The fascinating way that Godzilla’s original roar was created
The mantra of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ applies to many aspects of cinema, with 70 years still having failed to come up with a better way of manifesting Godzilla‘s unmistakable roar than the original. While the dozens of feature films starring the iconic kaiju have moved with the times and embraced evolving technology in stepping away from the man-in-a-suit era and into the CGI age, the character’s distinctive guttural roar has always remained largely the same and instantly recognisable as a result.
There are now a plethora of ways for sound designers to replicate what was first heard in the 1954 original. However, regardless of any advancements in how it’s created in post-production, it still echoes the unforgettable sounds first ingeniously concocted by composer Akira Ifukube.
Director Gareth Edwards brought Godzilla stomping back to the big screen on the 50th anniversary of the atomic kaiju’s debut. It erased all memories of Roland Emmerich’s 1998 misfire with an atmospheric and ominous creature feature that proved so popular it launched an entire cinematic universe.
Sound designers Ethan Van der Ryn and Erik Aadahl had their own techniques, but they were nonetheless indebted to the inspired method of settling on Godzilla’s fearsome rumblings. “It was actually a double bass, using a leather glove coated in pine-tar resin to create friction,” Aadahl said to NPR. “They’d rub it against the string of the double bass to create that sound.”
Van der Ryn knew that it was an iconic sound, one that he didn’t believe had ever been bettered by any other monster. “I think that the Godzilla roar probably tops the King Kong roar in terms of iconic-ness,” he stated. Still, they had to put their own spin on it, not that they were willing to divulge their secrets to Edwards until absolutely necessary.
“We actually decided not to tell him until we had finished the film,” Aadahl continued. “Because it’s kind of like a magic trick. If you show, OK, the card is right here in the sleeve, and I’m going to pull it out, and that’s the trick, it kind of diffuses it. It ruins it.” Even at that, they refused to reveal their secrets to anyone outside of the production.
Godzilla Minus One continued the proud tradition of harking back to those origins, with director Takashi Yamazaki wanting to hew as close to history as possible. Composer Natsuko Inoue recreated it using a modern sound system and will “never forget the emotion I felt when I played it from the biggest speaker behind the electronic bulletin board” as a result.
The hulking lizard may be in a constant state of reinvention, then, but for over 70 years, that legendary roar has sounded almost exactly the same.
