In My Footsteps: A Gen-X Nostalgia Podcast

Episode 167: Godzilla 70th Anniversary; Breaking the Curse of the Bambino; 1990s Urban Legends(10-23-2024)

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The birthday of the King of the Monsters. The breaking of one of sports' most infamous 'curses.' Some chilling 1990s urban legends.
Episode 167 of the podcast rampages through spooky nostalgia like a towering kaiju.
It begins with a trip back 20 years and a moment that will live in New England sports lore forever. For decades the Curse of the Bambino haunted the Boston Red Sox and its fans. In 2004 the curse was finally broken and the Red Sox became World Series champions. We'll look back at that 86-year journey.
Generations of people grew up on Godzilla the King of the Monsters. This week the beloved and also feared creature turns 70. We go way Back In the Day to look at the inspiration for the creation of Godzilla, what went into the original film, and the overall impact of the monster.
Whether plausible or total fantasy there is no doubting that this week's Top 5 is filled with spooky urban legends. We will look back at some 1990s urban legends that filled people with fear, but it will not include the actual Urban Legend movie from 1998.
There is also a brand new This Week In History and Time Capsule focused on Black Thursday the catalyst for the Stock Market Crash of 1929 that started the Great Depression.
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Speaker 00:

Hello world, and welcome to the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund, coming to you from the vacation destination known as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and this is episode 167. We're going to keep things as scary as they can be in spooky season, kicking it off by looking back at the Boston Red Sox breaking the curse of the Bambino 20 years ago this week. Living through the curse of the Bambino was pretty scary and sad. We're going to go way, way back in the day and celebrate another anniversary. This is the 70th anniversary of the original Godzilla movie. There's going to be a brand new top five looking at the top five 1990s urban legends, not including the movie urban legend. And there'll be a brand new This Week in History and Time capsule centered around Black Thursday, a stock market crash that began the Great Depression. There couldn't have been much more scarier than that back then. All of that is coming up right now on episode 167 of the In My Footsteps podcast. So what are we going to talk about this week? Something scary, no doubt. Scary comes in all different shapes and sizes. At least that's the way I'm going to spin it when talking about a baseball World Series drought. It was scary for fans. I hope wherever you are listening to this from that you're having a great week, a great month. I appreciate all of you who check out the podcast, who share it, rate it, review it. A content creator's best friend is a fan that actually takes the time to share their work. Because as much as I market my own podcast, YouTube videos, etc., and even spend money on advertising for it, there's nothing better than you who listen and enjoy it and tell others to check it out. And it doesn't get any better than my Patreon subscribers who actually put their money where their mouth is, and it means so much to me. So I always start the show off by shouting them out laurie mary lou ashley kevin marguerite leo neglectoid thank you all for your support of my show my content five dollars a month on patreon gets you access to bonus podcast episodes early access to the main show early access to youtube videos There's more and more in the way of free content for people to sample without having to put money down. An example of that is for the month of October, the monthly bonus episode has been made free for everyone. Anyone that wants to listen to the bonus podcast episode, partially as a celebration of being on Patreon for a year. So go and give that a listen. Also make sure to go and watch the Webcam weekly wrap-up podcasts. Essentially, I record them right after I do this show. So I set up my ring light and my new webcam. I've been trying and failing to keep them under 20 minutes. But now I've started recording them through my ClipChamp video editing app. And the only good thing about that is the max recording time I can do is 30 minutes. So it's like I have to be sure that I keep my stories succinct. The episode I'm going to record today after this podcast, I'll talk a lot about the amazing Aurora Borealis experience that I had on Cape Cod a few weeks ago, complete with loads of photos. If that's a teaser for you to go and check out, that would be episode four of the webcam weekly wrap up. But before I get into episode four of the video podcast, we've got to really get started on episode 167. of the In My Footsteps podcast. Older Red Sox fans, including me, we dealt for a long time with something called the Curse of the Bambino. And 20 years ago this week, that curse was broken. So let's talk about the curse, being a Red Sox fan during the curse, and the curse being broken. It's all very scary, but it has a happy ending. So let's all share our suffering coming up right now. I envy you younger sports fans in the Boston, New England area. You have no idea what it was like to grow up in the 80s, 90s and older folks, 70s and 60s and deal with the less than stellar franchises we had here. Think about it. In the 21st century, the Celtics have won a pair of NBA titles and probably will be winning a few more. The Patriots won six Super Bowls after being a joke team for basically all of their existence. Even the Bruins won a Stanley Cup and got there a couple more times. But when it comes to suffering, as far as sports fandom goes, there was nothing like the Boston Red Sox. In the 