Weirdhouse Cinema: Gorgo

Can London survive the bond between a giant monster and its young? In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the 1961 British kaiju film “Gorgo,” starring Bill Travers and William Sylvester.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And
on today's episode of Weird House Cinema, we are going
to be talking about the nineteen sixty one British kaiju
movie Gorgo, which I just saw for the first time
a couple of weeks ago when my friend Ben brought
it over for a movie night. So one of the
first things you might be thinking is did I hear

(00:36):
the first line of the description, right? Is this a
British giant monster movie? Yes? You did. Why is that
concept inherently so funny? I don't really know, but to me,
certainly it is. And I wonder if you have the
same thought, Rob, So like I was interrogating this further. So,
Japanese giant monster movie could be funny in execution, but

(00:57):
it's not necessarily funny in principle, Like the original Godzilla
is not funny at all. It's a very dark, grim serious,
great movie. An American giant monster movie, I'd say, same
thing could be funny in execution, not necessarily funny in principle,
but a British giant monster movie where a huge rat
creature attacks London is just fundamentally hilarious.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah. I'm not sure quite what it is, because you
do find giant monster kaiju movies in various film cultures,
and it doesn't feel inherently out of place in other
film traditions. But yeah, there's something about the British setting
and all the British actors. I don't know it. It
makes it unique, and it does maybe make it a

(01:42):
little bit hilarious unintentionally.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
But at the same time, there are a lot of
things about this movie that are beautifully executed. It has
a similar problem that a lot of giant monster movies have,
which is that there's a lot of city stomping at
the end, just relentless smashing of buildings and such. It
goes on for a long time. That's not unique to Gorgo.
But the city smashing looks fantastic, It looks great. They've

(02:09):
got really good models. We get to see a creature
smashing well known landmarks throughout London, you know, really laying
into Big Ben and the Tower Bridge and all that stuff,
and it is really pleasurable to watch.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yeah, I mean, it's the basic formula in play here.
Don't go into Gorgo expecting something drastically different from any
other giant monster movie that you've seen, but it is
well executed. There are a lot of solid talents that
were involved in making this film, and it does find
some places to do things that, if not entirely unique,
at least they come up with an interesting palette with

(02:46):
which to paint it.

Speaker 3 (02:47):
Yeah, I would agree, there are some other things that
work kind of well. I would say in the first
act there's an interesting sort of full corror vibe that
is unexpected for a movie of this type. We can
talk more about that when we into the plot, but
I think we should start off by exploring the question
of what is Gorgo? Right? So, Godzilla is a giant

(03:08):
bipedal reptile or lizard of some kind with atomic radiation
breath who emerges from under the ocean. Gamera is a
giant fire breathing turtle from the Arctic that can fly.
King Kong is a giant prehistoric ape from Skull Island.
What is Gorgo? I would describe Gorgo as a gigantic,

(03:28):
toothy monster with a similar bipedal posture to Godzilla, who
looks like a cross between a frilly eared lizard and
a satanic rat with red glowing eyes. He comes out
of the sea off the coast of an Irish island,
and he is thought to be some kind of ancient god,
at least at first.

Speaker 4 (03:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
And I would also add that he has pretty much
has the body of a rock'm sockem robot, not in
the sense that it's metallic, but in the basic posture
and proportions. It looks like he's ready to throw some punches,
and I guess ultimately does throw some punches at major
London landmarks.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
And the way you can kind of see him rotating
his torso as he reaches with his arms.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
Yeah, now, if there I had plenty of scenes later
in the film to stare at this monster and try
and cope with some headcanon for everything I'm seeing. And
I will say the teeth. The more I looked at them,
the more I started thinking, well, these are like filter
feeding teeth, Like this is an aquatic organism that's had
millions and millions of years to sort of evolve. Maybe

(04:34):
it's a filter feeder. Maybe that's what those teeth are
all about.

Speaker 3 (04:37):
That's a good point, So you might think giant toothy
rat lizard creature, and think a smaller number of large,
pointy teeth. You know, maybe each pointy tooth is like
the size of a sharpened boulder. But no, instead it's
a lot of tiny pointy teeth. It's more like a
mouthful of swords. And so I think with that in mind,

(04:58):
you could also look at that as like the brick
souls or the beleen of a filter feeder. That's a
good connection.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
Rob, thank you. But you know this is not the
only the only connection between this monster and in the
world of actual terrestrial biology, because the creature's name, Gorgo
is allegedly based on an actual dinosaur, the Gorgosaurus.

Speaker 3 (05:24):
Now they don't say that in the movie. In the
movie they later explained that it. Well, first, when we
learned the name Gorgo, they literally say, we don't know
why he's called that. But then the the scheming circus
operator who is exploiting Gorgo for cash, he explains that
he named the creature Gorgo after the gorgon Medusa. So

(05:46):
there is a common connective thread that we could get into.
But they don't say in the movie that it's named
after this dinosaur.

Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah, so this might have been something that was more
of a stronger connection at some earlier phase of production.
It could also be something that's been kind of added
after the fact. But the truth is there is a gorgosaurus.
The gorgosaurus was not named after this movie. This is
the It literally means fierce lizard. This creature lived during

(06:15):
the Late Cretaceous period eighty to seventy three million years
ago in parts of what is now the United States
and Canada, So you know, I guess its range wouldn't
actually have extended over to the British Isles. But anyway,
it was a large therapod and we have at least
twelve complete or near complete skulls and various partial skeletons
to go off of. It was a tyrannosaur, not as

(06:37):
big as a t rex, but still quite impressive at
eight to nine meters or twenty six to thirty feet
in length. It was first described and named by Canadian
paleontologist Lawrence Lamb that's not spelled like my name is
Lambe in nineteen fourteen, and the Gorgo part of the
name fierce is in fact related to the ancient Greek
word gorgos, which means grim. Or dreadful reflected in the

(07:00):
naming of the mythical gorgons.

Speaker 3 (07:02):
Okay, so at the very least, the real gorgosaurus and
the gorgo of the movie get their name from the
same place.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
Yes, And you know, if this strikes a chord with
anyone out there, you're like, where have I heard about
gorgosaurus recently? Well, the gorgosaars actually just made the news
last month. This was reported about in the New York
Times under their Ancient Meat Reporting desk. This concerns a
seventy five million year old Gorgosaurus fossil. It was discovered

(07:32):
with fossilized stomach contents. This was the first, apparently for
a tyrannosaur. It was a juvenile and the stomach contents
were the hind limbs of two small feathered dinosaurs. According
to Michael Greshkoh in his New York Times article covering
a study authored by Francois Therein, the curator of Dinosaur

(07:52):
paleo Ecology at the Royal Tyreel Museum in Alberta, they
said that if it had grown to adulthood, it would
have liked we moved on to much bigger prey. But
as a smaller tritter, it was having to eat the
legs of various bird creatures. So at any rate, gorgosar
is still making the headlines at least, you know, as

(08:13):
far as stories about ancient meat and an ancient chicken
legs ghosts.

Speaker 3 (08:18):
Now you included an illustration from the New York Times article.
It's an artist's impression of what the living juvenile gorgosaurus
would have looked like. And this is a much more
spindly creature than the gorgo of the film, which is
which is very dense and bulky, and apart from its
rat like head, it's got the more classic sort of

(08:39):
storybook illustration of the tyrannosaur that's very sort of bottom
heavy and has like big legs and lower body parts.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
Right right, But before you gorgo fans look up this
article and say this is not accurate, let me suggest
that the gorgo that we see in this movie has
again evolved for life in an aquatic setting over millions
of years. So he has kind of like that whale
body going on. Ah, So, if we're being generous, we
might say, well it kind of makes sense.

Speaker 3 (09:09):
That's right, Yes, the gorgo's body has evolved for insulation purposes.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah, so a little science there, but believe me, the
science is not necessary for your appreciation and understanding of
this movie.

Speaker 3 (09:21):
Okay, so on. We've talked a little bit before on
the podcast when we've done other Kaiju or giant monster
movies about the various subgenres that these movies fall into,
and I thought it might make sense to try to
figure out where Gorgo fits into that subgenre map. So
a few of the main types of giant monster movies

(09:45):
are I would say, first of all, Kaiju the destroyer.
An example of this would be the original Godzilla. A
giant beast arrives unexpectedly and brings ruined to humankind, and
the monster must somehow be defeated or driven away. Second
that category, I would call Kaiju the defender. Good examples
here would be the later sequels involving almost any of

(10:07):
the popular Kaiju monsters, monsters like Godzilla and GAMMERA. This
is a variation that arises in which the giant monster
that was once the destroyer must now defend us from
a more horrible threat, usually either space aliens or a
new giant monster that is meaner and more spiny. And
I would argue that the emergence of Kaiju the Defender

(10:29):
as a subgenre of giant monster movies is part of
a broader trend that's not just in giant monster movies.
But it's this trend where if you have a series
of movies all about the same focal character, that character
will almost always become more friendly and approachable over time,
even if they began as a villain or an anti hero.
So Gamera goes from being a terrifying pyro turtle on

(10:53):
a rampage to the friend of all children. You can
look to any Vin Diesel movie series for examples of this.
The Vin Diesel character will always become nicer as it
goes on. Even Freddy Krueger goes from being in the
first Nightmare on elm Street movie this grimy, disgusting child
murderer too later on more just kind of like a

(11:13):
lethal puck in a sweater, Like he does still kill people,
but he's more kind of a prankster and a jokester.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah, it becomes more of like a pee wee herman
kind of a character as opposed to just a nightmare
monster from your mind, that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (11:28):
Right, So in the later sequels, in these movies you
often get Kaiju the defender. Next, I would say is
the Pity the Kaiju movie. Great example here is sort
of the original King Kong. Like a dangerous but in
many ways admirable and noble monster is kidnapped or imprisoned
or otherwise exploited by greedy humans, and in the end

(11:48):
you have emotional sympathy for the creature in the way
that it has been mistreated by humankind.

