Movies - Rodan

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	Movies - Rodan

Rodan (空の大怪獣ラドン - Sora no Daikaijû Radon, "Giant Monster of the Sky Rodan") is a 1956 tokusatsu film produced by Toho Studios. It was the studio's first daikaiju eiga filmed in color (though Toho's first color tokusatsu film, Madame White Snake, was released earlier that year). It is one of a series of "giant monster" movies that found an audience outside Japan (especially in America). The first were serious horror and adventure stories, before the genre devolved to the level of "kiddie" entertainment in the 1960s and 1970s. For a time the film was released in the U.S. under the title Rodan! The Flying Monster.

Rodan follows in the footsteps of other Japanese monster movies, such as Godzilla
, which involve a giant monster being awoken from an ancient hibernation by human beings. In Rodan, miners digging far into the earth stumble across a clutch of giant caterpillar-like insects, which viciously attack several of the miners and prompt a government investigation into the matter. The giant bugs turn out to be little more than food for two gigantic flying beasts called Rodans, similar to pteranodons but far larger and more powerful, who hatch from giant eggs and proceed to terrorize the entire world.

Rodan is notable for its action scenes, which are surprisingly well filmed and still excite audiences today. Unlike most of the Toho monster movies, which featured "action" scenes consisting of roaring monsters lumbering across the landscape at a stupefyingly slow pace, the battle scenes and monster rampage in Rodan are thrilling, exciting, and fast-paced; it is much easier for the audience to suspend disbelief and accept the low-tech special effects here. The emphasis on action and thrills, and willingness to scare the audience, has made Rodan one of the more enduring entries in daikaiju eiga.

In the original Japanese version this daikaiju is called "Radon", a truncation of "pteranodon"). While it is commonly believed that the Japanese Radon became Rodan for the international release due to a translation error, it is likely that the name was deliberately changed to avoid confusion with the chemical element radon. The name Radon is, however, preserved in the English-dubbed version of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II
(1993).

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Movies - Rodan

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