21st century, they've won four World Series. If you had told me in the late 80s, early 90s, when I was really getting into my fandom, that someday the Boston Red Sox would be one of the elite teams in baseball, I mean, not this year, but overall in the 21st century, I'd have said there's no way that's going to happen. They stink. I became a sports fan in 1986. Do you longtime sports fans know what happened in 1986 in the Boston area? That's the famous Bill Buckner error that led to the Red Sox losing the World Series to the New York Mets. Granted, it was in seven games, but still, one of my first experiences in sports was seeing the ball go through Buckner's legs. How's that to begin your sports fandom? Granted, the Boston Celtics were always an elite team in basketball, except for the 90s into the early 2000s. But for me as a sports fan, I played basketball and baseball. So from 1986 up to and including 20 years ago this week, I was a suffering Red Sox fan. For you older listeners, you had it way worse than me. By 1918, the Red Sox had won five World Series titles. This included 1912, 1915, 1916, and 1918. They were a dynasty. The Red Sox had legends like Cy Young, Harry Hooper, and most of all, Babe Ruth. Anyone who, you don't even have to be a baseball fan to know who Babe Ruth was. He wasn't quite what he would become with the Yankees, but he was still a big star and only getting better. What happened ended up being one of the biggest moments in the history of professional sports. After the 1918 World Series, Babe Ruth was a star. He wanted to be paid like a star. He wanted his contract to be doubled in salary from $7,000 to $15,000, which was what Ty Cobb was making. He also wanted to stop pitching. He was a pitcher and outfielder. He wanted to just play outfield. This was the opportunity for Red Sox team owner Harry Frazee to make some money. He'd been losing money on New York theatrical productions. So to kind of kill two birds with one stone because he didn't want to pay Babe Ruth more, and he needed money for these frickin' theatrical productions that were bankrupting him, he sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. Now granted, it's not all just that cut and dry. They did agree to a contract, Frazee and Ruth, not for as much. And Babe Ruth had a monster 1919 season. But the fact that Babe Ruth was becoming bigger... and the contract negotiations had kind of played out on front pages of newspapers in early 1919, the wheels had already been set in motion. Yankees owners Jacob Rupert and Tillinghast Houston, they smelled blood in the water, and they made Harry Frazee an offer he couldn't refuse. $100,000 for Babe Ruth. In 1919, Ruth had set a record with 29 home runs. So imagine a team in any other sport trading a player that had just set a record for any sort of statistic in their sport, just selling them right after. That's what happened. Babe Ruth went on to win four World Series titles with the Yankees, and the Yankees became the gold standard of baseball franchises. Babe Ruth brought them there, and they started bringing in other legendary players that would help continue their run of dominance. Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle. From early 1920, when Babe Ruth was originally sold to the Yankees, through 2004, the New York Yankees won 26 World Series titles. The Boston Red Sox won zero. It wasn't immediate. It was more in the 1980s that the Curse of the Bambino really became something that was talked about in baseball circles. Don't get me wrong, the Red Sox had flashes of being a really great team. They had Ted Williams, who was considered one of the greatest hitters of all time, and other legends like Kalia Stremski, Carlton Fisk, Jim Rice, Roger Clemens, Wade Boggs. And they made it to the World Series, 1946, 1967, 1975, and as I've told you a few times, 1986. Things didn't always end in catastrophe, like the ball going through Buckner's legs. Sometimes they just ran into a team that was better. In 1967, they played the St. Louis Cardinals, who had Bob Gibson, one of the best pitchers of his generation. In 1946, the Red Sox also played the Cardinals, who had Stan Musial, one of the best hitters of his generation. And at that time, Ted Williams was injured, and he played through his injury. So despite him being one of the best hitters of all time, his one World Series appearance, he wasn't healthy enough to help the Red Sox at all. It was hard to ignore the calamities that seemed to befall the Red Sox players. The infamous 1978 season where they blew a 14-game lead and had to play a one-game playoff against the Yankees, where Bucky Dent hit a home run to seal the fate of the Red Sox. We don't need to talk about the 1986 World Series anymore. But there were other smaller things, or at least smaller at the time, like trading away minor league prospect Jeff Bagwell for relief pitcher Larry Anderson. This was during the 1990 season, kind of a playoff push. The Red Sox made the playoffs. Larry Anderson was a middle reliever. Now, they didn't know it at the time. Maybe they did. But Jeff Bagwell, when he went to the Houston Astros, became a Hall of Famer. Can you imagine having Hall of Famer Jeff Bagwell on those 90s Red Sox teams with Mo Vaughn, Roger Clemens, Wade Boggs? Deep into my fandom, my Red Sox fandom, I saw these things happen. None worse than the 2003 season. If I say to Red Sox fans, the Grady Little game, you know what I'm talking about. It was Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series between the Red Sox and Yankees. Pedro Martinez was pitching. He had pitched great, but he was bumping up against kind of his pitch limit, where if he tipped over that, his performance began to drop a little. And he started getting into a little bit of trouble, and manager at the time, Grady Little, came out, talked