Speaker 2 (11:56):
Yeah, and obviously there are numerous sub classifications that we
could play out here, but well, one that comes to
mind as well as essentially the ware Kaiju option. So
not an amazing colossal situation where just a human gets
big and then does big stuff, but a situation where
a protagonist transforms into a giant monster that is distinct

(12:16):
from just a giant human. The twenty sixteen film Colossal
starring Anne Hathaway comes to mind that has a fun
twist on this concept. And there's also nineteen sixty five's
Frankenstein versus Beragon that involves something like this as well,
with a small boy transforming into a giant Frankenstein's monster.

Speaker 3 (12:33):
MM. I don't think I've seen either of those. I
certainly haven't seen the one with Anne Hathaway. Is Anne
Hathway the one who transforms into a giant monster?

Speaker 2 (12:42):
Yes she is, or it's a spoilers If you haven't
seen this, just skip like you know, a few minutes ahead.
But the basic concept, if memory serves, is that she
has a spells where she becomes the monster or controls
the monster with her impulses, but is not conscious of
the fact. So it's not a physical transformation. Uh, it's

(13:06):
it's it's something else, it's it's it's a very fun film.
It's it's it's it's a comedy, but it has a
giant monster and it has a number of wonderful actors
in it, well worth checking out.

Speaker 3 (13:17):
That does sound interesting. I'll have to look that up.
But okay, So where does Gorgo fit into the subgenres?
I would say Gorgo has elements of the first Kausu
the Destroyer, and elements of the third the Pity the
Monster film, less of the second, which makes sense because
this is the first Gorgo movie. This is not like
a later sequel, and usually they don't become defenders of

(13:40):
people or friend to all children until later on, so
it has elements of both I would say, especially in
the first act, the monster really does seem scary and
seem like a threat. But as as the film goes on, yeah,
you really come to sympathize with the monster spoiler monsters
over the I don't know, like gloating egotistical naval commanders

(14:03):
who think that launching, you know, some more bombs at
them will finally solve the problem.

Speaker 2 (14:09):
Right right, It's ultimately going to be a draw, and
you realize, well, we can't really oppose Gorgo anymore, we
must form an alliance with Gorgo. Clearly, if they'd made
more Gorgo movies, it would have been Gorgo protecting the
British Isles from some other menace.

Speaker 3 (14:25):
Right. But Rob, you brought to my attention the fact
that there was a Gorgo comic series that seems to
have happened after the movie. So, if I understand correctly,
the character was created for the film, but then there
were comics made in the wake of that. And I
haven't read these comics, but just judging by looking at

(14:46):
some of the covers online, Gorgo does appear to go
through the exact same like heel to face turn we
see in these other monsters. Because in the first issue,
he's just yeah, like, you know, looming over London opposing
some kind of threat. But by the last issue it
looks like he's the only thing that can save the
world from communism.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
Yeah. Yeah, these covers are definitely worth looking up. I
was surprised because I think I'd run across the idea
before that there was some sort of a comic book adaptation,
and that alone is not surprising. I was thinking, oh,
it's a one off, you know, they did a comic
book adaptation of the movie. But no, it's like it's
a whole run with Gorgo fighting various threats, including communism

(15:29):
and giant squidsed it, you know, it's that sort of thing,
big furry monsters with horns on their head, cyclopses, you
name it.

Speaker 3 (15:38):
Yeah. So for a brief survey, issue number one, Rob
I've added these images to the outline so we can
comment on them as we look. Issue number one is
just Gorgo standing. There's London in the background because he
big ben. You see the tower and the clock, and
then some guys on the ground with flame throwers blasting
up at Gorgo's hands, and Gorgo just looks done. He's

(15:59):
got a kind of like grinning through the pain look
on his face.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
Yeah, yeah, And I assume this one is basically an
adaptation of the picture, or you know, an abbreviation of
it anyway.

Speaker 3 (16:10):
Right, But then by issue number three, we see a
cover that is some kind of mad scientist trying to
harness Gorgo's power. Gorgo looks different now by the way.
He's kind he's got a different shape, and he's kind
of bubbly all over in a lighter shade of like
yellow green. But he's standing there and he's sort of
reeling back. Gorgo looks like it's a more defensive posture,

(16:32):
and this mad scientist is poking at him with this
shock ray, and the mad scientist is saying, I can
control you. With you at my command, I will rule
the world.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
Yeah. Like, clearly, Gorgo is a force of nature that
is going to be potentially exploited by bad actors in
the human realm, and therefore that the real villains are
the mad scientists.

Speaker 3 (16:55):
That's right. So that's three. By issue number five we've
got the tide Gorgo clashes with the sea beast, where
he's just it's an it's a Kaiju meet slam. Now
he's just wrestling with another giant monster. This looks like
some kind of octopus inspired type creature, though. I have
to say the illustration is funny because it looks like

(17:16):
they're about to kiss. Doesn't it like Gorgo's even sort
of holding the back of the octopus's head like he's
gonna dip him for a kiss.

Speaker 4 (17:23):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:24):
It says Gorgo clashes with the Sea Beast and the
Unforgettable the day Manhattan died, which raises all sorts of questions.
Why is Gorgo going over to Manhattan? Is like, is
there like a Gorgo sharing program or treaty between the
UK and the United States At this point, I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 (17:41):
Oh, you know, they do invoke NATO later in the
uh oh it's in the movie. Yeah, And then it
goes on. So, like I included issue number ten, there's
more fighting that looks kind of like kissing. This is
where Gorgo is fighting the Venusian Terror. It says they
came from an alien world bent on destroying Earth and
it's an inhabitants. Could even the mighty Gorgo stop them?

(18:03):
Don't miss the Venusian Terror? What is the Venusian Terror? Well,
you see a couple of flying saucers in the background
that almost kind of look like they have eyes, like
they're kind of placid, smiley faces. But then the Venusian
Monster is a cyclops being with a long yellow snake tongue,
one big eye, and one big horn on the top
of his head.

Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yep, and he's licking Gorgo in the face. It really
seems like maybe this is a big misunderstanding. The Venusian
Tear doesn't really want to hurt anyone. He just wants
a little snuggling, a little little face licking.

Speaker 3 (18:37):
That's it. Yeah, he is cute. And then, like we said, finally,
by like the end of the series, we've got Gorgo
in one of them. I don't know what's going on here.
He's fighting a giant guy, just like a guy who
kind of looks like Dracula, but he's Gorgo sized. I
think they must have blown him up with mad science somehow.
He's fighting Gorgo. And then also Gorgo is fighting somebody

(19:00):
called General Thung, and we see General Thung saying that
with uh together, we will destroy all imperialistic nations. UH
and Gorgo, I guess, is gonna gonna prevent that.

Speaker 2 (19:13):
Yeah, Gorgo's politics are fully explored in this this particular issue.

Speaker 3 (19:18):
I'm sure, yeah, but.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
All of that comes later. This movie is about then
this would be my my elevator pitch. It's the British
Isles versus giant monster, that is exactly it. All right, well,
let's go ahead and have that trailer audio so everyone
can hear some of the destruction that's coming their way.

Speaker 5 (19:39):
Foh, a picture of our time? How's ever unleashed? Shut
spectacle of such scope? But realism? How's up from the
depths of prehistoric mystery? Rages gorgo? The headlines of the
world plays the fabulous star, this monster from another age

(20:02):
can pull it drops up the mass subutionan cavern by
unprecedented volcanic action, and the headlines screamed the story of
the reckless skin divers who capture the monster and put
it on exhibition.

Speaker 4 (20:14):
Sam hop their nets. You're doing they take it easy.
I can't do. Then go back to see way belongs?
Why maybe to see they're silly skins for you? Hoorray Gorgo.

Speaker 5 (20:28):
But the headlines do not record the story of the
little boy who had a curious sympathy and understanding for
the fantastic creature. What strange secret. Does he know that
scientists only suspect you're.

Speaker 1 (20:41):
Trying to say, there may be a fully grown one
of these things around somewhere, Hobbig.

Speaker 4 (20:45):
Would a full grown one be an approximate guess? The infant.

Speaker 5 (20:51):
The adult that'll make it eighty two hundred feet tall,
wreaking terrible nance against the civilization that has captured its offspring,
ring over the cities of the world, has millions flee.
It's awesome, terry. Nothing can summit defying the porce of

(21:20):
the army, the might of the navy.

Speaker 4 (21:24):
Man of Momotari, ready to or from Father file Man, even.

Speaker 5 (21:36):
The fury of the jets, and rising crescendial sights never
before beheld by human eyes, and adventures never before experienced
by any man or woman.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
All right, Well, if you want to go out and
watch gorgo before proceeding with this episode. It is widely
available in physical and digital formats and on multiple streaming platforms.
You can even grab it on Blu Ray and again.
The film was also covered by Mystery Science Theater three
thousand in a nineteen ninety eight episode, and I think
that's available in different formats as well. All Right, let's

(22:36):
talk about the people behind this film, starting at the
top with the director, Eugene Lourie born nineteen oh three
died nineteen ninety one, Russian born French art director and
ultimately director. His production design work goes back to the
early nineteen thirties, but his first directorial credit was nineteen
fifty three's The Beast from twenty thousand fathoms. This one,

(22:58):
of course, has a an X ray Harry Housen lizard
in it, giant lizard monster the terrorizes the city and
in one memorable scene, eats a cop.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
Is this one attacking New York or somewhere else?

Speaker 2 (23:10):
I think it's New York. This is what I've never
seen in full, but I've certainly seen the monster clips.
Anytime you see Harry Howsen retrospective, you're going to see
clips from this film for sure. And this movie was
a hit. Seems to have cemented Laurie as a giant
monster director, and he followed this up with nineteen fifty
eight's The Colossus of New York. This is about a

(23:33):
giant robot body that has a dead boy's brain in it.
I included a still for you here. Joe ofv said robot.

