Frankenzilla

So, me and the Little One made our weekly trip to the library over the weekend and borrowed a whole slew of DVDs. We sat down together and watched two special, heartwarming movies, and now I’m catching all sorts of flack for it.

Before I tell you what the movies were, let me tell you of my vision. My vision, enumerated even before I met my wife, was to spend Saturday mornings with my children watching monster movies. Just like I did when I was a kid. We’d go through the Universal classics, the Hammer horrors, the Toho rubber-suited reptiles, the stop-motion wizardry of Ray Harryhausen, the completely awesome 1950s invasion-of-the-saucers SF. Then, I’d chase them around the house like a zombie or an alien or a radioactive dinosaur or – whatever. I’d even let the wife have a half-day off. In my vision, she’d be out getting a coffee and having her nails done by herself.

Now. Two girls later, I have to adjust my approach slightly. But not by that much. The Little One is absolutely, astoundingly, amazed at all my monster tales. I can regale her for the whole two or three hour weekend errand run with spooky stories from my youth. Or plot lines from the classics movies from Universal, Hammer, Toho, et al. I even test-run story ideas on her during these weekly trips.

This past weekend, I launched a tentative Monster Movie Saturdaython. We started off with 1931’s Frankenstein. Clocking in at 71 minutes of black-and-white creepiness, the Little One, age five and ten months, handled it no problem. In fact, she was somewhat bored during long sections of the classic. I thought the scenes with brains would get to her, or the infamous scene where the monster tosses the little girl into the lake to drown, but that was not to be the case. I think her reading of Mary Shelley’s abridged version two weeks ago adequately prepared her.

Oddly enough, this was the first time I saw Frankenstein beginning to end uninterrupted, and the first time I watched it since I was a kid. Colin Clive as Henry (not Victor) Frankenstein was truly unnerving as a literally mad scientist straddling the boundary of genius and insanity. The monster was more sympathetic than I remembered. The little girl scene is still dark for something filmed nearly eighty years ago.

We followed this up with Godzilla, King of the Monsters. This, too, was in black-and-white, the only Godzilla movie to be so. Originally filmed, I believe, in Japanese in 1954, the movie we watched was the Americanized version, from 1957. This is the one with Raymond Burr, starring as reporter “Steve Martin,” covering the giant lizard on its first rampage of Tokyo. My daughter liked this one more, even laughing at certain scenes, usually of frantic Japanese fisherman pointing at the sky and screaming, “Gojira!”

However, the scene were Doctor Serizawa uses his “oxygen destroyer” in his lab and turns his fishes into skeletons unsettled her. At the end of the movie, when Godzilla turns to a skeleton and then dissolves, there were one or two tears down her cheek. “Cheer up, honey,” I said. “Godzilla survives and comes back for twenty more movies!” She sniffled and wiped away tears. “Those poor fish!”

A lot came back watching King of the Monsters. It is the darkest of the Godzilla movies, the one where he’s most representative of the A-bomb and the horrors Japan suffered sixty-five years ago. It was never my favorite as a kid, but I saw it at least a half-dozen times. The moody musical score has always stuck with me. So have the imagery of Dr. Serizawa’s fish tank and Godzilla on the bottom of Tokyo bay.

So, the wife is shocked I let the Little One watch Frankenzilla with me. I don’t see the problem. There have been no nightmares, no difficult questions. To me, that means no permanent damage, no sessions on the psychiatric couch two or three decades down the road. Ergo, all engines: full speed ahead! Perhaps The Wolf Man (1941) and Gamera (1965) next? I’ve already primed her for fiery giant flying fanged turtles.

What do you think? Agree with me or the wife?