The Kaiju Extension Eligibility Society

Godzilla Minus One puts human-scale characters
in the foreground, while the kaiju casts a shadow
over their lives. (Image via IMDB.com)

This spring, almost 70 years after the original hit cinemas, Godzilla Minus One became the first movie in its franchise to win an Academy Award, for best visual effects. By our estimation, this marks the first time since 2006 that an Academy Award-winning SFF movie did not also earn a Hugo nod.

It’s a perplexing omission. Written and directed by Takashi Yamazki, Godzilla Minus One is a compelling and nuanced take on the kaiju cinema subgenre. Using the monster itself as a metaphor for militarism, for cultural trauma, and for guilt, the director has crafted a beautiful allegory about the power of community and rebuilding.

The protagonist, Koichi, is a former kamikaze pilot who is wracked with guilt over his decision to reject a pointless suicide mission at the end of the Second World War, and is haunted by memories of

The team behind Godzilla were
so enthusiastic at the Oscars,
how can you not cheer them on?
(Image via People.com)

an encounter with a massive lizard monster that nobody believes he saw. Trying to rebuild his life in the ruins of bombed-out Tokyo, he finds meaning in caring for Noriko, a woman who has also lost almost everything in the war, and Akiko, an orphaned baby.

Godzilla Minus One is a movie about human characters whose lives are upended by forces beyond their control. Their struggles to rebuild against the horror of their past are exacerbated by an impressively imagined monster. Godzilla's appearances are more genuinely frightening because we were so invested in the lives of the people.

Enhancing this first-rate script is a subtle and thoughtful approach with the special effects, and action scenes that emphasize the terror such a monster could evoke. The train carriage scene might be one of the greatest moments in kaiju history.

During an era in which the Hugo Awards seem to be beginning to embrace an international mandate of a “World” Science Fiction Convention, there had been hopes that Godzilla Minus One

Warner Brothers (the studio run by
everyone's favourite CEO David Zaslav)
 forced Godzilla Minus One out
of the cinemas early, thus
limiting its audience in America.
(Image via Warner Brothers)

might become the first live-action Japanese movie to earn a nomination for the award.

The fact that Godzilla Minus One does not appear on the Hugo Award Ballot likely has to do with the fact that it was released late in the year, hitting cinemas in the United States on November 29, 2023. Although it opened as a wide release, it did not have the marketing budget of a movie like Dune or Spider-Man. And although it was relatively successful in the box office, it was pulled from distribution early because executives at Warner Brothers didn’t want a Japanese kaiju movie competing with the American kaiju movie Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire which opened a few weeks after Godzilla Minus One.

These are circumstances relatively similar to those in 1981 that prompted the adoption of WSFS rules that enable the business meeting to extend the eligibility of a movie. If you’ve not read our blog post on the subject, here’s the relevant clause of the constitution:

3.4.3: In the event that a potential Hugo Award nominee receives extremely limited distribution in the year of its first publication or presentation, its eligibility may be extended for an additional year by a two-thirds (2/3) vote of the intervening Business Meeting of WSFS.

Given that Godzilla Minus One earned a respectable $56 million in North America, and was on more than 2,000 screens (compared to the English-language Godzilla x Kong, which made almost $500 million on 3,900 screens), it’s not exactly a clear-cut case that this movie was unavailable to Hugo nominators. Nevertheless, a compelling argument could be made that it was denied a fair shot at Hugo nod based on the studio shenanigans and the late-in-the-year release.

We’ll be putting forward an eligibility extension motion at this year’s business meeting. We hope you will support it, and consider it for the Hugo Award in 2025.

One Giant Leap Backwards For Science Fiction On Screen

This blog post is the thirteenth in a series examining past winners of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award. An introductory blog post is here.  

“The dramatic Hugo is the least satisfactory category under today's reality.” - Harry Warner, Jr., 1970

“I didn’t see anything worth giving it to.” - Buck Coulson on Best Dramatic Presentation 1970

To say that the fictional works on the shortlist for the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo in 1970 was a step backwards would be an understatement.

