If you click the picture above you will be directed to a really interesting 1999 article about global catastrophes- doomsday was all the rage during the pre-millennium run-up to the year 2000 -or was it 2001?
In any case, the world didn't end.
In fact, it's still here today.
Doomsday remains popular, though, and always will be, for reasons the author examines in his article,which is worth reading - or merely looking at- just for the great crayola illustrations.
Warning: the author says things like (emphasis added) :
The basic story is that an atomic bomb test on remote Lagos Island in the South Pacific awakens and mutates a dinosaur survivor into Godzilla (in one film he is identified as being in the Godzillasaurus family-this is taxonomically incorrect, however, since the proper family designation would be Godzillasauridae and would be the genus)
Well...OK... we all know that-but he does make a lot of good points, including :
-He is one of the first to make the Voltaire- Godzilla connection ( remember, this was written in 1999- years before Voltaire's long- missing brain was discovered in a Toho Studios backlot prop warehouse)
and
- Art loves bullshit. History tells us so.
Where are the Giant Radioactive Monsters when we need them? Remember how the world's leaders put aside their differences and united in the struggle against the menace of Ghidorah?
- - - GHIDORAH , THE THREE-HEADED SPACE MONSTER
Ghidorah or Hezbollah, can't something be done? Can't Godzilla fix this?
I dunno... I think Godzilla is neutral in matters of religion and geo-politics. He probably thinks of cities as "things that hurt my feet" and "God" is a nick-name.
It is folly to attempt to understand the mind of Godzilla; all we know is about it is that it is roughly the size of a basketball- pretty damn small considering how big G is- but it's not G's mind that smashes things.
It's his tail that does that. And his halitosis.
Still, Godzilla seems to have been our 'behind-the-scenes' foreign policy guy for a long time...all the way back to the little known Godzilla Initative- a really bad idea that consisted of trying to put all the Giant Monsters in one place, the aptly named Monster Island. This is documented in the 1968 BBC documentary, Where Have All The Monsters Gone?
So now we have to deal with the consequences of the Godzilla Initative, which frankly , was a really shitty idea in the first place.
Imagine that each of these monsters hate each of the other monsters:
Let's take all the squabbling monsters and force them into a small geographical area and hope they all get along peacefully.
We can give some of the monsters weapons.
We can give other monsters medical supplies in case they get hurt by the monsters we armed.
Sound crazy? Of course it is.
Our world is ruled by Giant Radioactive Monsters with Tiny Brains.