to him, but rather than take him out, he left him in. Pedro Martinez collapsed. The Yankees came back and won. I'll never forget sitting in the living room with my niece Kaylee, who was probably four years old at the time, sitting on my lap. There's my stepfather, my then-brother-in-law, my sister, my mother. We're all watching, and we're watching Pedro start to collapse. And it was like you could see it in slow motion coming. And finally, when the Yankees took the lead... I had my low point as a Red Sox fan, yelling and screaming and swearing about the game, while my poor little niece is crying because I've suddenly gone from holding her there and sitting and watching to just flipping out like a lunatic over sports. But it's hard when you get so invested in something like sports, especially the Curse of the Bambino, when you can see possibly that coming to an end. And then another chapter is added to that book. It made me not want to watch the Red Sox anymore. Until the following season, of course. 2004 didn't seem like it was going to be any different than any other season. The Sox had a great team. You had David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez. Like I said, you had Pedro, Wakefield, Derek Lowe as pitchers. And they brought in Curt Schilling to really help. It was a dynamic duo with he and Pedro. But as a jaded and beaten down Red Sox fan, I'm sure a lot of you remember this. It's like until they actually held up the World Series trophy, you just kept thinking that it was going to be something would happen. And for all intents and purposes, it should have. After Game 3 of the 2004 ALCS with the Sox and Yankees, Where the Red Sox just got wailed on. They were down 3-0. Tim Wakefield had just given up so many runs. He took one for the team, which ended up really helping out. But it honestly looked like it was going to be a four-game sweep, maybe five games to make it respectable. But it was going to be just another chapter. The Yankees own the Red Sox, and that's it. Then in game four, it all started with the Dave Roberts steal of second base. That was kind of the moment that people point to as the beginning of a sea change. And what started as a stolen base led to a win in game four, a win in game five, a win in game six, and then a total ass whooping of the Yankees in game seven. It was like the only way the Red Sox could really erase the curse of the Bambino was to just bludgeon the Yankees on their home field, wiping out their 3-0 lead and embarrassing them worse than they'd ever been embarrassed before. I mean, they weren't a great team in the 1980s, but the Yankees never were a laughingstock like they were after the 0-4 ALCS. I can only speak for me as a Red Sox fan at the time. But it was almost like them beating the Yankees was the World Series. It broke the curse of the Bambino. Because when they got to the World Series against St. Louis, it was kind of like a bit anticlimactic. Not to say that them sweeping the World Series and winning their first World Series title in 86 years wasn't an incredible moment. But it felt like more of a foregone conclusion because they'd slayed the big bad beast of the Yankees. One great thing about the 2004 World Series really not being in question was that my family, with us knowing it was coming, my mother had her camera ready and was taking pictures of me, my stepfather, my then-brother-in-law, as the Game 4 was ending. So we have those moments etched in stone of the Curse of the Bambino breaking. It was October 27, 2004. The Red Sox sweep the St. Louis Cardinals four games to none to win the World Series. In the last 20 years, the Red Sox have taken the unfamiliar mantle of being a baseball powerhouse. They won World Series in 2007, 2013, 2018. In 2018, they had the best regular season in baseball history. It's a little bit weird as a Red Sox fan. I was... Almost 27 years old when they won the World Series. So it's kind of weird to not have something like the Red Sox to complain about. Sure, you might complain today that they finished in last place. That's nothing compared to what fans went through that grew up in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. You younger fans that are complaining about the Red Sox not being good now, you have no idea how good you have it. I still have all of my collectibles from that World Series, newspapers, yearbooks. I've got these collector's pins of everyone that was on the team. It was a huge moment in Boston sports. It was a big moment in sports in general to have a supposed cursed franchise break their curse. It was like when the Chicago Cubs broke their curse in 2016 after 108 years without a World Series, the curse of the billy goat. It was 20 years ago this week, though, one of the scariest things to bring it back to spooky season, one of the scariest things about growing up in this area, the curse of the Bambino. It was finally broken. You out there who grew up in Boston, in New England, in the Northeast, do you remember the curse of the Bambino? Did you live through it? And what did you think when the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004? For me as a sports fan, nothing tops it. And the only thing that comes close is the New England Patriots winning the Super Bowl in 2001. This week in history, we are going back 95 years ago to October 24th, 1929 and the infamous stock market crash, also known as Black Thursday. Black Thursday was the beginning of a catastrophic economic event that was eventually known as the Great Depression. And although this day was not the sole cause of the depression, it was the event that triggered the chain reaction. It's hard to fully grasp the significance of Black Thursday until you think of what came before. The roaring 20s, A period of prosperity in the United States with the stock market