MONSTER OF THE WEEK: The Frozen Monster Gigass, The Comet Monster Dorako, and The Skull Monster Red King
This episode is just gleefully nutso, a series of ideas introduced one after another with bizarre conclusions and very little connective tissue between them – all just so they could have another big monster throwdown and some beautiful location filming in the Japanese alps (I’m sure getting to film in some primo locations was the basis for a few episodes.) As far as “a series of things happening”-type stories go, this one is pretty entertaining.
Follow this: the episode begins with a scientist discovering a comet that may collide with and destroy the earth. He then discovers it will not. The science patrol then finds out that the comet will be close enough that radiation from it might set off nuclear weapons without proper storage. This then leads to them discussing a rumour that Japan lost a half dozen H-Bombs in the ocean. This rumour is then updated so that those H-Bombs were not lost, but in fact swallowed by a monster who then escaped into the Japanese alps. They search for the bombs in the alps, even after the comet has passed and the main danger dismissed – this is the actual meat of the story, but it is sidelined when one random monster unrelated to the plot shows up, and then another one (who apparently came FROM the comet, a detail that is dropped and then never referred to again), and then finally the one who ate the bombs appears, and the three of them fight. The bombs are used to add some tension, because the monster getting into the fight might accidentally detonate them, so breaking up the monster royal rumble is at least an important part of the story. Ultraman appears and decapitates the monster to save the world. The scientist appears again to explain that the comet would reappear in the 31st century, and will almost certainly hit the earth then – but everyone has hope that human technology will be advanced enough to deal with it, ending with some quaint 60s idealism.
The story is silly and overstuffed, and it is kind of strange that people who worked on Godzilla would treat the Cold War-era arms race so flippantly (even after having scenes of everyday people hiding in shelters), but everything moves at a cracking pace and never gets boring. The last third of the episode is more or less the same as the opening of “Lawless Monster Zone”, even bringing back Red King – and with a lot of delightful comedy from the suit actors. You could see how a lot of these ideas being together would make some sense, but there is little to connect those ideas in the actual execution – it’s certainly one of the most nonsensical episodes, but also one of the most fun.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 