Godzilla!

[a quick one]

When I first saw this comic by Jon Adams, my immediate thought was:

“Stings like Godzilla, floats like the Silence.”

And that’s all I have to say about that. IYKYK; I will not explain, and I will not be this intertextually witty again for at least a week! (Noel Clarke might appreciate this joke.¹)

I will note that reader Brian Day had this important observation:

I never thought about this before. But giving Godzilla more humanoid arms makes him look really creepy! Now I’m imagining a T-Rex the same way and it’s horrifying. Tiny goofy arms FTW!²

Since I’m not writing a full critical analysis of this one, please enjoy a bonus Godzilla gag, courtesy of The Far Side’s Gary Larson.³

1. (self-indulgent, needless obscurity, because I’m clever)

2. Technically, since Godzilla has traditionally been played by an actor in a rubber suit, one could say he always had “humanoid arms.” However, the traditional suit was designed to make Godzilla’s arms appear smaller and less clearly articulated, partly based on the stylized proportions of the rest of Godzilla’s body parts. In particular, the elongated neck (which contained the actor’s head) and the large head projecting far above, and the massive lower body and legs made the arms appear, if not quite as atrophied as a T-rex’s forelimbs, at least less alarmingly formidable than those of the kaiju in the cartoon above.

3. This Far Side gag strongly recalls two pop-culture works from the cinema world: one from more than 15 years earlier, and the other from a dozen years later. The first is Marv Newland’s 1969 animated short Bambi Meets Godzilla; the second, a memorable sequence in Steven Spielberg’s 1997 Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World in which a T-rex wanders the suburbs of San Diego, to the misfortune of a local dog.

Was Larson influenced by Newland? Were Spielberg and/or screenwriter David Koepp influenced by Larson? Who knows?

On a side note, in all these works—Bambi Meets Godzilla, the Far Side comic, and the Lost World clip linked above—and also in the Jon Adams cartoon, the apex predator is depicted striding from left to right. This does not of course suggest influence; left to right is default movement in representational art in the English-speaking world.