King Ghidorah Lives!

When I was a little kid living in Kingman, Arizona, I used to get up every Saturday morning and watch a television show called World Beyond. It was my favorite show because it would present monster movies of every kind imaginable. This is where I was first exposed to the old Hammer Studios movies, Vincent Price movies, The Blob, and other movies of the same ilk. These movies were a lot of fun, to be sure, but they weren't what I most liked on World Beyond. Every Saturday morning when I tuned in, my young little heart would await in gleeful anticipation the announcement of this week's feature in the hopes of hearing one name: Godzilla!

I loved Godzilla movies. There was nothing more exciting to me than watching giant monsters collide with each other in the middle of Tokyo, or Osaka, or Planet X, or Monster Island. I thrilled at the moment of discovery when their varied monster powers were revealed for the first time. Some could breathe fire. Others shot electricity or beams of light. Some could even fly.

Out of all of Godzilla's formidable nemeses, not one of them was as awesome looking and as powerful as King Ghidorah. With his scaly gold skin and his three dragon-like heads and his huge bat-like wings, he was a glorious sight to behold! He could fly and shoot what looked like lightning bolts (they were actually called gravity beams) from all three of his mouths. He was the destroyer of worlds and the greatest threat that humanity had ever faced since the advent of nuclear weapons. In the movie Ghidorah: The Three-Headed Monster, Godzilla needed the help of both Rodan and Mothra just to defeat him!

Back in those days, I used to look out my bedroom window and imagine King Ghidorah on the distant horizon, slowly but steadily lumbering toward my house with his three heads bobbling wildly, shooting bolts of electric death to everything in his path. A friend of mine once told me that he had always believed as a kid (and probably still does to this day) that his love for Godzilla would protect him from being destroyed if Godzilla were ever to destroy his hometown. In contrast, I always knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that if King Ghidorah ever visited Kingman, AZ, I was most definitely going to be toast. He was a remorseless badass.

That's why I was absolutely overjoyed when that same Godzilla-loving friend of mine surprised me with the coolest gift I have received in a long time—a King Ghidorah action figure. My pictures don't really do it justice because my camera is not very good at taking close-up shots, but it is an awesome-looking toy. He now sits atop my computer monitor, standing guard in case any other 9" plastic monsters should enter my room with an eye toward creating mischief. Thanks, Brian, for the coolest present I've received in a long time!

[It should also be noted, that whenever Brian and I play Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee on his XBox, I always play King Ghidorah and he always plays Godzilla. I have yet to beat him.]