booming, fueled by optimism, rapid industrial growth, and many believe that that would just continue forever. This led to a surge in speculative investments, people buying stocks based on what they could be, not what they were. If I sell you a coin and say in five years this could be worth $10 million and I want $25,000 for it, and the coin ends up being worthless, you could see where some of those investments would cause issues with the economy. This didn't happen overnight. Signs of trouble began to emerge in the late 1920s with agricultural and industrial sectors slowing down, consumer spending beginning to falter, Federal Reserve raising interest rates. The panic began on Thursday, October 24th, 1929. The stock market opened to over 12.9 million shares being traded that day, which was nearly triple the usual volume. That sudden rush to sell caused prices to plummet. And on that day, the market fell so fast that many stocks became worthless within hours. Crowds gathered outside the New York Stock Exchange, desperate for news, watching their life savings evaporate. Banks and investment firms scrambled to stabilize the market. And while Black Thursday ended with a modest recovery, it was only temporary. The real collapse came the following week on Monday, October 28th, Tuesday, October 29th, when by the end of Tuesday, the stock market dropped more than 25%. This began the Great Depression, factories shut down, businesses closed, unemployment skyrocketed to 25% in 1932. There's tons of newsreel footage from back then to see what it was like. Millions of people were homeless, living in extreme poverty, there were bread lines, soup kitchens. And the collapse of the United States economy triggered worldwide economic downturn. The Great Depression lasted throughout the 1930s, and then President Herbert Hoover's slow response as he believed the economy would recover on its own paved the way for Franklin D. Roosevelt to be elected in 1932. He introduced his New Deal program, which introduced major changes to banking and financial systems, including the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, FDIC, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, to regulate the stock market. Social Security, unemployment insurance, they were established. And although World War II kind of caused a little bit of a slowdown, the end of World War II in 1945 throughout the 1950s led to another boom period in the United States. Black Thursday was a pivotal moment in American history. It signaled the end of the exuberant, speculative prosperity of the roaring 20s and the beginning of a long, painful period of economic hardship. And that day, Black Thursday, occurred 95 years ago this week in history.

Unknown:

Black Thursday

Speaker 00:

Oh, and it's time for a brand new time capsule. Fittingly, we're going from the end of the roaring 20s to the next beloved period in American history, the 1950s. We're going to go back 65 years ago to October 24th, 1959. Let's see what was going on in the world of pop culture back then. The number one song was Mack the Knife by Bobby Darin. Not to be confused with Mac Tonight, the moon-faced character from McDonald's in the late 1980s. This was off of Bobby Darin's album That's All, and he was actually reluctant to release the song as a single, and it actually became the biggest hit of his career, his only number one. He won two Grammy Awards for it. The number one movie was Pillow Talk, and you could get into the theater with a ticket costing 51 cents. This romantic comedy starred Rock Hudson and Doris Day, and it's about a romance between an interior decorator and a Playboy songwriter. The movie's 94% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and made just under $19 million at the box office on a budget of about a million and a half. The number one TV show was Wagon Train. This was obviously a Western show. about a wagon train leaving post-Civil War Missouri bound for California. The show was on for a total of eight seasons and 284 episodes from 1957 to 1965. And if you were around back then, October 24th, 1959, you're celebrating another beautiful day of life in America in the 1950s. Maybe you're getting your candy for Halloween. Well, there's something new that you can give out to kids on Halloween. A new and popular candy known as Pixie Stix. Ah, yes, Pixie Stix. The little paper straws filled with sugar. Pixie Stix spawned from the Lick-Em-Aid product, which 80s kids probably remember. You had that pressed, chalky tablet thing. that you would lick and stick into the little pouch and get the sugar on it. The creator, Sunline Incorporated, they saw that kids were just eating the sugar dust out of the pouch with the Lick-O-Mate, so they decided to just sell that on its own as well. In the early 1960s, the Pixie Stix dust was pressed and it was made into another famous candy known as Sweet Tarts. So if you didn't know that, Lick-A-Made, Pixie Six, Sweet Tarts, they're all related. That'll wrap up another This Week in History, another time capsule. I appreciate you sticking with me through some very exciting stock market crash talk. Now you're going to get paid off on the other side as we talk about some spooky and perhaps true 1990s urban legends coming up right now. Urban legends can be kind of based in reality where they could be feasible. They can be things that when looking back, there's no way they could have been true. And on this brand new top five, what I'm going to do is look at some of the best ones that originated in the 1990s, or at least were hugely popular, I guess, for lack of a better term in the 90s. Back in episode 135, I did a segment on 1980s urban legends, so go and check that one out if you haven't heard any of those. The 90s list, when doing the research for it, besides getting lots of links to the 1998 movie