Carl Bibbee

 Godzilla Alert!

The Biology of B-Movie Monsters 

Most of us who are interested in the "B-movie" science fiction and horror films of the Fifties and beyond probably fell in love with them as kids (I know I did). And from a child's standpoint, there are few things at once scarier and more fascinating than "giant monsters", like Godzilla, King Kong, and their brethren (for the most part, they're considered male, for some reason, although there are some exceptions on that count.) And it's understandable - giant monsters (or "Kaiju Eiga" in Japanese) are clumsy, tantrum-prone, and generally misunderstood. Most children can identify with at least two of the above characteristics.
 
Giant creatures in film have a long history- one of the very first animated cartoons was about a dinosaur named Gertie. Later on, a silent film based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel "The Lost World" launched the career of one of the pioneers of stop-motion animation, Willis O'Brien, who was the mentor of Ray Harryhausen. And of course, O'Brien went on to create one of the two best-known "giant monsters" of all time, King Kong. (the other being, of course, Godzilla.)
 
Other than Kong and the "Big G", though, giant cretures in SF movies tend to have a "giant" problem. Simply put, they're too big. Not from a standpoint of habitat, but from that  of simple mechanics and biology. This was covered very well in a recent article titled "The Biology of B-Movie Monsters"(2003), by Michael C. LaBarbera, available online at the University of Chicago digital Library Fathom Archive. LaBarbera goes into considerable detail on the pure mechanics of how such creatures would work bilogically- or more often, fail to do so. (At this point, I suggest everyone go read his article. I'll wait.)
 
(Everyone back? Good. OK, here we go.)

Unfortunately for me, my personal favorite of the American-made "giant critter" movies also has the most categorically impossible monster. Namely, "The Deadly Mantis". It's ell-written, well-acted; but sorry,  there is just no way for an insect to be darned near the size of a B-36 and even live, much less "walk, fly, and crawl", as Dr. Ned Jackson said.

At that scale, the Square/Cube law of volume vs. mass states that its legs would collapse under its own weight--and forget about flying, there is no way it could generate sufficient "horsepower" to lift itself. And even if it could get around these two (fatally serious) drawbacks, it is still doomed; its primitive respiratory system could not deliver enough oxygen to its metabolic systems to allow it to survive, much less engage in its normal behavior (hunting and eating).

Insects breathe by  transport of O2 across cellular membranes in their skin, and from there to their bloodstream; they do not have lungs like higher lifeforms. And that method of O2 transport doesn't work at that size level; it just can't deliver the volume needed for such a massive body. Long before the Mantis could fly south and menace Washington D.C., it would have died of oxygen starvation internally. Ditto for Clint Eastwood's bombing target, "Tarantula". As for "Earth vs. The Spider", all "Earth" really has to do is wait for the bugger to suffocate. And the same for the ants in "Them!", although they're really just "big bugs" as opposed to "giant ones". Buick-sized or bigger insects just can't exist. (Those of us who have a problem with the regular-sized kinds are profoundly grateful.)
 
Similarly, as stated in LaBarbera's article, I look at a lot of the Japanese "kaiju eiga" and think, "no chance". Rodan (Radon) being the classic example of mechanical impossibility, right up there with Mothra. (Mothra is as impossible as the Mantis and Friends, for exactly the same reasons.) As for Rodan, the eponymous flying dinosaur, he has never had nearly enough wing area to fly at all, let alone fly at hypersonic speed. Wing-flapping flight requires a massive musculature to power those wings; this is why birds have deep chests, to make room for the wing muscles. And Rodan's chest area isn't nearly deep enough for the sort of muscles required for even the wings it has, let alone what it needs. Let's not even talk about the critter's breathing problems; those massive wing muscles require serious lungs to provide the oxygen needed to power them. Rodan would suffocate almost as fast as the Mantis. 
 
In comparison to the critters already mentioned, Gojira (Godzilla) looks almost viable. Note its huge, elephantine legs, and the equally heavy tail, all needed to balance and support its mass. Also, being a vertebrate it wouldn't suffer from gravity stress to the extent that the octopus did in "It Came From Beneath The Sea". (BTW, LaBarbera's explanation of the octopi's demise as being due to cerebral hemorrhage caused by the effort of lifting its mass out of the water to grab the Golden Gate Bridge made sense to me, and was a bit surprising as well-- I wasn't previously aware that something like that could happen to an octopus,  but then I'm not an expert on octopi.)

As for the problem of blood supply to Gojira's brain (which would be a problem for the original 100-foot-tall version*, let alone the ridiculously- oversized "Heisei model"), I've long suspected that if we could dissect one of the critters (fat chance, I know), we'd find that like some dinosaurs. such as Stegosaurus. it had multiple "nodes" along its spinal cord that acted essentially as "extra brains", to supervise its bodily functions at the 'local level", so to speak. Meaning that the "main" brain would be less important to the purely "housekeeping" details of running the beast's oversized body.
 
 * I've based my measurements of Gojira on the scene in the original movie with the old NHK radio tower in Tokyo, in which "Big G" tears it in two with his jaws at the second observation platform. The NHK tower that existed in Tokyo when "Gojira" was made in 1954 was not the same as the present-day, 1080' one- the present one was only started in 1957 and completed in '58. The old tower, built in 1934-35 (mainly for the convenience of the Imperial Japanese Navy in communicating with its fleet), was about 250 feet tall, and the second platform, where "Big G" chomps it, was about 90 feet from the ground. This is probably consistent with a creature standing about 100 feet tall on its hind legs.

The old tower survived World War Two, but was demolished in 1959 after the new tower was completed. This often fools people who think that the "new" NHK Tower, which is a Tokyo landmark on a par with the Eiffel Tower in Paris, is the one that gets wrecked in the movie "Godzilla", to suitable impressive music. To take a bite out of the new tower's second platform, the critter would have to be about 300 feet tall. (Which, come to think of it, might be where they got the idea for making the Heisei version so impossibly huge.)
 
Of all the "kaiju eiga", my vote for the least unlikely is also one of the least-noticed. Namely Anguirus, the overgrown Ankylosaur who first shows up in "Godzilla Raids Again" aka "Gigantis the Fire Monster"; which makes more sense, as, of course, the original "Gojira" was thoroughly dead at the end of the first movie. (My guess is No. 2 was a relative looking for payback.) Anguirus is quadrupedal, armored, slow-moving, and not all that smart.
In short, he's well in keeping with what we know of the larger saurians. And "mechanically" speaking, Anguirus works about like an elephant, and we know those can get fairly big and live. (Of course, like the elephant, one hard fall and it probably suffers serious injury, but that's show biz.)
 
At the beginning of this article, I noted that most "giant monsters" are considered to be male. While true for King Kong, it isn't necessarily so for some of the others. The Mantis was definitely a female; only the female mantis hunts, and gets that "big", comparitively speaking. Mothra was obviously female, and was referred to as such. Rodan was male, and had a mate, but two other lesser-known giand birdies, the Giant Claw and Q, The Winged Serpent, were both female- they laid eggs, after all. As for Godzilla, who knows?- we've never determined exactly how it reproduces. All we know is, it seems to be impossible to get rid of it- if you destroy it, another mysteriously appears. I could list others from movie history, some menacing Europe rather than the U.S. or Far East--but I think I've made my point.
 
The more we learn about the giant monsters, the less perhaps we really know about them, it seems. Of course, that's part of the fun. No matter how impossible they really are.