Questions about the original 1954 Godzilla...

1. Both, but the Japanese is better.
2. TCM showed the Japanese version a little while while ago. It was subtitles.
3. More meat to the Japanese version, less Ray Burr silliness.
4. Can't say It was a long time before I knew Burr wasn't in the original. Yeah, It's some doofus in a rubber suit and not CGI, but it's so cool. I grew up with the Toho rubber suit monsters. Every Saturday afternoon, you had "Creature Feature". Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, the Ray Harryhausen mythological films, Jason and the Argonauts, Sinbad. Great stuff.

The 1954 version is subtitled--the Raymond Burr version(1956) is more enjoyable--There's little difference in the films otherwise

The Raymond Burr American version appeared on TV in the U.S. in the early 1960s and was the only one that people over here even knew about. We all loved what we saw, though. It was much later that I realized how a real original vision has been made palatable to American TV watching zombies (like me, my family, and all my friends) by essentially remaking it with inserted scenes and re-edited. I didn’t get to see it as it should be until 2004. And what a great film it is.

Remember, Japan is the only country in the world to be atomic bombed. Almost 10 years later, the Japanese people were still trying to come to grips with what had happened. A couple of great movies came out that dealt with the question. “Gojira” in 1954 and “Ikimono No Kiroku (I Live In Fear)” (1955). In case it was not obvious at this remove, the atomic bomb attacks are the sub-text of “Gojira.” (The Raymond Burr re-edit had no sub-text except to thrill which, admittedly, it did. I was in high school when it premiered on American TV. The next day it was the only topic of conversation at school.)

These two important films are connected with one another is some major ways.

1) “Gojira” was directed and co-written by Ishirô Honda. Honda was a frequent script collaborator to Akira Kurosawa. Honda wrote the most well known story, “The Tunnel,” for Kurosawa’s “Dreams” (1990), which reflected Honda’s own war experiences.

2) Kurosawa directed and co-wrote the second film, “I Live In Fear.”

3) The great actor Takashi Shimura (Ikiru, The Seven Samurai) stars in both films. In Gojira he plays the scientist who wants to study rather than kill Godzilla.

In one of Gojira’s most striking images, as Tokyo is being destroyed by fire, a mother and children wait for inevitable death by flames from above.