On first glance, the shortlist seems like an aberration, comprising such unloved and unmemorable works as Marooned, The Bedsitting Room, Illustrated Man, and The Immortal. Watching these movies, we wondered what Hugo voters could have been thinking in nominating them. 

Hugo finalist dramatic presentation Marooned has
the unique distinction of being the only Academy
Award winner to be lampooned on MST3K.
(Image via IMDB)

But the more we looked at cinema from that year, the more we realized that Hugo voters had done as good a job as possible in selecting the shortlist, considering that the eligible films for those Hugos (movies released in 1969) included such celebrated works as Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, Moon Zero Two, Night of the Bloody Apes and The Curious Dr. Humpp.

Reality had overtaken screen SFF. The decision to honour news footage rather than fiction (a decision we had initially questioned) seems rather brilliant in the context of the rest of the shortlist and the state of science fiction cinema. 

The nomination process wasn’t helped by a moral panic among a recalcitrant conservative faction of fandom. With the site selection vote having given the 1970 Worldcon to Heidelberg, West Germany, there were fears that the Hugos would be taken away from the English-speaking West, that the United States might never have another Worldcon, and that the Best Novel shortlist would be comprised of nothing but Perry Rhodan books. Members of the 1969 WSFS business meeting passed several motions trying to prevent this speculative calamity, including provisions that put restrictions on the language that the Hugo finalist could be published in (spoiler: English only).

Thankfully, fandom has moved beyond this type of knee-jerk panic. There’s no object lesson to be learned from what happened in 1970, and none of these events are at all relevant to anything going on in Worldcon fandom in 2023.

This change meant that in 1970, the Japanese action movie Latitude Zero and the Italian-French comedy Hibernatus were ineligible. Although neither movie is a classic, either one would have been a more interesting finalist than most of the works on the shortlist.

Of the films that did make the shortlist, the most serious is the high-budget Marooned, a Martin Caidin-penned tale of three American astronauts dealing with technical problems during a NASA mission. Although the movie has high-wattage star power featuring (among others) Gregory Peck and Gene Hackman, it is astonishingly dull and monotonous.

There are a few redeeming moments in Marooned; the heroic role of Russian cosmonauts and the international cooperation depicted is certainly refreshing for the era. And there is an excellent taut sequence in which one of the astronauts is asked to sacrifice himself to save oxygen for the rest of the crew. But overall, it is an astonishingly dreary movie to endure.

It’s interesting that Marooned and 2001: A Space Odyssey were filmed on comparable budgets at approximately the same time. Although it won an Academy Award for special effects, Marooned seems cheap and shoddy by comparison to Kubrik’s masterpiece.

The Illustrated Man, based on Bradbury’s collection of stories, is mediocre in more perplexing ways. Much like the collection it’s based on, the movie uses a man’s tattoos as a narrative framework to tell various stories, including Bradbury’s “The Veldt,” “The Long Rain,” and “The Last Night of the World.”

While any of these stories could have been adapted into serviceable episodes of The Twilight Zone, they don’t work well when combined into one overarching narrative. Compounding this tonal mismatch is leaden dialogue and hammy acting.

The most controversial of the shortlist for us turned out to be The Bedsitting Room, a frankly bizarre post-apocalyptic comedy set in the ruins of London in the wake of a nuclear war. Based on a stage play by Goon Show legend Spike Milligan, the movie rambles between the 20 or so survivors of the atomic fires as they go about their daily lives and come into incredibly petty conflicts and surreal misadventures.

The Bedsitting Room is elevated by an exceedingly strong cast including Dudley Moore, Rita Tushingham, Peter Cook, and Marty Feldman (in his film debut).