Speaker 3 (23:40):
I have considered suggesting this for the show before. I
think we may come around to it one day, because
from what I understand, it's a similar concept to Tammy
and the t Rex, except instead of a t rex body,
it's a giant sort of colossus being.

Speaker 2 (23:55):
Then there's also nineteen fifty nine's The Giant Behemoth. This
has another giant dinosaur in it, less memorable, not a
rat Harry House in Creation. And then he also did
an episode of the nineteen fifty nine TV series World
of Giants. This was an incredible Shrinking Man inspired show.
I couldn't find details on the specific episode he did

(24:16):
and what kind of giant aka normal sized insect or
what have you might have been featured in that episode. Now,
Michael Weldon and his Psychotronic Movie Guides points out that
the success of nineteen fifty threes Beast was actually an
inspiration on fifty four's Godzilla, and I've read elsewhere that

(24:37):
Godzilla was also inspired by the commercial success of a
nineteen fifty two re release of nineteen thirty three's King Kong.
So you can think of those two films as two
primary predecessors to Godzilla, and therefore the vast world of
Kaiju that we have before us. So that's the director.

(24:58):
A couple of writers attached to this. There's Robert L.
Richards who of nineteen oh nine through nineteen eighty four,
American writer of mostly westerns. Another one of these individuals
who lost their Hollywood career due to the blacklist during
this time period. Daniel James as the other writer of
nineteen eleven through nineteen eighty eight, also blacklisted from Hollywood

(25:18):
for his political views. He worked as an uncredited writer
on the Beast from twenty thousand Fathoms as well as
The Giant Behemoth served as Early in his career, he
had served as assistant director on the nineteen forty Charlie
Chaplin movie The Great Dictator. All right, let's get into
the cast. The towering lead man in this is Bill
Travers playing the character Joe Ryan.

Speaker 3 (25:40):
There's really there are really sort of two leads in
this movie. There's Sam and Joe the characters. And you know,
one is Bill Travers and the other is William Sylvester.
And I was thinking them as Bill trav and Bill sill.

Speaker 2 (25:54):
Well obviously for the lead. And I mean in terms
of billing and in terms of height and maybe that's
all they decided on it. Big Bill Travers is your
lead here. He lived nineteen twenty two through nineteen ninety four. Yeah,
I looked it up. I was like, how tall was
this guy? Apparently six six, so that's that's that's a
big guy by most standards, and it's clear in the film,

(26:15):
you know, this is this guy's he's almost as tall
as Gorgo basically. But anyway, British leading man and animal
rights activists who mostly worked in mainstream dramas, with this
being I believe his only sci fi or horror film.
Everything else is more, you know, traditional real world sort
of stuff. His most famous and ultimately most influential film
was nineteen sixty six Is Born Free. This was an

(26:37):
adaptation of George and Joy Adamson's book about their experiences
raising a lion cub in Kenya, and it led to
a kind of spiritual follow up with the same stars
called Ring of Bright Water in nineteen sixty nine. Bill
Travers's wife, Virginia mckinnab born nineteen thirty one, was was
his co star in both of those pictures, and their
experience with the with the films, especially the first one,

(26:59):
Born Free this open apparently opened up their eyes to
various challenges concerning captive wild animals in the world, and
they created the Born Free Foundation in nineteen eighty four,
which is still very active. It works to quote ensure
that all wild animals, whether living in captivity or in
the wild, are treated with compassion and respect and are

(27:19):
able to live their lives according to their needs. And
you can learn more about that organization at Bornfree dot
org dot UK.

Speaker 3 (27:27):
That's interesting given the themes of Gorgo. Yeah, correct me
if I'm wrong. I don't think I heard you mentioned
Gorgo as a cited inspiration for this activism, But Gorgo
also has themes of animal rights and captivity.

Speaker 2 (27:43):
I mean, maybe it was there in the background, and
maybe Gorgo is what pushed it over the edge, but no,
they never mentioned Gorgo with It's not the Gorgo Foundation,
it's the Born Free Foundation.

Speaker 4 (27:55):
Now.

Speaker 3 (27:56):
I say this not to tarnish his acting or his
activism by soiation, but there's kind of an elephant in
the room with this guy, which I know of being
brought up multiple times independently when talking about this movie
with people, which is that in some shots he kind
of looks like Steven Sagall here it helps that he's tall.
Sometimes at like certain angles, he makes a kind of

(28:17):
Stephen Sagall face. And there's also a kind of energy
that I don't know if this exactly makes sense, rob
but like the fact that he doesn't take off his
captain's hat even when they come on board land that
kind of has a sigall thing too.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
Okay, all right, fair enough, fair enough. Now you mentioned
that William Sylvester plays the other main character in the
character Sam Slade, And this is a guy that I
think a lot of people will recognize he was. He
lived nineteen twenty two through nineteen ninety five. His most
recognizable role is that of doctor Haywood R. Floyd in
Stanley Cooper It's nineteen sixty eight masterpiece two thousand and one,

(28:56):
a Space Odyssey.

Speaker 3 (28:57):
So he is the character in two thousand and one
who we see him when we first transition from the
prologue into the future. He's like taking a shuttle to
the moon and then arrives there to investigate the anomaly
found buried on the moon. Is that right?

Speaker 2 (29:14):
Yeah? Yeah, So it's you see him early in the film,
and he is I mean not too early, because early
enough you're only seeing hominids and tapers and so forth.
But yeah, one of the first modern humans you encounter.
And I don't know about anyone else, but like watching
this film and recognizing him from two thousand and one,

(29:35):
it kind of added a little extra class to this picture,
you know, like like two thousand and one can't help
but where it we could rub off on any other picture.
You see some of the various actors from that film.

Speaker 3 (29:46):
Yet though, of course Gorgo did come first, so you
could look at it as Bill silll bringing that class
of Gorgo into the production of two thousand and one.

Speaker 2 (29:55):
Certainly, you certainly could, but you know, it wasn't all
like generational, all time best sci fi films for William Sylvester.
Other folks might recognize him from the TV series Gemini
Man and the TV movie from seventy six as well
writing with Death. This was pieced together from I think
like a couple of episodes of Gemini Man and was
featured on Mystery Science Theater three thousand.

Speaker 3 (30:16):
Oh yeah, I have vague memories of that one.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
His other credits include nineteen sixty four's Devil Doll, sixty
five's Devils of Darkness, and he also pops up in
nineteen seventy eights Heaven Can Wait.

Speaker 3 (30:28):
You know, there's only so much that is demanded of
the actors in Gorgo, But I think I would say
William Sylvester stands out in this movie as doing maybe
the most with his role of anyone.

Speaker 2 (30:39):
Yeah, and he gets the smoke a lot. Let just
smoke a lot.

Speaker 3 (30:43):
He's the one who we first see really seeming to
feel bad about what's happening to Gorgo, apart from a
child actor who we'll talk about in a bit.

Speaker 2 (30:52):
All right. A couple other characters of note. We have
Professor Hendrix, played by Joseph o'connorteen ten through two thousand
and one, Irish actor and playwright with extensive Shakespearean stage credits.
His films include nineteen sixty four's The Gorgon, so it's
in both Gorgo and The Gorgon. This is the Terence
Fisher Hammer film, starring both Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

(31:14):
He was in nineteen sixty nine's And of the Thousand Days,
ninety eight's Elizabeth, nineteen ninety nine's The Messenger And This
is pretty cool too. He served as the narrator in
the voice of the ERSKKX in nineteen eighty two's The
Dark Crystal. Oh wow, yeah, So that voice you hear
at the end, that's Joseph O'Connor.

Speaker 3 (31:33):
I had no idea.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
All right, So that's Professor Hendrix. And then there's this
character Dorkin.

Speaker 3 (31:37):
Oh what a skiz?

Speaker 2 (31:40):
Yeah. Dorkan is played by Martin Benson, who lived nineteen
eighteen through twenty ten. English character actor whose credits include
nineteen fifty six Is the King and I sixty three's Cleopatra,
sixty four is a Shot in the Dark, sixty nine's Goldfinger.
He plays one of the mobsters that the villain in
that is involved in his to radiate a bunch of gold.

Speaker 3 (32:02):
I believe he is the guy who objects to Goldfingers
plan and they're like, oh, oh, you know, that's fine,
you don't have to be part of this. So they
go put him in a car, and then they put
the car in a trash compactor.

Speaker 2 (32:16):
Classic. All right, then you got seventy six is the Omen,
seventy sevens Jesus of Nazareth in nineteen ninety nine's Angela's Ashes.
So yeah, I don't think he was ever. He was
a very much a character actor, often like a little
further down in the listings, but had major roles in
a number of big pictures.

Speaker 3 (32:32):
Dorkin is the greedy, unscrupulous circus proprietor in this film
who exploits Gorgo for profit, and I think Benson does
a great job with this role. He's like he's out
Carnival barking about how you know, oh, we the Irish
government may soon put a stop to what we're doing
to Gorgo, so come and get your tickets now while

(32:53):
there's still a chance.

Speaker 2 (32:55):
There's a window for Gorgo exploitation. Yeah, all right. I'm
not going to go into a lot of d tail here,
but it is worth noting that in small uncredited roles
we also have future UFO lead Ed Bishop who lived
thirty two through two thousand and five. And then we
also have Nigel Green, John Wood, Fred Wood. All three

(33:15):
would later go would go on to be bigger name
actors there and there. I wasn't able to spot most
of them. I think I spotted one or both of
the Woods. And then as far as the monsters go,
there's a stunt man by the name of Dave Wilding
inside the monster suit. I couldn't find out much about him,
but I do like to acknowledge the person wearing the
monster suit whenever possible. All right, now, behind the scenes,

(33:37):
you actually have a number of notable names here. We'll
try not to spend too much time on him here.
But the cinematographer for this was Freddie Young, who lived
nineteen oh two through nineteen ninety eight, British cinematographer best
known for his Oscar winning work on David Lean's films
Lawrence of Arabia from sixty two, Doctor Shivago from sixty five,
and Ryan's Daughter from nineteen seventy. This is right before

(34:01):
Lawrence of Arabia.