Urban Legend, was I didn't have many that I remembered in the 90s. There were a few that I was able to put in here. But when doing my research, I was finding others that I had no idea about that I said, man, I got to put those in there. There are even a few from other countries outside the United States that I said, those are really interesting. Because it's interesting to think about how urban legends get created. Like who's the first person to bring that up? And so without further ado, let's get into the honorable mentions. As with many of these top five lists, there are some honorable mentions. And the top five is in no particular order. I'll also do my best to not just fly through these honorable mentions. I'll give you a little bit of what the urban legend itself is. Honorable mentions include Mr. Gepeng, which is an urban legend from Indonesia that originated in 1990. He's a malevolent spirit that supposedly can be summoned by dialing all sevens on the telephone, and then he will pick up the phone and ask who is it and then torment that person. Another honorable mention, more based in reality or a possibility of reality, was HIV-infected needles being stuck up under gas pumps. with the AIDS and HIV panic of the 80s into the early to mid-90s, it's easy to see where this would freak people out. That you're going to grab a gas pump, and when you grab it, there's a needle that pricks you that has HIV-infected blood. Despite this sounding like something that could happen, there have been no reported cases of it ever happening. Another honorable mention is Phantom Social Workers, and this one's from England. And it's what you think it is. People going to people's houses, posing as social workers, saying they have to take their child. And then when they do, the child is never seen again. There are supposed stories of similar things happening in different countries, but it seemed to probably be most likely a scare tactic. And the final honorable mention is one I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with, and that's Bloody Mary. For those that don't know what it is, You look in a mirror, you say Bloody Mary three times, and this summons the malevolent spirit of Bloody Mary. There are loads of websites that have the stories of who's supposed to be the original Mary that inspired Bloody Mary. But I thought there were more important ones, at least to me. So if you want to research Bloody Mary, you're more than welcome to do that on your own. Because now we're going to get into the actual top five 1990s urban legends. And we're going to start off with one that I'm sure a lot of you that grew up then are familiar with. And that's number one. Don't flash your high beams at a car coming at you without their lights on. Because that's a gang initiation. Boy, this was the first one that popped into my head. The timing of the creation of this urban legend, it varies. Some people say it goes back to the mid-1980s. Others say early 90s. Either way, the story is that you're driving along on the road. A car is coming at you at night without their headlights on. So you, out of courtesy, flash your lights to them to let them know, oh, you forgot to put your lights on. And then what happens is the car turns its lights on after it passes you, spins around, and comes flying at you. And the urban legend ends with everyone in the car being murdered by the gang members that are chasing them now as part of an initiation. I can't say that this has never happened, but there are very few if any substantiated stories of this happening. I will flash my lights for people if they have forgotten to turn theirs on. I have never had anyone suddenly turn their car around and chase me, even to kind of pull a prank. But in the 90s, when I first got my driver's license, I will admit that was in my mind every now and then. Granted, growing up on Cape Cod, there wasn't much in the way of gangs, except maybe gangs of old ladies going to Kmart. So that was one I definitely remembered. And I think a lot of you will remember this next one. Number two, the urban legend that singer Marilyn Manson was actually the person who played Paul on The Wonder Years. This was one I absolutely believed was true. Despite the fact that later on it's been proven that it's absolutely not true, Paul on The Wonder Years was named Josh Saviano, and Marilyn Manson's real name is Brian Warner. There are a few urban legends about Marilyn Manson. He's a pretty sick MF. But the idea was that Marilyn Manson dressed up kind of in costume so he could possibly be obscuring his face if he was Josh Saviano, a.k.a. Paul from The Wonder Years. They had similar facial features, but lots of people have similar facial features with others. This was one, it started in the late 90s when Marilyn Manson came out. So I was out of college, but in my mind, the mystique of Marilyn Manson, I said, wow, that actually makes sense if Josh Saviano from the Wonder Years went on to become this weirdo goth rock star. Sadly, it was not to be. Another one I absolutely remember is number three, the story that Daddy Longlegs are venomous. Their teeth just aren't long enough to break your skin. I don't know if this was a Daddy Longlegs that started this urban legend so that people would put respect on their names. It's that these little sort of spiders, they're kind of spiders, kind of not, that these Daddy Longlegs, they were venomous, but their fangs weren't able to penetrate human skin. So they weren't dangerous, but they were. This urban legend is so pervasive that there are some people in education and in television that believe it to be true, where there's no basis, no fact for the daddy long legs to be venomous. So there's no need to go find a daddy long legs and put it on your hand and try to coax it into biting you to see if it's poisonous. Number