Who is Godzilla?
Godzilla (Japanese: ゴジラ, Hepburn: Gojira, ; [ɡoꜜ(d)ʑiɾa] ) is a fictional monster, or kaiju, that debuted in the eponymous 1954 film, directed and cowritten by Ishirō Honda. The character has since become an international pop culture icon, appearing in various media: 33 Japanese films produced by Toho Co., Ltd., five American films, and numerous video games, novels, comic books, and television shows. Godzilla has been dubbed the King of the Monsters, an epithet first used in Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), the American localization of the 1954 film. Originally and in most iterations of the creature, Godzilla is a prehistoric reptilian or dinosaurian monster that is amphibious or resides partially in the ocean, awakened and empowered after many years by exposure to nuclear radiation and nuclear testing. With the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Lucky Dragon 5 incident still fresh in the Japanese consciousness, Godzilla was conceived as a metaphor fo...