Speaker 3 (34:02):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (34:03):
He also worked on sixty seven's You Only Lived Twice,
seventy one's Nicholas and Alexandra, and nineteen seventy two's The
Asphcs Wow.

Speaker 3 (34:11):
Freddy got around. Yeah, big name, big name. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
Another one, Elliott Scott was the art director on this
so of nineteen fifteen through nineteen ninety three. He'd worked
previously on nineteen fifty eight's Tom Thumb, which was a
kind of a big special effects feature of the time period.
I believe he went on to work as art director
on such films as sixty four's Children of the Damned,
nineteen seventies No Blade of Grass, and he served as

(34:36):
production designer on a ton of big films nineteen eighties
The Water in the Woods, eighty one's Dragon Slayer, eighty
three's The Pirates of Penzance, eighty four's Indiana Jones, and
The Temple of Doom eighty six is Labyrinth eighty eights,
who framed Roger Rabbit and nineteen eighty nine's Indiana Jones
in the Last Crusade, Oh Jam.

Speaker 3 (34:55):
A lot of high profile work. Wow.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
Yeah. Then we have Tom Howard Special Photographic Effects, lived
nineteen ten through nineteen eighty five. It was a visual
effects expert who worked on a number of award winning
and legendary special effects film including Tom Thumb, nineteen sixty
three's The Haunting and nineteen sixty eight two thousand and
one A Space Odyssey. As we'll discuss, there are a
lot of monster suit effects in this, a lot of

(35:19):
like miniature set effects, but there's also a fair amount
of chroma key replacement stuff, you know, like blue green
screen type of effects. I'm thinking especially early on in
the film when you know, however, two main characters out
on the water about to go scuba diving, Like clearly
they did some combination of on location and sat with

(35:39):
the ocean thrown in the background. And then finally the
score is by and I may not be pronouncing this correctly.
Angelo Francisco Lavagnino, who lived nineteen oh nine through nineteen
eighty seven, an Italian composer whose other scores include nineteen
fifty five Lost Continent and a whole slew of Spaghetti
Westerns and Sword and Sandal epic. His score for Lost

(36:01):
Continent was a winner at the Cannes Film Festival. So
you know, it's a it's a fine, sweeping orchestral score here.
It fits the grandeur that is Gorgo. But that's about
all I can say for it.

Speaker 3 (36:14):
Yeah, well, sometimes it's funny because clearly something it's trying
to do, especially at the beginning, is blend this thundering,
you know, suite of monster horns with the lilting Irish
folk melodies. And you know, I'd say it does that
fairly successfully. Though it's a kind of amusing thing to hear.

(36:43):
So I guess we're transitioning to the plot now. And
the movie opens with that score. That that combines like
the you know, the the dramatic monster music with the
Irish sounding folk melody, and that is playing while we
see the titles and the type is there are such
like block letters in the title here. I love the

(37:07):
heaviness of it, like you can imagine the teams that
built the Pyramids putting together the Gorgo title.

Speaker 2 (37:14):
That's right. Yeah, when they drop the title Gorgo here,
it is like a thousand feet tall. It's like a
biblical epic font. It looks like it should be comically
Monty Python style crushing something.

Speaker 3 (37:28):
And then.

Speaker 2 (37:29):
This alone was amazing. But then they kept using it
like smaller of course, but they kept using it for
the rest of the credits, and I loved.

Speaker 3 (37:36):
It strong choice. So the action begins with a steamship
out on the sea and we see the men of
the crew all looking out over the sea with concern.
Something is troubling them. And then we see what they're
looking at. Far out in the distance, there is a
patch of ocean that appears to be at a rolling boil.
It is this giant, white, frothy mass swirling around ominously,

(38:01):
and soon a diver in scuba gear comes up to
the ladder on the side of the ship. From the
water and from the diver, we learn that these are
salvage operators, and while they're certainly worried about the boiling ocean,
there is money to be made. A shipwreck worth a
fortune is down below, so the dive continues until disaster strikes.

(38:23):
The boiling region of the ocean suddenly irrupts. Something comes
out of it looks kind of like a volcanic mountain
top poking up out of the water, and the ship
is rocked by brutal waves. It nearly turns over. We
see cargo from the deck being washed overboard, sailors fighting
to keep the vessel afloat, and the boat is nearly destroyed.

(38:43):
And then we cut to the next morning. The violence
has subsided, but the ship is very damaged. Its engine
has taken on water. We see this giant propeller making
a weak effort to spin, and here assessing the problem,
we meet our two main characters. Actually I guess we
met them before. We sort of get to know them.
So there is Captain Joe Ryan played by Bill Trevers,

(39:04):
and then there is the first mate, Sam Slade, played
by William Sylvester. Now Honestly, the first time I watched this,
though they don't look the same, I couldn't tell much
of a difference between these two guys. I didn't really
separate them. In my mind. They were just like the
two Salvage guys. Captain Joe is the taller guy. He's
the guy wearing the captain's hat. But but on rewatch

(39:28):
I could see more of the differences between their characters.

Speaker 2 (39:32):
Yeah, this film doesn't set them up as being like
an antagonistic to each other. Like they clearly have a
great working relationship, and therefore they line up on a
lot of things. You know, another film might have gone
in a different direction, where you know, one of them's good,
one of them's bad. You know, one of them wants
to cut corners and the other one is buy the book,
and it's not really what we have.

Speaker 3 (39:51):
Here, certainly not in the beginning. They do have more
differences later on in the film.

Speaker 2 (39:56):
Yeah, because you throw a giant monster into a relationship,
even a working, reallytionship, and it changes everything that's right.

Speaker 3 (40:03):
So Sam and Joe figured that the boat is going
to take three or four days to repair, and they're
out of fresh water, so they need to go ashore
at the nearest port, which is on a small island
where they're off the coast of Ireland by the way,
but it's a small island called Nara, and so our
salvage buddies take a dinghy into the port and along
the way we see some kind of strange creatures that

(40:26):
appear to be dead floating in the water. They're like
weird floating. I mean, we see these models. At one point,
Bill Travers like picks one up out of the water
and holds it up for us to see, and they're
like these rubber fish that I think have legs and
they have things poking out of their eyes.

Speaker 2 (40:45):
Yeah, big rubber monster fish everywhere, like weird enough looking
that you would have it seems like it would have
been more alarming, but I guess yeah, they're just like, well,
these are strange, not familiar with this species.

Speaker 3 (40:57):
Yeah, Bill Travs says, never seen anything like that before,
and then just throws it back.

Speaker 2 (41:01):
Yeah, they pick one up, look at it, throw it
back in.

Speaker 3 (41:04):
But I don't know, maybe when you're a salvage operator,
you are just constantly seeing things like, oh, that's a
weird thing from the ocean, don't know what that is.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
Yeah, a cryptozoology hadn't been invented yet, so you couldn't
like take a picture of it and claim that it's
a you know, some sort of fantastic creature. They're just like, well,
that's expected. Really, it's a chupacapra. It's got to be so.

Speaker 5 (41:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (41:22):
They determined that the whole ocean floor must have been
torn up by what appeared to be a volcanic corruption,
the thing that damaged their boat. But they dock, they
meet some local fishermen who are not very friendly and
mostly don't speak English. They just kind of cuss them
out in Gaelic, and eventually they come to a house
where they meet a little boy who will become another

(41:43):
one of the main characters of this movie. The boy
is Sean. He is introduced as an orphan boy who
assists the harbormaster mccarton. And you know what, I give
credit to this child actor. He does a much better
job than you might expect with his role. But also
they have him dressed up in some funny clothes. When
we were watching it, Rachel was observing that, like they

(42:05):
just have shown in these gigantic clothes, like he's wearing
this huge sweater tucked into huge pants.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
Yeah. Yeah, but yeah, he does become important. He's an
important character, not just a one off. And as we
kind of alluded to earlier, Yeah, this whole first act
has kind of a full car vibe to it. A
solid mysterious atmosphere is rolled out, and i'd say they
also venture into sort of like soft lovecrafty and othering

(42:33):
of the Irish here with this whole like, oh, they
can't understand them. There's something creepy going on here in
this this Irish village, which I mean, as we'll find out,
nothing really that creepy is going on, but they kind
of create this air of mystery.

Speaker 3 (42:50):
Well, yeah, the way they're first introduced, you might expect
that the like, all the people on the island are
part of a cult that worships Gorgo or something. That's
not the case. They're no, Like, they're just as baffled
and terrified by Gorgo as anybody else, it seems.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:05):
But anyway, so Sean invites our heroes into the harbor
Master's cabin and he informs them that Macarton is not
that the harbor Master mccarton is not actually a local
Sean says, instead a city man, he is a government man,
calls himself an archaeologist. So I was a little confused

(43:26):
by this. Macarton is simultaneously the harbor master and a
working archaeologist.

Speaker 2 (43:33):
Yeah, I feel like a lot of roles were combined
into this was originally just going to be the whole
movie is tinkering around in the small village.

Speaker 3 (43:42):
That's a good point this in an earlier draft. I
wonder if this was two different characters that were combined
into one. Yeah, could have been anyway. Sean says he
works for mccarton, quote, cleaning up the things he finds,
and Sean asks if they want to see these things
that he cleans up for mccarton. It turns out McCartin
is he's got like a back room where he is

(44:03):
piling up a secret stash of priceless Viking artifacts left
over from a great sea battle a thousand years ago
when the Irish drove off the Vikings and sank their ships.
And Sean says that apparently fighting in the Irish's corner
was a sea spirit called Ogre, and he points up

(44:24):
to a figure of like a dragon head that I
guess is supposed to be a representation of Ogra.

