Godzilla Monsters Illustrated: Ultra Encyclopedia and the 1999 publication The Godzilla Chronicles Vol. 3 which instead lists 2,100 tons as the mass.
Almost no colored publicity stills of the Giant Condor exist, that don't also feature it entangled with Godzilla. The main image on this bio is a recolored image from a trading card that was then enhanced by the staff of Toho Kingdom.
