Back to the Stan's Kaiju KornerWe all know Godzilla is Grey.
Don't we?
Well, the truth is that we don't necessarily, not even the people who consider themselves trufans and certainly not the popular media who refer constantly to "the great green Godzilla."
It seems like it should be a simple thing. Watch the movies, look closely, and you'll see that Godzilla varies from a dull, light-grey rubber in his earliest incarnations to his almost-black rubber of the latest films.
The late Tomiyuki Tanaka - the Godfather of Godzilla, his creator and overseer throughout his career - has said, "Godzilla has always been grey."
And how else to explain the elation of at least one G-Fan who, on seeing the teaser for 1998's GODZILLA from Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerlich, cried out gleefully, "Thank God he's GRAY!"
So what does all this mean to a modeller?
Well, we PAINT with LIGHT. The colors on a kit are, in some fashion, meant to represent what we'd see if we saw THE REAL THING.
(That's were it starts to get complex. When we talk about Godzilla, what is the REAL THING - a five-foot something SUIT, the two dimensional image on a movie screen, or an actual, 300 meter GIANT MONSTER?)
Let's start a little earlier than that, though. Let's talk about why some people perceive Godzilla as green in the first place. It turns out it's not so simple.
Part of the problem is popular culture. Early Bandai Godzilla toys were green, ditto Trendmaster's North American toys.
ToHo -like most movie studios before them, notably RKO- followed the practice of doctoring and retouching production photographs ( some of my favourites are Toho pictures for KING KONG VS. GODZILLA which show the '54 Godzilla squaring off against a '33 Kong so heavily airbrushed he qualifies as a painting).
There's a terrific photo of Godzilla and Ghidorah - in colour - that shows the '62 Kongzilla - in green - squaring off against bronzed-body Ghidorah with blue-gray necks and wings, a deep red mouth, and glowing yellow eyes.
Extremely cool. Extremely NOT what you'd see watching Ghidorah The Three-Headed Monster.
But why not paint your kits that way, exactly? Well, why not?
Not even the Japanese perceive Godzilla as Gray. There are lots of comic and kid's book illustrations that show him as green.
And in fact the last two issues of G-FAN, surely the last word on the subject, show a Godzilla that is perceptually GREEN.
Actually G-Fan #25, Mar/Apr, shows a Godzi that REALLY IS GREEN, whereas G-Fan #27 May/Jun shows a Godzi that is probably BLUE actually, but is perceptually pretty well Green when matched with the turquoise background of an undersea scene.
"Perceptually pretty well Green" - what the heck is that?
Well, it turns out that perception is the real trick here. And it affects model building in a couple of ways.
The first is the most obvious, we're building a model of a subject on film. Therefore, as we said before, what's the TRUE COLOR OF GODZILLA - the color of the suit on the set, the color it appears to be in any individual frame of film, or the color of the "real animal?"
The best example of a color problem that other SF model builders have is the U.S.S. ENTERPRISE. If you've ever cracked open an Enterprise model, you probably know that the suggested color of the television spaceship is "duck egg blue."
What's that? On television it appears WHITE, or at least a VERY LIGHT GRAY. But due to the physics of lighting the model, film's imaging properties . . .etc, the "actual" color of the motion-control miniature is duck egg blue. But hold it again, are we building a model of a model? Or are we building the U.S.S. Enterprise, a United Federation of Planets Starship as it appears in weekly television episodes.
Well, probably most of us are building the second item, not the first. (But we're free to choose. That's what's fun in the hobby.)
This problem gets compounded when you start to deal with the color grey. It turns out, because of it's neutral intensity, grey is inordinately affected by the predominant colors surrounding it. That is, the grey appears to shift it's color and intensity depending on whether there's a blue sky, a black night drop, a red sunset . . . whatever.
Look at some color stills of Godzilla. In night sequences, especially since '84, Godzilla is being hit with blue lighting and his scales highlight blue, in destruction scenes yellow-red of firelight plays off the scales, and in blue-sky scenes (to me at least) both older godzilla suits and the newer, almost black, suit take on a predominantly "greenish" tinge. These are effects of lighting and background on the suit.
So as modellers, what do we paint?
Godzilla fans aren't the only ones who have this problem. As a matter of fact, military modellers have some wonderful, bang-up arguments about World War 2 Luftwaffe color schemes for exactly this reason - dark grey, dark green, black confusion. Depending on the surround, these colors are highly dependent on the PERCEPTION OF THE VIEWER.
