History is a funny thing: one minor change or false move in any world event and things play out differently for better or worse. Pivotal occurrences either don’t happen or a disaster gets averted in a theoretical elseworld where butterflies are in full effect.
Then there is Kaiju History, an equally funny slipstream replete with what-ifs and what-could’ve-beens. For instance, several attempts were made to adapt Godzilla outside of Japan which may have changed the course of the character’s trajectory in ways we can’t imagine.
I’ve covered quite a few here, some of which are doozies, but the biggest swing by an American director you might not know about was taken by a journeyman horror director back in the 1980s years before the King of the Monsters ‘Returned’ with “Mr. Martin” himself Raymond Burr in tow around ‘85.
Steve Miner has quite the resume, breaking in as he did at the height of the slasher boom. Working under Sean S. Cunningham, he rose to the director position on Friday the 13th Part 2 and 3, and has very notable TV credits such as The Wonder Years.
But Miner is known best for his work in the horror genre. His name is attached to Jason Voorhees through and through, but he also made Halloween H20, Lake Placid, House, and Warlock. In other capacities, he lent a hand behind the scenes of The Last House on the Left and Night of the Creeps.
(He is responsible for Soul Man, too, but everyone makes mistakes now and again.) However, a big fish by the name of Gojira got away from him just as his career was taking off, and this was no footnote in missed opportunities. It was more like Captain Ahab trying to catch a ginormous white whale.
Miner had serious ambitions. Like Yoshimitsu Banno decades later, he wanted to take Godzilla down the eye-popping road of 3-D since he had already gone that route with Friday the 13th Part 3. As stated in Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star: The Unauthorized Biography of the Big G by Steve Ryfle, he wished to remake Godzilla as “a good movie in 3D.”
That’s coming from a fan or so he claims, but regardless, he pursued the rights from Toho in a co-financing deal between himself and the studio. The search was then on for a writer, and Miner found someone who was less of a G-Fan, and even less enthused about making a “cheesy” movie.
Miner enlisted Creeps and Monster Squad writer/director Fred Dekker to pen his Godzilla script, which is significant. Though the project went nowhere, it brought the duo together for the first time years before they collaborated on the horror comedy House.
On being hired, Dekker said to Ryfle in his book, “He did not want to make a cheesy film, and I wasn’t interested in just special effects and knocking buildings down. The first thing I said to Steve was, ‘If all this movie is about is this big monster destroying buildings, we’re screwed.'”
Dekker took little inspiration from Toho films and didn’t bother to watch them from beginning to end. Instead, he looked to Steven Spielberg, the James Bond series, and the disaster movies of Irwin Allen (The Poseidon Adventure) to make his script as interesting as possible without Godzilla in play.
However, his story was similar to Godzilla movies to come in the Heisei Era, taking full advantage of Cold War tensions and fears of mutually assured destruction. Nukes fly to get the plot moving and Godzilla does battle with both American and Soviet forces.
Certain details bear a not-so-coincidental resemblance to The Return of Godzilla which became Godzilla 1985 in the West. Other than the Russian element, there is a missile launched from a satellite, the ruins of a derelict vessel with a survivor, and a special weapon fired down Godzilla’s gullet.
Further similarities you’d recognize include Godzilla stomping around San Francisco Bay and the presence of his offspring. As for the human characters, viewers were meant to identify with a journalist named Dana Martin, a Navy Colonel named Peter Daxton, and his son Kevin. Their foil and the main villain is a Russian officer and spy named Boris Kruschov.
Each of these elements fit right in with the 80s, especially the missiles and the Soviet threat, but for all its classic action films and their cliches, the decade had its limitations. First among those was special effects, which were hamstrung by the nonexistence of CG visual effects.
Miner’s way around this involved the good old tried-and-true methods of the practical effects he and audiences were used to. Wanting to do a little bit of everything, he planned for sequences with suitmation, stop-motion, and a combo of miniatures and giant props to bring The King of the Monsters to life.
Puppet Master and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids designer and puppeteer David W. Allen was tapped to handle the model making. Illustrator and paleoartist William Stout was in charge of a team of storyboard artists, and according to Ryfle, they finished 80 percent of the effects shots.
Their version of Godzilla bore little resemblance to a Toho design but had the usual flourishes in subtle ways. “I designed him as a cross between the classic Godzilla and a Tyrannosaurus,” said Stout on his website in 2014. (Note: Gojira’s appearance was already based on the T-Rex, making Stout’s idea redundant, but I’m nitpicking.)
(Digressing now…) Master makeup artist Rick Baker was also part of the crew, tasked with constructing a large animatronic head for close-up shots. He unfortunately never got around to it, probably due to scheduling, according to Ain’t It Cool.
If you are familiar with the Kaiju History series and made it this far, now is the time we get to the essential question: what went wrong? Why wasn’t Steve Miner’s 3-D Godzilla movie made? The answer is pretty simple when you boil it down, but there are a variety of factors.
Miner’s biggest problem was that he wasn’t a major name – something Dekker pointed out. In horror, he was somebody but only to a devoted few and in any other instance, nowhere near the level of Spielberg or James Cameron.
He couldn’t request the kind of money an undertaking like his would require. The projected budget reached an estimated high of $30 million which was a lot and a big risk at the time. Cannon Films, for example, gambled that much and then some on several projects that either flopped hard (Superman IV) or were never made (Spider-Man) to the group’s detriment.
Miner met with almost every studio and came close to a deal with Warner Bros. and Jon Peters, but still couldn’t secure funding. The rights reverted to Toho who read the room and saw there was renewed interest in their golden goose. They soon rushed Return into production, kicking off the Heisei period and putting Miner’s project on ice for good.
It wasn’t a total loss, though. The script and concept art are online for all to see and Miner’s efforts steered Godzilla in the direction he has been stomping since 1984. So oddly, we have him to thank for where the franchise is today.