four is one that I'm thinking not a lot of you have heard of. I hadn't. And this one is actually what bumped Bloody Mary to the honorable mentions. And that is the urban legend of a town called Doveland, Wisconsin. The fascinating story behind this urban legend is that Doveland, Wisconsin is supposed to be a real small town in rural Wisconsin. The only problem is the town never existed, or that's the story. Doveland, Wisconsin, people have or people are purported to have shirts, mugs, other souvenirs, or have had relatives that lived in Dublin, Wisconsin, but there's no record of this town. These days, you can create your own t-shirts and mugs, so it would be easier to create a hoax town, but it's a little harder in the 90s, and to have people that say that they had relatives that lived in this potentially fictitious town. I'm not saying there's no such place as Dublin, Wisconsin, or that there never was, but that seems to be the reality. And finally, number five on the list of top five 1990s urban legends is another one that you've probably all heard of, and that's the legend of the Chupacabra. This falls a little bit into the cryptozoology part of urban legends. Chupacabra is Translates to goat sucker. So this is supposed to be a small, usually four-legged, blood-sucking animal with the urban legend originating in Puerto Rico and really coming to prominence in the mid-1990s. There have been photos, there have been videos, but it comes down to what you believe. What can be faked. But there are stories from Puerto Rico of this creature attacking livestock, chickens, pigs... A lot of people that don't believe chalk it up to it being a mangy dog or another canine, maybe with rabies. But you never know. The giant squid was considered fiction and an urban legend until they finally captured him on film and actually captured a specimen. So maybe someday there'll be a chupacabra that's actually in the zoo and you can go visit it. That wraps up the top five things Do you remember any of these urban legends? I'm pretty sure that most of you that grew up in the 80s, 90s like me remember most of these. And I'll likely do a 70s urban legends, maybe 60s ones. There aren't really any good ones in this century. Maybe that's just my old age. I'm a sucker for older nostalgia. This is the 70th anniversary this week of the original Godzilla movie. There are some things for me as a child growing up that are kind of the holy grail of my life. As far as things I liked, Godzilla is one, The Simpsons, The Three Stooges. And it's hard for me to wrap up the whole existence of these different things in one segment of the podcast. I mean, I tried it with The Simpsons back in episode 132, but obviously I'm going to do several more segments digging into different aspects of The Simpsons. And in episode 142, I talked about the Three Stooges, kind of an overarching segment about their careers. For this one with Godzilla, it's going to be focused mainly on the origins of the character and the original film, because I want to leave room to talk about different movies, different kaiju, the monsters in the films, best and worst and all that good stuff. Godzilla, overall, the franchise is one of the longest running and most beloved movie franchises in cinema history. The monster Godzilla itself, it's a global icon, and originally was the embodiment of fears of nuclear destruction, where then Godzilla went on to become a protector of humanity. The origins of Godzilla go back to post-World War II Japan and the trauma caused by the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that was coupled with the success of other giant monster movies like King Kong in 1933 and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in 1953. A critical spark for the creation of Godzilla came in a real-world event that occurred early in 1954 when a Japanese fishing boat The Daigo Fukuryu Maru Lucky Dragon 5 was caught in the fallout of a U.S. hydrogen bomb test near the Bikini Atoll. The crew suffered severe radiation sickness with one member later dying, and this incident combined with the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki intensified Japanese public fear of nuclear weapons. Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka said, envisioned a film that would capture these anxieties. And he worked with director Ishiro Honda and special effects wizard Eiji Tsuburaya to create a monster that symbolized the destructive power of nuclear weapons. The result was Gojira, a colossal fire-breathing dinosaur awakened and empowered by nuclear radiation. The name Gojira, for those that don't know, it's a combination of the Japanese words for gorilla and whale. For those familiar with the later Godzilla movies or the American Monsterverse that's kind of out now, the original Godzilla was not meant to be a fun monster sci-fi romp. It was very serious. When the film came out in October 1954, you're talking nine years since World War II ended with those atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So it was all fresh in the minds of the Japanese people. Long before you see Godzilla, you hear his famous roar, which it's a lot different than how it ended up being in later movies. This sound was created by rubbing a rosin-covered glove over a double bass. It's fascinating to know that that's how they created this iconic roar that would eventually become more higher pitched as Godzilla got more kid-friendly. The movie was a big hit in Japan. You look back at it now, if you're only familiar with the current MonsterVerse, then the special effects in Godzilla might seem dated, and they are. I mean, the Godzilla character is a man in a rubber suit, and he's rampaging through the streets of Tokyo. The black and white of the film actually makes it look better. In later Godzilla films, they would have these