Speaker 2 (44:30):
It's a nice shock. I mean, in a way, it
kind of reminds me of the early scenes in The
Exorcist where we haven't seen anything demonic yet we see
that statue of Bazoo Zoo and it's you know, it's
ominous and really one of the creepier moments of a
film that you know, in its later stages is less
concerned with being subtly creepy and more in your face.

Speaker 3 (44:48):
Yeah, the dogs are fighting in the rubbish heep well
while he's looking at the statue. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:53):
Yeah, And in a similar way, this is a movie
that is going to be very in your face later on,
But at this point we haven't I've seen the monster,
and we just have this nice subtle idea, you know,
the sort of the mythic potency of the idea.

Speaker 3 (45:07):
So just then in the artifact room, they are interrupted
by mccarton, the city man. Mccarton is borderline hostile from
the get go. He seems to be wanting to protect
his stash of Viking stuff, and he says, by orders
of the local authorities, no ship is allowed to put
into port at Nara for more than twenty four hours
without a permit, so Joe and Sam plead for help.

(45:29):
After all, he's like, you know, the ocean boiled, something
wrecked our engine. But mccarton will not budge on this.
He's like, I don't make the rules. It's never established
who does make the rules. But they cannot come into
port except to get some water and leave. So on
the way back to their ship, Sam and Joe run
into some local boats who at first cuss them out

(45:50):
in Gaelic and then report that they are waiting for
some divers to come up, and when one of the
divers does turn up, he is dead, so they pull
him on board the and Sam looks at the dead
diver and concludes that he died of fright. And I
always wonder how you can tell that in movies just
by looking at people.

Speaker 2 (46:09):
Yeah, yeah, without like a Star Trek medical scanner device.
Usually sometimes there's a vision that they make it abundantly clear,
like suddenly the hair is turned white, or they're like
severe distortions allah the ring. But for the most part,
in films like this, it's like I touch him on
the neck, he's dead, Jim.

Speaker 3 (46:29):
So we get a diving scene next, Sam and Joe
are on the case. They're trying to figure out. What
are they trying to figure out? I don't know. They
go down to investigate, I think, what could have scared
the diver that killed him.

Speaker 2 (46:40):
And they also are just suspicious. They they're suspicious of
this archaeologists. They're like, something is up, and we want
to find out what is up and what he's up to,
and that's why they're going freelance here.

Speaker 3 (46:52):
That's right. So they just they like scoop it down.
And I really like in this scene that they just
kind of see gorgo. He's just down there swim swimming around.
The water is murky, so you don't get a great
look at him yet, but you just see this like
lizard rat swimming through the water. And they come back up.
They're sitting there in their scuba gear smoking cigarettes and
Joe says, what did you see? Sam? And Sam says,

(47:13):
I don't know, but whatever it was, and never want
to see it again. Unfortunately you will in the next scene.
So later on the salvage ship, they're bringing aboard barrels.
I think this is the fresh water they asked for,
and Sean the child shows up on the boat. He
says that mccarton wants to see them, and then he
also says that the permit is a heathen lie. I

(47:35):
didn't know exactly what this meant.

Speaker 2 (47:37):
Yeah, but Sean is ready to sell out his village
to any outsider salvage crew that is just halfway nice
to it.

Speaker 3 (47:43):
Yeah, there's nothing so far to establish that Joe and
Sam are nice people like they.

Speaker 2 (47:48):
They're like everybody's in the business of finding stuff lost
on the seafloor and stealing it for your own purposes. Yeah,
but it's implied that these eyes are okay, whereas the
archaeologist is clearly up to no good.

Speaker 3 (48:04):
He's a city man. Yeah, Yeah, are Sam and Joe
not citymen? What makes one a city man?

Speaker 2 (48:10):
I guess they're they're they're semen.

Speaker 3 (48:13):
They're navy men, right, Okay, Yeah, there are men of
the salt. Yeah, of the salt in the wind. Okay.
So the next thing that happens is the atmosphere gets
pretty cool, like the locals appear to be preparing for
something weird. I would say this scene is like a
cross between Jaws and The Wicker Man. We see locals

(48:33):
loading into boats rowboats with flaming torches and harpoons and
one harpooneer spies something in the water and then lets
his dart fly, and then we see Gorgo. We see
this head, this like rat lizard type head pop up
out of the water with red eyes, with a with
a harpoon I think stuck in his eye, and Sean

(48:55):
informs us that this is Ogre, this is the sea spirit.
So then we get kind of a battle scene that
is Ogre versus the boat Posse. And then after this,
Ogre comes on shore and attacks the harbor. He's like
stomping around smashing things, and mccarton seems to be in
command of the locals. He's like he's like commanding a

(49:16):
group of men with rifles who get into formation and
shoot at Ogra. But does it do anything, of course not.

Speaker 2 (49:23):
How did they control the monster in ancient times? I
feel like like ultimately, the the the alluded to backstory
is far more fascinating than anything we get into later
on in the film, Like what was that encounter like
between the Irish and their monster and the Viking invaders?
Like I want to see that prequel.

Speaker 3 (49:41):
Yeah, we never really learned any more about that, do we?

Speaker 2 (49:44):
Yeah, maybe they controlled the monster with religion. That's that
would that would make sense, That would be interesting.

Speaker 3 (49:50):
But I do like a lot of the way this
scene looks like. There are some shots of, you know,
from a distance, of the monster, the monster sort of
walking through the harbor, and then you see all the
people running around with their fires and torches trying to
stand off against him. Is a It's actually a surprisingly
dark and cool looking scene. Yeah, I agree, But of

(50:12):
course the locals are completely ineffective at repelling the creature.
Their harpoons and bullets do nothing. But the outsider Sam
and Joe they have an idea. They have the idea
of throwing sticks at Gorgo. Technically, they throw flaming torches
at Gorgo or Ogra, whatever the creature is called at
this point. I can't remember what we specified so far.

(50:33):
So far, but to be clear, nobody in the movie
has said the word Gorgo yet. That name will come later.
So they throw some torches. Gorgo gets the torches stuck
in his teeth. Then he squeals, walks backwards into the water,
almost as if moving in reverse I think this actually
is a reverse shot, and then sinks back into the waves.

Speaker 2 (50:51):
So they drove him away.

Speaker 3 (50:53):
It worked right, And after the attack, the locals are
mad at mccarton and I wasn't your wily? Is Gorgo
his fault? Don't see any reason to think so?

Speaker 4 (51:05):
No?

Speaker 2 (51:05):
I mean, I mean, we know the viewer knows that
this probably has something to do with the volcanic activity, yeah,
and that they're thinking, oh, it's because he's still in
all that Viking gold, but that, I mean, did it
unless you're going to make some sort of crazy hypothesis
in which the theft of Viking gold from the seafloor
caused some sort of volcanic reaction.

Speaker 3 (51:27):
There's no indication of that in the film or and also,
from what I can tell, no indication that Gorgo cares
about the Viking artifacts or the gold anyway. So the
locals are mad at mccarton. They start saying, hey, we
want to leave with Sam and Joe on their salvage
ship when it's repaired, but mccarton tries to talk them
out of that, and eventually Sam and Joe retreat with

(51:48):
mccarton into his harbor master's shack to discuss a deal.
They know that mcarton is secretly trying to protect the
Viking treasure which I guess he plans to keep for himself.
That he has a safe full of what looked like
Holy Grails.

Speaker 2 (52:04):
Yeah, yeah, different Holy Grail prototypes in there.

Speaker 3 (52:07):
Yeah, he's got like I can see at least fifteen
Holy Grails in there. And Sam and Joe offer a trade.
They say, if mccarton pays them off in some of
the Viking gold, they will get rid of the monster
for him. So they make a deal. So they leave,
but then Sean the kid, follows them and he does
not like the idea of them catching ogra. He catches

(52:29):
up to them and he says, it's a bad thing.
You're doing a terrible bad thing, mister Ryan. And then
Joe Ryan kneels next to the kid. He says, why
don't you call me Joe? And Sean says okay Joe,
And Joe says okay Sean. End of conversation. So next
time a child accuses you of doing evil, just remember

(52:52):
you get on a first name basis. It'll totally distract them.

Speaker 2 (52:55):
But I love the setup here, Like we're really cooking
with gas now. The idea is that these guys are
going to catch the monster in order to make that
sweet Viking gold, and so this is the challenge ahead
of them. There's no indication that they actually have the
ability to do this, but they're going to set out
and try to do it anyway.

Speaker 3 (53:15):
That's right. Well, at first they're like, how would you
even kill a creature like that? Maybe you'd use dynamite
or something, But then they consider, actually, what is a
creature like that worth alive? Maybe it's worth more alive.
So from here we move on to the Bathisphere scene.
Though this bathisphere is not a sphere, it is not spherical,
it's sort of the bathist cylinder, and Joe gets into

(53:40):
this metal contraption with some portholes on it that looks
incredibly small inside, and I don't know, this is a
cool scene concept, though it doesn't look as amazing as
I think it could have.

Speaker 2 (53:55):
Weldon points out that this section of the film is
pretty much a direct remake of a scene in the
Beast from twenty thousand fathoms, and so I had to
look it up because again I've only really seen the
monster sequences from that movie. And indeed there's another Bathisphere
segment that you can watch. So they basically were like,
well that worked last time. Let's do it again. But yeah,
to your point, I think it works better in the

(54:18):
mind that it does on screen, at least by modern standards.
I don't know, maybe this was a lot more impressive
at the time.

Speaker 3 (54:24):
Also, the Bathistphere in this movie is like a tartist
and that it is much bigger on the inside than
on the outside. We see Joe Ryan inside there, and
I don't know, it's quite roomy actually on the inside though.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
Yeah, especially because that's how big this actor is. Again, Yeah,
he has he has so much room. And if you're
curious about all this, we did some episodes of stuff
to blow your mind back in the day about the
Bathistphere and about the construction of it and the size
of it and some of the amazing observations that were
made with it. It's an amazing story and I can

(54:56):
totally understand wanting to capture that in the film, and
I guess to a certain extent they do. Like I
like the idea of the small capsule being lowered into
this vast, unexplored world, like a that world is vast
and as large scale as your giant monsters, though being
very much an outsider in it. In this vulnerable little capsule.

