When TV shows about time travel bring in historical figures, they tend to pick names the average viewer will instantly recognize: your JFKs, your H.G. Wellses, your Rosa Parkses. So I was quite surprised to learn that an episode of Legends of Tomorrow, "Tagumo Attacks!!!", was going to feature Eijiro Ozaki as director Ishiro Honda, a legend to kaiju fans and few others. I figured a CW superhero show would favor dramatic storytelling over historical accuracy, and it certainly did. The curious thing is that the episode would have really been onto something if it had focused on one of Godzilla's other Founding Fathers.
First, a recap. (If it seems short, that's because this episode had a B-plot and a C-plot.) While filming a diver in Tokyo Bay in 1951, Ishiro Honda is shocked to record a massive tentacle in the distance as well. In the present, the Legends (Sara, Mick, Charlie, and Zari) learn of another monster disrupting the timeline: the giant octopus Honda saw will destroy Tokyo if they don't stop it. A newspaper article leads them to Honda, now working on a war film at the studio, complete with a miniature city. Zari and Mick pose as Hollywood types to talk to him, while Sara and Charlie ransack his office and find the octopus film hidden inside an artillery shell. They later find Honda trying to throw a book into the bay, only for it to instantly leap back into his hand. The Legends discover it was created by a Celtic goddess; anything described in its pages comes to life. A survivor of Hiroshima, Honda drew the octopus (Tagumo) as a way to "turn the nightmares into something I could understand." Unfortunately, it's now out of his control. When he tries to rewrite the ending so that something defeats the monster, the ink just vanishes.
Traveling through the sewers, Tagumo attacks the studio. Sara manages to shrink the monster down to human size, but it escapes. Mick, an aspiring novelist suffering from writer's block, consoles Honda, who wishes he could have stuck to more realistic plots. "Sober and grounded is boring. You had a story to tell and you told it. You brought that monster to life. Don't pretend for a second you aren't a little bit proud." When Tagumo resurfaces, Mick uses the book to summon a triple-breasted, purple-skinned Amazon who slays Tagumo on the miniature set. Honda, inspired, films their battle. After making love to his creation in the 1/25th-scale ruins, Mick gives Honda some final advice: "Forget about the octopus. Lizards... lizards are king."
Everything writers Keto Shimizu and Ubah Mohamed get right about Honda comes with a caveat. The opening scene suggests The Blue Pearl (1951), but it was shot in the Ise-Shima region, not Tokyo. Honda also made a war film, Eagle of the Pacific, prior to Godzilla, but it was in 1953 (the Allied occupation wouldn't have allowed it before then) and Eiji Tsuburaya directed the special effects. He held onto an enemy shell that would have killed him if it didn't misfire, but it stayed in his private study. His train passed through the ruins of Hiroshima on his way home from the war, but he was still a prisoner in China when the Bomb fell. His line "Why couldn't I just tell sober, grounded stories instead of indulging in silly monsters?" is something he might have actually said later in his career, after Toho insisted on a campier Godzilla. Finally, the episode implies Honda created Godzilla, but he "merely" directed and coauthored that first movie; producer Tomoyuki Tanaka came up with the idea and Shigeru Kayama wrote the first draft on his own.
Still, Ozaki makes Honda's speech about Hiroshima a heavy moment. The episode treats Tagumo, and by extension Godzilla, as a form of art therapy, a practice our heroes all support in spite of the real monster Honda inadvertently made. I know we're all sick of the original Godzilla being treated as a metaphor for Hiroshima and nothing else, but the more personal angle here makes it fresh. Honda's brush with nuclear war, while uncinematic, certainly influenced his work on Godzilla. On the flip side, the octopus/Amazon battle is a delight. The miniature city, with its plastic army men and barren streets, certainly wouldn't have passed Tsuburaya's inspection, but Honda wisely avoids showing them in the finale. It's also fitting that Mick chose a mammal champion, as giant octopi fought three of 'em in Honda's films.
And yet... it was Tsuburaya who wrote an outline for a giant octopus movie in 1951, Tsuburaya who survived the Great Tokyo Air Raid, Tsuburaya who would go on to create a franchise about giant warriors defending the world from monsters. As fun as it was to see a popular American show involve an underappreciated Japanese director in one of their wacky tales, they probably picked the wrong guy.
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