kind of spliced screens where the monster would be in the background, And there'd be people running closer to the camera. But you could see kind of the division of the two screens. It was all meant to symbolize the uncontrollable power of nuclear destruction. Godzilla had his atomic breath that would set fire to things or blow things up. It has a haunting soundtrack by Akira Ifukubei. And it's just this grim movie. If you came into this original Godzilla only seeing the kid-friendly or somewhat stupid ones like Son of Godzilla, you'd be shocked to see how this movie is. Granted, it's 1954, so it's not super bloody, but there's way more focus on injured people and the sadness... rather than in later films where it was just like, okay, here's another monster coming to kill us, oh well. It's like part of life. One thing that's different about the original Godzilla is that the monster is actually mortal, I guess. Because he goes, he rampages through Tokyo and destroys much of the city, and they're trying to figure out what they can do to stop him. You've got some that want to study him, seeing him as this miracle opportunity monster, to study something unknown and Godzilla's resistance to nuclear radiation. But he's supposed to be a couple hundred feet tall. It's like you want to risk that thing wandering around your cities just in the chance of studying it. I go back to Godzilla being just a guy in a rubber suit. The thing is, up until then, these giant monsters, they were basically all stop-motion. King Kong with stop motion, the monster in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. A man named Haruo Nakajima, a veteran stunt actor, he was the one that had to wear this latex suit. It weighed 200 pounds. A fun fact, those of you that like the Godzilla movies, you probably noticed that he doesn't look the same in every film. It's like he's got the spines up his back, but his color might change a little from... Black, charcoal gray, a little more greenish. And his face changes sometimes. That's because they needed to make new suits. Because the suits that were being worn would get damaged. Because these people, like I said, Haruo Nakajima is a stunt actor. Because he had to do stunts. Not so much in the original Godzilla. But as they went on and there's monster fights and there's more and more of these monsters breaking through buildings, the Godzilla suit would get damaged. In some of the movies, you can see it. Godzilla lifts his arms and there's pieces of fabric hanging down, making it look like a suit I made at home. You can't deny the effort put into the special effects, though. The miniature sets were meticulously detailed. There were innovative techniques like slow motion photography and pyrotechnics to create the illusion of a giant monster rampaging through Tokyo. The original Godzilla movie had a budget of $900,000 when adjusted from yen to the dollar. That ends up being about $10.5 million when adjusted for inflation to 2024. The movie made about $2.25 million, the conversion from yen, in the Japanese box office. That's a shade over $26 million when adjusted for inflation, so about two and a half times its budget. It was a big enough hit, though, for the United States to buy the rights to it and create Godzilla King of the Monsters in 1956. This is the one I'm familiar with, as it has actor Raymond Burr as Steve Martin, the American correspondent over in Japan. And he's spliced into scenes, reporting back to the US, basically as a narrator, for those of you that wouldn't understand what's going on. Raymond Burr's character doesn't really take away from the grim nature of the film, although the Japanese original is a lot darker. Godzilla's second rampage through Tokyo is like the first iconic scene of the movie franchise, where he comes out of Tokyo Bay, rips through the power lines that were supposed to keep him out, and then he's just crushing all the buildings. They show more of him walking through the streets and people running in front of him, so you know people are getting trampled. That's a part of the thing that they changed in the later films, was they didn't focus as much on the people that were getting killed. Because all the buildings that get destroyed, they're supposed to have at least some people in them. The movie ends with Godzilla actually dying. Like I said, that was a difference between this and most of the other Godzilla movies, was that the creature was mortal. The oxygen destroyer created by Dr. Serizawa is what is used to kill him with Serizawa going down into the water near Godzilla with this oxygen destroyer and then sacrificing himself to kill Godzilla because he thinks that people will come after him for this invention of his. For years after this movie came out, for me, after I first saw my first Godzilla movie, I didn't know there was a direct sequel to this movie called Godzilla Raids Again. It came out to capitalize on the success of the original Godzilla. So it's from 1955. And this is where Godzilla becomes like Jason Voorhees, where you thought you killed him in the last film, but here's another Godzilla. This one's kind of stupid looking, way more skinny with this huge overbite. It's still got some of the same charm and vibe, and it has the first monster fight with Anguirus, the, I guess, Ankylosaurus slash porcupine, fighting Godzilla but getting killed. Some of you longtime sci-fi fans might remember that this movie, Godzilla Raids Again, when the U.S. bought the rights to it, they changed it to Gigantus the Fire Monster.

Speaker 01:

Here's motion picture adventure and excitement to stagger the imagination. The fantastic fire monsters raging out of the flaming bowels of hell. Mighty Gigantis, crushing whole cities in its wrath. And deadly Anguirus, screaming its challenge of mortal combat. The Battle of the Ages.