Speaker 3 (55:20):
Well, I mean, the thing to remember about the Bathisphere
is that it has no propulsion of its own, so
it's just dangling by this cable. So if it were
to somehow drop that, that's it. You're not coming back up.

Speaker 4 (55:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (55:32):
Well, anyway, so they send Joe down there, and they
make contact. There's a Gorgo attack. Gorgo attacks the Bathisphere
and oh you hear these like tin cam crunching sounds
and you see water spraying on the inside, but there
is not a catastrophic implosion. Joe is not killed. Instead,
the ship successfully traps Gorgo in a net.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
It's kind of a lackluster finished to that though, because
it's like the bathysphere, oh, high technology, and then they
just use a net. Just yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (56:01):
And then we get some news reports and I can't
remember what we've said about this already, but from here
on out the movie will become highly reliant on news
reports for both plot exposition and for exploration of themes.
We're just going to get reporters telling us what's going
on and what it means, over and over.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
Yeah, it basically goes all Santa Claus conquers the Martians
for a bit here where it's yeah, a bunch of newscasts,
expert interviews, and of course our all time favorite stock footage.
So much stock footage, though at least this time around
it's British military stock footage, which has, you know, a
different texture to it compared to the like nineteen fifties

(56:43):
and sixties US military stock footage that you see in
so many films of that era.

Speaker 3 (56:48):
Yeah, we haven't gotten exactly to the point where stock
footage becomes super prevalent yet, that'll come a little later.
And it's into the second act. Right now, we're at
the at the like peak newscast stuff. So we get
a newscast where this guy at a desk explains what's happening.
He says, the headlines of the entire world are being

(57:09):
monopolized by the news of the capture of a fantastic monster,
seemingly of prehistoric origin off the coast of Ireland. Puzzled
scientists are already speculating that the monster may have been
released from some vast suboceanic cavern far beneath Earth's crust
by unprecedented volcanic eruptions which occurred in the area last

(57:29):
week and then meanwhile, we also get this other guy who,
like we cut to a different newscaster who says some
scientific authorities are suggesting that the whole thing is merely
an elaborate Irish hoax. Nevertheless, the Irish government are sending
two of their top paleontologists to claim the creature for

(57:50):
Ireland if it does exist.

Speaker 2 (57:54):
I also have to throw in here that, you know,
I think all organisms are of prehistoric origin, if you
want to be technical about it. So I don't really
know what that means. What do you mean of prehistoric origin?
I know what they're getting at, but I'm just not
sure it makes sense.

Speaker 3 (58:07):
You know, We've watched a lot of movies with plot
exposition via like a newsdesk segment, and I feel like
at some point we should go back and rank the
newscaster segments. I'm want to say, these guys, they're no
Dick Cutting.

Speaker 4 (58:20):
Now.

Speaker 3 (58:21):
What was he that he was in a creature with
the atom brain?

Speaker 4 (58:25):
Right?

Speaker 3 (58:26):
He was? Yes, yeah, he's the Walter cronkind of monster attacks.
Always always trust Dick Cutting. Let's see here. Oh yeah.
Then we get the transport segments, so we see gorgo
on the salvage ship, he's like tied up in ropes
and nets. He's being taken somewhere. The scientists from Dublin
who were mentioned in the news report, they arrive on
the boat and they say, this animal is of enormous

(58:49):
scientific value. You must take it to Dublin immediately, and
its skin must be kept wet. But then, when the
scientists are out of earshot Sam and Joe, one of
them pulls out like a letter they got, I think,
which is a better offer. It is from Dorkin's circus
in London, and they say that Dorkin is offering them

(59:10):
thirty thousand against fifty percent of the gross. So are
these hardened mercenaries going to turn gorgo over to the
clutches of science for a pittance of compensation. Hell no, no,
they're gonna go. They're going to send him to the
circus of Dorkin. So they set the course for London.
I think the scientists from Dublin are still on the

(59:31):
ship as the ship is like departing, like going in
the other direction to take the monster to London. So
I assume they're protesting the entire time. Oh also, Sean
comes along on the ship and I don't know why,
but he's on the ship now. I think he has
now just become the ward of Sam and Joe and

(59:54):
Sean comes to Oh. He comes out in the middle
of the night and talks to Gorgo. He's like, I
came to let you go back to the sea, and
tries to release him. But then Joe comes out and
gets mad at Sean and he says, you little nuthead,
I have a gutton notion to toss you over the side.

Speaker 2 (01:00:11):
But we get a little bit of the natural affinity
that a young child has for a giant monster. You know.
This is of course something recently see especially in the
Gamera and movies. Gamera is a friend to children.

Speaker 3 (01:00:23):
It's never established that Gorgo is a friend to all children,
but Sean is like naturally drawn to Gorgo. There are
scenes later where Gorgo spoiler Gorgo's mother is destroying London
and Sean while all the crowds are running away, Sean
runs toward.

Speaker 2 (01:00:39):
Kids get Kaijuk. They understand that's part of the connection.

Speaker 3 (01:00:51):
So anyway, Joe and Sam they put armed guards on Gorgo.
They say, if that thing moves, start shooting, But why
would they do that? Isn't like this thing being a
lot their meal ticket as so Gorgo I think kills
a guard in the middle of the night. And they
also mentioned that Gorgo is dripping some kind of phosphorescent
ooze into the water as they travel that won't come

(01:01:13):
back Later. They arrive in London and we get a
bunch of shots of London and some things that are interesting.
Rob I included one screenshot for you to look at here,
because what we're looking at is like in the background
a real shot of the Thames with like the Tower
Bridge in the background. But then in the foreground there

(01:01:33):
is a it's supposed to be a tent, like a
circus tent that says Gorgo over the top of it,
so now we're actually seeing the name. And then there
are painted cutouts of people in front of the circus tent,
so they're not actors. They're like stands of people. But
it cuts away pretty quickly, so if you weren't able
to pause, you might think they were really standing there. Yeah,

(01:01:55):
it's just a quick mat painting here. It's not in
there interesting. So there's some conflict here. When they arrive
in London, the scientists from Dublin are mad that Sam
and Joe have decided to sell the animal to Dorkin
instead of handing it over for research, and they point
out that it may be carrying unknown diseases or parasites.
It hasn't been studied yet, but Dorkin has got that

(01:02:17):
sweet cash for them. And Dorkin also makes assurances to
the scientists. He's like, don't worry, you know, we'll we'll
be giving you every opportunity to study the creature while
it is held in a concrete pit for the gaulking
crowds I'm selling tickets to. And Dorkin is a real
like pencil mustache, bow tie wearing money freak.

Speaker 4 (01:02:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):
Yeah, it's very clear that he is a villain in
this picture. We're not giving a lot of reason to
sympathize with this case.

Speaker 3 (01:02:48):
Oh and then we get the gorgo in chains parade
through London. I think this scene was amazing. So there
is like this parade of trucks or lories I guess
that say dork In circus and say Gorgo on them.
And one of them is like a flatbed truck that
has Gorgo on the trailer and he's like wrapped in
a big tarp that says Gorgo covered in chains, and

(01:03:11):
it feels like it's like tied to Saint Dronicus, like
marching into Rome with the Queen of the Goths in
a cage. But it's all for Dorkin. And and I
guess it was Dorkin's idea to call the creature Gorgo
because it's written on all of his circus stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:03:25):
Well he knows you got to brand it, so that
makes sense. And yeah, this this whole sequence is pretty
great because it's it's it's weird h And also you
get lots of period shots of London. I really enjoy
just seeing all of like the neon and the signage
and so forth. So this this is a lot of fun.

Speaker 3 (01:03:45):
Yeah, and these are real location shots. So they actually
must have like driven a truck with a thing that
said Gorgo on it in front of Buckingham Palace and
stuff like that. And the we get another news cast
that's saying we bring you the u and our most
unusual telecast today, we bring you the arrival of Gorgo.
This creature, which should have been extinct ten million years ago,

(01:04:07):
is truly an awesome sight as it is transported through
the streets of modern London on its way to Battersea
Park and there's a big sign for Gordon's Gin in
the background, so it's just ads all over the place
and the newscast goes on. Of course, Londoners are notoriously skeptical,
and a good many we've spoken to still seem to
think it's some kind of circus stunt. But the animal

(01:04:29):
is real, take my word for it. And they go
on to it to say, well, the streets have been cleared,
but you know, rest assured there is no danger. The
animal has been given a large dose of tranquilizer and
actually being so close to this thing, I could do
with a large dose of tranquilizer myself. But jokes aside,
the animal has killed a number of persons already. Oh

(01:04:53):
and finally, this is also the newscast where when the
guy is saying, oh, we've arrived at Battersea Park where
Gorgo as he called we don't know why, will be
exhibited to the public, and Gorgo is like, you can
just straight up see Gorgo on the back of the truck,
like his eyes are open and they're glowing red, but
he's all tied down, and Gorgo in captivity like this

(01:05:16):
does look very pitiable, like they they achieve in tugging
on the heart strings, Like I'm already feeling bad for
Gorgo and they haven't even really gotten to the part
where you're supposed to feel super bad for him.

Speaker 2 (01:05:27):
Yet you know, I can't help but feel as cool
as these scenes are, Dorkin's kind of given it away here,
like everyone gets a free peak at Gorgo and then
he's gonna sell tickets to have Gorgo do more than
just be present.

Speaker 3 (01:05:41):
I don't know that's a good point, yeah, Dorkin, You
would think he'd be keeping more of a lid on it,
or maybe just trying to give people the tiniest tease
so that they will have to come pay for a ticket.
But no, like you can see you can see Gorgo's
face on the truck, because.