So maybe those old Bandai toy makers, the occasional Godzilla fans, and the just-plain-wrong Media guys have some excuse when they depict a "green" Godzilla.
But wait, there's a third problem. What about painting your model so that it just makes the model look as COOL AS POSSIBLE?
For some modellers, this isn't even an option. This partially has to do with the tradition of plastic modelling - which is seen by most as a craft not an art. The standard of success that is usually applied to a model is HOW ACCURATE A REFLECTION OF REAL LIFE THE KIT IS. (Read the model newsgroups and you encounter questions like, "If a 1/48 scale model is meant to appear to be the real thing at X number of feet away, how much white paint do I need to mix with the colors to scale the effect of atmospheric interference?" -I'm always tempted to ask, what atmosphere? - L.A. smog? New England fog? The battlefield with churned up dust from explosions?)
There is nothing wrong with this point of view, and it has stood the test of time as a judging technique in organizations for plastic modellers like IPMS. (Though it is one of the reasons the "regular plastic guys" are baffled as to how to judge our models.)
In my opinion, there is no reason we should make a fetish of it, because the MOST EFFECTIVE paint job is not necessarily the paint job that MIRRORS REAL LIFE.
The best example I can think of for this are the FAMOUS MONSTERS covers and later monster paintings of Basil Gogos. Take a look at his palette if you have some of those covers on hand, and you'll see purples, yellows, and reds used in combinations most people have never thought of. And yet, the results are not just stunning, but also evocative renderings of subjects like Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, and even rubber suit friends like Gorgo.
I wonder if anybody ever went up to Basil and said, "Er, I like the painting. But Karloff isn't the right color." I doubt it.
More than that, I'm sure if Eiji Tsuburaya had Steve Wang or Tim Gore around, Godzilla would be more colorful too. I mean, look at the pumped-up paint job they did on Godzilla when he appeared as his be-frilled relation JIRAS on ULTRAMAN. (Hey, do you think they thought of putting the frill on the Jurassic Park Dilophosaurus because of that Ultraman Episode?)
A nice reference for this kind of painting is the rainbow besplendored YMIR that David Fisher is doing in the second MODELMANIA VIDEO (great references if you can get a hold of them). This is one of the terrific things about BLACK AND WHITE film, the monsters can be any color the modeller wants.
(Although, even here, the anal modeller thing can hold us back. A recent discussion on the Gremlins site mail list has centered around whether there really was a GOLDEN CREATURE SUIT (in THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON) or whether pictures showing such a suit are simply faded with age. People have mentioned that the remnants of the suit that people like Forry Ackerman and Bob Burns have is GREEN.
In my opinion, all of this misses the point. For one thing - there are "other" color references besides the suit - Lobby cards of Black and White films traditionally were printed in color. These form another possible reference, though they are also "imaginary colors" - airbrushed onto black and white photos by the publicity department.
For another, you can bet that if Jack Kevan and Bud Westmore had access to the painting technology and color film technology of today, their creature would have looked more like the PREDATOR too. He too would have had your basic Steve Wang paint job.
So why not go wild?
Personally, I own five Creatures, and will probably soon own more. An Aurora styrene kit is painted in traditional "lobby card" green with reddish tones on the lips and "hand suckers" - the little indentations on the underside of the claws. My Billiken is painted 'Siamese Fighting Fish' with purple, red, and golden iridescent colors fighting it out for dominance over a greenish basecoat. My Horizon creature simply apes the wonderful 'Trout-scheme' paint job on the Horizon box, which frankly blew me away. My Tsukuda has a gold-flake skin job based on a kit I saw in the Japanese Anime monthly NEWTYPE, and which was an elaboration on the "possibly faded" photograph (and hey, Jack Arnold has always said the Creature was based on the Oscar - so why not gold?).
So what color is GODZILLA?
Let me be Bradburyesque,
"Godzilla is the color of nuclear firestorms and raging destruction, he's the colors of all our dragon-nightmares and earthquake fears, he's the color STOMP, he's the color ROAR, he's the absence of color in an ash-charred city when every bit of life has burned up quick as flashpaper and the color of a fear-drained face full of fear . . .
Godzilla should be all the colors of our nightmares."
Come on, start painting and REALLY SCARE US . . .
BEST STan
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