Image: Deep Sea News
At first, Godzilla was merely the bomb. Director Ishiro Honda created the Tokyo-incinerating, 150 foot tall creature explicitly to embody Japan's nuclear anxieties. Over the years, he grew into an international cultural phenomenon—he starred in scores of sequels, a cartoon series, a heap of toy lines and video games—that reflected a wider range of existential threats. As he grew in fame, he also grew in size, by hundreds of feet.
In 1954 Godzilla was a mere 50 meters (164 ft). In the newest movie, Godzilla is estimated to be 150 meters (492 ft). For comparison the Empire State Building in New York City stands at 381 meters (1250 ft). Incarnations of Godzilla went from 13% of the height of the Empire State Building to nearly 40% of the height in just 60 years.
In his entertaining post, Craig McClain, the Assistant Director of Science for the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, notes that "It took cetaceans 55 million years to go from 2.5 meters (8.2 ft) to 30 meters (98 ft) in length." He goes on to explain that Godzilla's evolution seems to adhere to Cope's Rule, which explains how creatures grow larger as they climb the evolutionary ladder.
He postulates that Godzilla's magnificent and continuing growth—McClain predicts if the growth continues at evolutionary rates, Godzilla will stand 950 feet tall by 2050—is the result of the increasing height of skyscrapers over the last 50 years. Godzilla had to grow to destroy them.
The spurt also reflects the scale of the impending crises he was born to reflect. In the 50s, Godzilla was a single atomic bomb—horrific and deadly, capable of levelling a single city. By the 80s, Godzilla was tapping into Cold War unease; he was big enough to represent a bevy of metropolis-destroying bombs. In the globalizing 90s, he was bigger still. In the film debuting this month, Godzilla is truly massive. He is three times the size of that original lumbering vessel of existential dread. Which is to be expected. Godzilla is no longer just a metaphor for the nuclear destruction, but for the largest-scale environmental disaster of our era. The newest trailer begins with scenes of Hurricane Sandy-like flooding, and models its depiction of destruction on global warming disaster footage.
Clearly, some of the monster's growth hails from from Hollywood's mandate to produce bigger and better products, and that's maybe telling, too. Whatever the reason, the world's favorite metaphor-laden civlization-destroying monster is still rapidly ballooning in size; If McClain is right, the threat will be twice as big come midcentury.
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