Speaker 2 (01:05:56):
We know from King Kong that like a ticketed King
Kong presentation consists of King Kong chained on stage and
there's not much to it. I remember The Simpsons Tree
House of Horror has some jokes kind of alluding to
this fact that, like, like, what was the rest of
the show going to consist of? You just sit there
looking at King Kong? But you know, what's the Gorgo show?

(01:06:20):
Going to consist of is there an opening act, is
there some sort of a finale you're working towards. Is
he going to do any tricks or is he just
going to be tied up more or less like he
is in this whole sequence.

Speaker 3 (01:06:33):
He was supposed to read Gorgo then puppet show. Yeah,
but so oh and we see so like for some reason,
Sam and Joe are still involved and they don't just
like hand Gorgo off to Dorkin at the port and
then take their money and go. They're like they seem
to be Gorgo's full time caretakers.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
Now, yeah, despite having no qualifications, no call professions for
this at all.

Speaker 3 (01:07:01):
Right, they're salvage divers. What they what do they know
about Gorgo? But Joe Ryan still has his captain's hat on,
by the way. But there's like a Dorkin press conference
and this is the part where one of the reporters
is like, you know, is it true that you stole
this from the Irish government and Dorkin is like, yeah,
they may take it back soon. So you've got to

(01:07:21):
get your tickets to see Gorgo today while it's still here.
So yeah, like we said, Joe and Sam, they're still
involved in handling Gorgo, and during transport they're trying to
put it in its enclosure, and Gorko is awakened from
his tranquilizer slumber by camera flashes of irresponsible reporters. That
seems familiar. Was that in King Kong? I think maybe

(01:07:43):
it was? And there is a brief Gorgo rampage at
the circus where he is eventually driven back. He's driven
into his concrete pit by men with flame throwers. There
seems to be a theme that fires Gorgo's weakness, but
Gorgo kills some people with this tail on the way
back to his concrete pit, including a friend of Joe

(01:08:04):
and Sam's named Mike, and Sam seems more disturbed by
this than Joe does. But eventually they get Gorgo locked away,
and then we're just treated to some shots of like
London having Gorgo fever. So there are double decker buses
that all say Gorgo on the side of them. We
see the I guess it's Piccadilly Circus maybe, or you know,
some like streets of London where there are just Gorgo

(01:08:27):
signs all over the place, next to big posters for
schweps and Gordon's gin and stuff. We see fireworks for Gorgo.
There's cotton candy and rides at the circus and Dorkin
is out like barking in front of the circus entrance, saying,
everyone in the world is talking about Gorgo, but only
you can see him. Only five shillings ladies and gentlemen,

(01:08:49):
and they're you know, they're selling ice cream and stuff.
And we see all of the British circus goers standing
at the edge of this concrete pit where Gorgo is
in chain, standing in like a puddle of water. They're
all eating cotton candy and bananas and gaulking at this
creature and just poor Gorgo.

Speaker 2 (01:09:07):
Yeah, yeah, you feel a lot of sympathy for the
monster at this point, because yeah, he's just he's in
this pit and people are gawking at him, and he
does not belong here. Gorgo was born.

Speaker 3 (01:09:18):
Free, exactly, and he's also he's supposed to be in
the sea. This is a point that Sean makes multiple times.
It's not just that he's in captivity, that's bad enough,
but he's being kept on land and like hosed down
with water. Gorgo is a sea creature. And we get
a scene where we see how Sam and Joe are
dealing with their success differently. Joe is like living it up.

(01:09:39):
We see he's got like a nice new suit on
and he seems to be flashing his wealth. And Sam, meanwhile,
is shown apparently just like hiding in a trailer at
the circus where perhaps Sean is living. Like Sean the
kid is seen sleeping there. Again, it's not exactly clear,
but it almost suggests that like Sam and Joe have

(01:10:00):
adopted Sean, maybe like they are taking care of him now.
And Sam is seen drinking heavily and he says and
like Joe comes in and says, hey, you know, how
about coming out and having a few drinks, And Sam's like,
I'm having a few drinks right now. Sam is clearly
not happy with how things are going. And Joe is like,

(01:10:23):
stop having feelings. Let's just take the money and you know,
be happy. But Sam has a Sam has a bad
premonition about everything. He's like, something bad's gonna happen. I
can just feel it. And suddenly, and what do you know,
it's it's prescient. Because they get a phone call and
it's an urgent meeting with the scientists from Dublin and
they're like, hey, we figured something out. The creature you

(01:10:44):
captured is not an adult specimen. Yeah, whoops, not an
adult specimen. And then Sam says, you mean it isn't
fully grown. They say no, in fact, it's it's very
early in infancy. They're like, okay, well, what would an
adult look like? And then they open up this page

(01:11:04):
where they just like put a finger down on this
illustration of two gorgo skeletons that are exactly the same,
but one is like ten times bigger than the other.

Speaker 2 (01:11:14):
And it's you know, it's not quite an actual Gorgosaurus
skeleton that they have illustrated here, but it is more
in keeping with a realistic This may be another dinosaur
species that they're just using the skeleton illustration from, but
it is very hard to imagine the monster that we've
seen having this skeleton at the center of it. There's

(01:11:39):
a lot of meat on those bones.

Speaker 3 (01:11:40):
Yeah, and they're upset. They're like, wow, that would make
the adult nearly two hundred feet tall, and the scientists
are like, yep, so obviously we got to notify the authorities.
And Joe responds by saying, what are you trying to do?
Stir up a whole hornet's nest because of a few
calculations on a piece of paper. Nuts to that, Nuts
to that, I say. Then next we see Gorgo back

(01:12:02):
in his enclosure. So he's he's in this concrete pit
and it's surrounded by electric fencing, but we see Gorgo
testing the fences for weaknesses systematically. He remembers clever Girl exactly. Meanwhile,
back on Nara Island, remember Macarton, the corrupt archaeologist and
harbor master. While we see him in his harbor master shack,

(01:12:23):
just examining his precious Viking gold with a magnifying glass.
I guess this is all he does in his free time.
And he's sitting there, and then suddenly a Gorgo like
creature rises up out of the sea and attacks Nara
and McMartin or mccarton is crushed, and so, oh, you
know what's next. This is Gorgo's mom and the Gorgo

(01:12:45):
matriarch is on the way to London.

Speaker 2 (01:12:48):
Oh man, he messed up.

Speaker 3 (01:12:49):
Now humans, So we see all the British radio operators
naval authorities. They're trying to make contact with Nara Island,
but not a word from them. And then so the
next thing is, let's see if we can use our
precious national stock footage reserves to figure out what's going on.
So we see lots of naval engagements, so stock footage

(01:13:10):
of like battleships moving their guns around and firing into
the water and chugging along, and then close ups of
just admirals with binoculars looking out over the water. There
is a naval engagement between a battleship and Gorgo's mother.
Who do you think is going to prevail here?

Speaker 2 (01:13:28):
Yeah, it's going to be the monster.

Speaker 3 (01:13:30):
But of course we see the authorities back in London
making these gloating statements about how the creature was undoubtedly destroyed,
you know, it could not possibly be a match for
our navy. But then they get a phone call and
we see this guy on the phone. He's like, oh,
really capsized. O don't know. So they're getting the bad
news and they figure out that the creature is Gorgo's

(01:13:51):
mother and it is on the way to London following
a trail left in the sea, the ooze that had
been dripping off of Gorgo. They traveled by boat.

Speaker 2 (01:14:01):
M She's coming after him.

Speaker 3 (01:14:04):
So what are you gonna do? We've got a bigger
you know, ten times bigger monster on the way, Sam
has an idea, as Sam says, well, we got to
turn Gorgo loose. We got to let him loose and
send him back to the sea while we've still got
a chance. But Dorkin and Joe do not want to
lose out on their profits. Joe says, what's the matter
with you? This is the twentieth century. There must be

(01:14:26):
some way of handling an overgrown animal. And the admirals
give assurances that there will be no problem stopping this creature.
So like the authorities are like, no, no, no, don't
don't release Gorgo. You keep making money at the circus.
We will defeat the monster. And then later that night
we see Sam. Sam like gets drunk and tries to

(01:14:46):
release Gorgo and this leads to a fight with Joe
in which Sam is knocked unconscious and Gorgo is not released.
Sean is just here like watching these adults fight. And
then Gorgo's mother arrives, and from here until the end
of the movie, it is just a long series of
Mother Gorgo attacks Mother Gorgo versus more of the British Navy.

(01:15:08):
They launched torpedoes, they bombard her with heavy guns, They
drop depth charges all to no effect. She penetrates the defense,
swims up the estuary, up the river, and she's coming
for Battersea Park. There's a scene where she's like coming
up into the harbor. I guess this is on the
river in London, and the military tries to stop her

(01:15:29):
by dumping petrol in the river and setting it on fire,
and she clearly doesn't like that, but she is not deterred,
and Robbi caught a picture. There's one scene where it
just cuts to these random onlookers who are like watching
mother Gorgo gets set on fire with these faces like wow,
so cool.

Speaker 2 (01:15:47):
Yeah, And we also get a burning man stunt in
all of this, which was also quite terrifying.

Speaker 3 (01:15:54):
Oh is that? Wait, what do you have in mind?
Somebody in the Gorgo suit or a human.

Speaker 2 (01:15:59):
Human at some point in all of this. I mean,
there's a some of the chaos kind of melts together
in my mind, but I distinctly remember at least one
shot of a man on fire.

