Godzilla on Another Continent: Gogola

I have come to a unique point in My Year of Monsters: a giant monster movie I haven't seen. In fact, nobody has seen it for at least twenty years. Gogola is listed as a lost film, and those few Virtually everything I know about Gogola comes from a single blog entry, from Pedro the Ape Bomb. AT the same time, there seems to be enough surrounding evidence to say that {edro didn't make it up. We have some newspaper ads, and it is mantioned in many Bollywood film lists, although sometimes they don't agree whether the film was released in 1965 or 1966. On-line searches are difficult to do because gogola is also the trade name of a company that makes golas, Indian frozen desserts. Google will include a lot of Nickolai Gogol search results in a Gogola search.

Cineplot, which is rather difficult to navigate, has a picture of the booklet.



Pedro the Ape gives us the only photo of the suit, from an English-language ad. Who could possibly resist the allure of "Thrills, Suspense, and What-Not"?



As with many people who are aware of this film, I would love to see the combination of Hindi film-making and a completely novel studio working in suitimation. The suit certainly looks interesting, the teeth jagging out of the mouth in a very fierce fashion. There have been other, brief suitmation sequences in Bollywood films of the preiod. For example, the 1962 King Kong (which has nothing to do with a giant ape, and instead refers to a wrestler hero), in which our hero Jungu goes up against the Smoke Monster.



I would love to watch a Godzilla pastiche by these guys. But sadly, the film appears to be lost. Hopefully it will emerge again some day, as so many lost films have. Because I want to watch a Bollywood Godzilla. Until then, I can only console myself with the soundtrack, which is ridiculously easy to find, and dream of what the film might be like. Perhaps in the post Pacific Rim cinescape, we will get a modern Bollywood Kaiju film. Wouldn't that be something to look forward to?

Next week, back to Godzilla. And this time, he's following in Gamera's footsteps.