Speaker 00:

So you watch this movie and it's Godzilla, but they call him something else and they give him Anguirus' vocals. Man, it's so stupid. I didn't realize that until I got older that that movie, which I had seen, was actually a Godzilla movie that the U.S. company had ruined. Godzilla Raids Again is 64% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, so it's still seen as sort of fresh. Gigantis the Fire Monster is 35% fresh. So that shows you what the American edits did to the film. For comparison, the original Godzilla is 94% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. And for those longtime fans, I highly recommend Godzilla Minus One. That's from 2023. It's 98% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and won an Academy Award for special effects or visual effects. It really captures the World War II vibe and all of that, so I highly recommend that for longtime fans. And as you can see, I barely scratched the surface of Godzilla. I just gave you some origin and the original film leading into the sequel and the stupid gigantus, the Fire Monster movie. In the future, I will do more deeper dives into the Godzilla franchise, top fives, all that good stuff. But yeah, it was so much fun to finally get to talk about this subject on the podcast. Only 167 episodes in. But until next time, that'll wrap up episode 167 of the podcast. Thank you all so much for hanging out with me this week for about an hour. Come on back next week for episode 168. That's the final one of Spooky Season. But don't be sad. This month there were five episodes of the podcast because of the way the schedule fell, so you got extra spooky. And next week we will wrap it up with the story of H.H. Holmes, widely considered to be America's first serial killer, who has roots in New Hampshire, in New England here. And crazy enough, the following week, episode 169, that's the four-year anniversary of the podcast and the same week as my birthday. So I'm sure I'll have fun stuff planned for that. If you want to celebrate the birthday of the podcast or celebrate my birthday, you can always become a member on Patreon, $5 a month. You could buy me a coffee. If you're interested in any of my nine books, you can Venmo me. I have copies of some that I can sign and ship, including Cape Cod Beyond the Beach, my photography book, the second printing of In My Footsteps, a Cape Cod travel guide, a few copies of my Searching for the Lady of the Dunes book, which it's true crime. It's perfect for spooky season, and I lived it, at least the resolution of it. And speaking of the Lady of the Dunes, I will have a new interview with producer Frank Durant, a new video from our latest meetup. We talk about a lot of fun stuff, including the Lady of the Dunes documentary, book, and resolution to the case. To stay updated on all of that, follow me on social media. I have a Facebook page for the podcast. I've got an Instagram page for the podcast, but you can follow me on my regular IG page threads. I'm still on X. I do a lot of marketing of the podcast there. Go become a subscriber on YouTube. I'm getting closer to being able to monetize the channel and I've always got new content going up there. I don't know how the hell I find the time to do all of it, but I get it up there and I put a lot of work into it. These videos, if you watch them on YouTube, they take me hours to make. Although I feel like each time I do a video, I get a little bit better at how I make them. Check out my recent Return to Wing Island video. It was the 15th anniversary of an infamous video of mine on YouTube where I walked out to Wing Island in Brewster on Cape Cod. And I walked out and didn't account for possible tidal changes. So when I came back from my photo trip, the tide had come in and I had to hike across the marsh through almost two feet of water. But I made a sequel video that had my selfie stick so I could do more filming of myself talking, which if you like seeing me talk, and also a special double camera of me walking across the marsh, but also filming my feet to see if I stepped in any water. These definitely aren't revolutionary filming techniques, but for me, I was very proud of what I did. I love creating content. I love the feeling of sharing a new podcast, a new video, seeing what people think, what they like, hoping that more and more like each one as I go on. I'm sure some of you listeners have heard advertisements in the podcast. That comes from me reaching a certain threshold of downloads. So it's a good problem. If you don't like ads, I get it. But it's also a symbol of my success with the podcast. And that comes back to you who listen and you who share. So if you don't like ads on the podcast, blame yourself for listening. But don't stop listening. I can't thank you enough. Even if it's only a little bit that I make with these ads, it's still something that... I created with my mind that's now making me even a little bit of money. I'll continue putting as much effort as I possibly can into all this podcast and videos to justify me sharing it to everyone, to justify you sharing it. I don't want to make stuff that's crap and then have you share it and people are like, oh, why do you watch this or listen to this? So I'll keep pumping out the content. So follow me all over social media. And even though spooky season's starting to slow down, get out there, enjoy the weather. It's not bad during the day. It might get chilly at night, but the foliage is really coming into bloom all across the northern United States. And if there's no foliage where you are, just get outside and enjoy it. One of my favorite things to do is podcast walks. Listening to my favorite podcasts besides myself. And being outside and walking, it's all just a perfect feast for the senses. So do that with this show and thank me later. And remember, in this life, don't walk in anyone else's footsteps. Create your own path. and enjoy every moment you can on this journey we call life because you never know what tomorrow brings. This has been the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund. You already knew me. I'll talk to you all again soon.

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Christopher Setterlund

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