Speaker 3 (01:16:10):
Oh interesting, I don't recall that, but I believe you.
There are a lot of effects back to back here,
so they kind of like they wash over you at
some point. But we see the army and civil defense
authorities making emergency announcements. They start clearing out the streets.
They're running around on bullhorn saying don't panic, you will
be notified when the emergency is over. These shots of

(01:16:32):
people running around, there are tanks in the streets. We
see officials discuss the possibility of using atomic weapons, but
they decide against it wisely. And then we see Gorgo's
mother just smashing landmarks. So she comes up on the
tower bridge smashes it. At some point we get close
ups on these British soldiers and I'm like, why do
they look like they're outfitted to go fight in World

(01:16:54):
War One?

Speaker 2 (01:16:56):
I assume this was the standard uniform of the day.
Gorgo would get it right.

Speaker 3 (01:17:01):
I believe it. Yeah, they It is surprisingly antiquated, looking
like uniforms and helmets. But maybe that that was the
outfit in sixty one. Yeah, but you know, nothing nothing
stopping mother Gorgo. So, as we were talking about earlier,
the city smashing does go on for a long time
and it gets somewhat tedious. I would say this is

(01:17:24):
I would say, kind of a low point for a
lot of giant monster movies, and it's a tough balance,
because in a way, the city smashing is what you're
there for. That's a part of the part of the
appeal of the movie. On the other hand, in a
lot of these movies, there's just more of it than
you actually need.

Speaker 2 (01:17:40):
His eyes are always bigger than your stomach. Yeah, yeah,
this looks great, and they're like, oh wow, it's still
it's still happenings, still going. But you know that the
really memorable moments are, of course, when the monster keys
in on a particular landmark and we do get some
of that action here.

Speaker 3 (01:17:56):
Yeah, exactly. So this one has the same issue a
lot of these movies do. The smashing I think goes
on a little too long. There's a surplus of it.
But on the other hand, as we said earlier, it's
superb model work. I love the way a lot of
this looks. It's very tactle and pleasurable smashing to observe.
At one point, I think actually the army like accidentally

(01:18:18):
shoots Big Ben or the clock tower, they like launch
a missile through it, trying to hit Mother Gorgo. So
you know, how do you think this is going to end? Well,
the power of tanks and guns and bombs stop Gorgo's mother.
What do you think. No, So we see, you know,
our characters running around trying to get out of Harm's way.

(01:18:39):
At one point, Sean is like drawn to Gorgo's mother.
He's like approaching her when everybody else is fleeing, and
we see Joe have kind of a hero turn. Joe
has been the selfish, the more selfish, greedy one in
this act so far, but when Sean is in Harm's way,
Joe goes to rescue him and bring him out of
Harm's way, and we see Joe and Sean they're chased

(01:19:01):
into the underground and then the tunnels are collapsing and flooding,
but they make it out.

Speaker 2 (01:19:05):
Yeah, this segment with in the tunnels I thought was
very effective, like in general, all of the monster destruction
going on, even though, like you said, there is a
lot of it, but we do cut to all of
these scenes of the crowds in full panic mode and
like the street level understanding of the destruction and then
our character level understanding of the destruction, and that does

(01:19:28):
make it feel a lot more real. And there's one
segment in particular where Joe and Sean are just in
there in the crowd crush. Everyone's just going down into
the tunnels, into the subway tunnels there, and there's this
terrifying scene where like they make it into the tunnels
proper and behind them again crowds of people and then

(01:19:51):
the ceiling collapses like gorgo just destroys all of them
and like hundreds of people die. It's you know, the
it would seem to be the case anyway, and only
Joe and Sean make it out, And I was like,
well that that was effective, Like that made me feel
the chaos and the destruction of these sequences. So it's
not just man in rubber suit fall on bridge.

Speaker 3 (01:20:15):
Yeah, I would emphasize that, like nothing this year does
not look funny, Like this is a the way it's
visually realized. These scenes are very like dark and grim. Yeah,
So of course as the chaos is going on, we
get a lot more radio reports, you know, like the
radio reporter says like Piccadilly the heart of London. Words
can't describe it. There's been nothing like it, not even

(01:20:37):
in the worst of the blitz. This section is a
complete shambles, people running mad with fear, and we see
on the street level there's like a there's an end
Times profit who's wearing a sign that says repent, the
end is nigh, And we see the admirals and the
Dublin scientists trying to come up with a plan to
like electrocute Mother Gorgo. The admirals like, how much voltage

(01:21:00):
will we need and the Dublin scientist is like, uh,
two to three million volts but that's only a guess. Yeah,
then why do you even say it?

Speaker 2 (01:21:10):
And it really they do a great job of making
it feel rather hopeless because at this point there's just
no real plan. Uh, and it seems like nothing is
going to stop the absolute destruction of the city unless
they were maybe to do something like release little Gorgo,
which nobody is actually doing.

Speaker 3 (01:21:28):
Yeah, like Sam suggested before this all started, Sam was right.
Sam was right. Uh, so they've got this plan. You know,
we get a lot of moralizing from the radio reporters
talking about, you know, the wire all the electricity of
London has been redirected to the wires to this animal
small enclosure. Will it be enough? Will it be enough

(01:21:48):
to stop this huge beast? Where will the miracle be
granted or will it be yet another of man's puny
efforts to oppose this irresistible force of ancient nature.

Speaker 2 (01:21:59):
Probably the male, the miracle of keeping this mother monster
from her young Yeah, and like in a way, I mean,
I guess it's it's a rather effective part of the
film here, because it's like just do the the the
answer is right there in front of you, Like, why
don't you do that? Release the monster? Why like this

(01:22:20):
this desperate, uh you know, egotistical desire to defeat nature
instead of like bending at least a little bit to
it here, and instead they're just going to invite absolute destruction.

Speaker 3 (01:22:33):
Rob You're you're not understanding. Dorkin would lose some money.

Speaker 2 (01:22:37):
I mean, that's right, because on top of the tickets,
the concessions alone, like he was banking on that.

Speaker 3 (01:22:42):
Yeah, yeah, all right. So in the end, mother Gorgo
she makes it through. She rescues her baby, and Gorgo
and Mother Gorgo they trek back out to the ocean.
They get in the water and they start swimming away,
and we get the more of the like crazy commentary
from the radio reporter saying we've prayed for a miracle.

(01:23:05):
Maybe our prayers have been answered. It's this speech that
goes on for a long time. He's saying in the
end she turns with her young, leaving the prostrate city,
leaving the haunts of Man, and leaving Man himself to
ponder the proud boast that he alone is lord of
all creation. It is a very he tampered in God's
domain kind of ending.

Speaker 4 (01:23:26):
Yea.

Speaker 3 (01:23:28):
And then we see in the end, actually they give
the last word to Sean, the child who who's watching
the creatures leave, and Sean says, you're going back now,
back to the sea. And I do have to say
in the final shot where they're showing Gorgo and mother
Gorgo going back into the water, they make little Gorgo
look really tiny in comparison.

Speaker 4 (01:23:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:23:47):
Yeah, it kind of drives home the obscenity of the
whole act of keeping this creature hostage.

Speaker 3 (01:23:54):
Yeah. So that's the end of Gorgo Pity the Monster.

Speaker 2 (01:23:58):
Yeah, yeah, you know, it's reflecting back on it more here.
I feel like it. It does have a strong message
that it's trying to drive home. And yeah, you can't
help but wonder if this too might have had an
impact on the Star. You know, this might have like
laid some of the groundwork for Bill Traver's later involvement

(01:24:20):
in Animal rights activism. I mean, not officially, but but
maybe a little bit in addition to born Free.

Speaker 3 (01:24:28):
So that's a final verdict. I think Gorgo is a
tremendously enjoyable movie. It's, of course, as I said in
the beginning, funny and very concept funny in some elements
of execution, quite strong in other elements of execution. So
I think it's a fairly good entry in the giant
monster movie Cannon. You know, it's not quite your on

(01:24:50):
the level of like your original Godzilla and stuff like that,
but of the sort of mid level big monsters. It's
it's one of the better ones. I think.

Speaker 2 (01:24:58):
Do you think they could come back and do a
Shin Gorgo Gorgo movie inspired by Shin Godzilla.

Speaker 3 (01:25:06):
That where half of it is like the British Navy
having meetings and then having meetings about other meetings that
should be organized.

Speaker 2 (01:25:13):
Yeah, we didn't get enough meetings in this film about
relations with Ireland, about about Gorgo rights, who has the
rights to the monster, and the exporting of the monster
and so forth. A lot that could be done there.

Speaker 3 (01:25:29):
For listeners who don't recall and the pat We're big
fans of Shin Godzilla. I haven't seen the more recent one,
Godzilla minus one, but I've been hearing very good things
about it.

Speaker 2 (01:25:39):
Yeah, same, same. So it's a reminder that even though
the giant monster movie, you know, we think of it
as being just very formulaic, and if you've seen one,
you've seen them all, and that everything that could be
done has been done and the only upgrade you're going
to get are going to be effects based, right, But
it's not the case. Like clearly, there are still interesting

(01:25:59):
stories to tell with giant monsters, and they keep coming,
and I say that's wonderful. I'm all for it.

Speaker 3 (01:26:06):
Here here all.

Speaker 2 (01:26:07):
Right, we're going to go ahead and close the book
on Gorgo here, but we'd love to hear from you
if you have thoughts on Gorgo, on other Kaiju movies
that we mentioned in this episode, or once we didn't mention,
just what your favorites are. We'd love to hear from you.
We'll share the email address in just a moment here
and you can write into us. Just a reminder to
everyone that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a

(01:26:28):
science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but
on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just
talk about a weird film on weird House Cinema. If
you want a list of all the movies we've covered
so far, the best place to go is to head
on over to letterboxed dot com. That's l E T
T E r bosd dot com. Our username is weird
House and we have a list of all the films
we've covered, and sometimes there's a peek ahead at what's

(01:26:50):
coming up next. Also, while I have you, if you
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(01:27:11):
sure that you're still subscribe, that you're still receiving downloads.
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Speaker 3 (01:27:15):
Us out huge Thanks as always to our excellent audio
producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in
touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:27:39):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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