In the bright cold air, you seemed as innocent
and fair as Rita Tushingham in 1969.
(Image via IMDB)

Very little in the movie makes sense, whether it’s an elderly woman spontaneously turning into a piece of furniture, an aquatic bishop swimming up from a lake to perform a forced marriage, or the cast being listed in the credits by order of height. While those of us with strong cultural ties to the United Kingdom found some of these moments funny, overall it was a difficult movie to appreciate.

The nearly forgotten and short-lived television series The Immortal may have been the strongest fictional work on the ballot in 1970.

The show is a story about Ben Richards, a race car driver whose genetics render him impervious to disease and likely to live an extended lifespan. The show puts him in conflict with a billionaire who wants to kidnap him and harvest his blood. Much like Richard Kimble, The Incredible Hulk, or Johnny Bago, the series follows the protagonist as he flees across the country.

The Immortal — which didn’t even last a full season — wasn’t great. They took a decent novel by James E. Gunn, sanded the rough edges off it and made it safe and generic television. However, the fact that most of our cinema club would have put it on the top of our ballots is an indictment of the quality of screen SFF that year.

Produced by Universal's famous "factory" model
of television storytelling, the Immortal is remarkably
similar to many of the studio's shows. 
(Image via ComfortTV)

In light of the year’s fiction in this category, the selection of news footage from Apollo XI as the winner for Best Dramatic Presentation looks rather inspired. Certainly the special effects were extraordinarily realistic (given that they were real), viewers were emotionally engaged by the memorable characters such as Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong, and the work did provide some of the most quotable dialogue in dramatic presentation history (who could ever forget lines like “One Giant Leap For Mankind”?).

The news footage is interesting, but needed an editor to tighten it down to a shorter run time and to provide context. Rather than going back and watching the original news footage, we would recommend watching the spectacular IMAX documentary Apollo 11. The event and the documentation holds up remarkably well 53 years later.

There was at least one major omission from the Hugo Awards ballot: Destroy All Monsters. The ninth, and arguably most bonkers, of Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla movies brings together kaiju from all previous entries in the series. This is the Avengers: Endgame of the GCU (Godzilla Cinematic Universe.) It is likely that among our viewing group, this would have been the top pick amongst actual movies and TV shows that year. Likewise, it's possible that one of the late episodes of Star Trek such as "All Our Yesterdays" might have warranted an inclusion … though even this might be a stretch. 

After several years in which Hugo nominators had an embarrassment of riches to choose from, the well had gone suddenly dry, and there was little top tier science fiction on screen.

It still feels weird to honour real history in a category that has otherwise been exclusively dedicated to fiction, but if not for Apollo XI, this might have been the first year that we suggested a No Award result. 

Once more into the breech (Best Dramatic 1966)

This blog post is the ninth in a series examining past winners of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award. An introductory blog post is here.  

Although the Hugo committee solicited nominations for a Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award in 1966, the category was omitted from the final ballot. This made it the fourth time in eight years that a Worldcon had failed to honour a televised or filmed work of science fiction.

Harlan Ellison addresses the audience at the
1966 Hugo Awards ceremony. Though he'd
been quite insistent that there be a Dramatic
Presentation Hugo in 1965, he was oddly 
quiet about the subject in 1966 when he didn't
have anything eligible in that category.
(Image via Calisphere)

Interestingly, this fact seems to have escaped the notice of fandom at the time. Or at least, it wasn’t documented. Notable fanzines such as Yandro, and the WSFA Journal reported on the 1966 Hugo shortlist, and analyzed each category in detail … but failed to make so much of a mention of the absence of Best Dramatic Presentations.

Theodore Sturgeon, writing in the Australian Review of Science Fiction, noted the disconnect between the quality of science fiction on screen and fandom’s prevailing attitude to the medium: “In films, on TV, and even occasionally in the theatre, we are seeing a new attitude to science and science fiction. The result of this combination of new attitudes has been a resurgence of sf in the cinema - and the production of the finest sf films ever made. Yet the fanzines are empty of sf film reviews except those panning the duds.”

The members of our cinema club agreed in broad strokes with Sturgeon’s assessment that there were exceptionally good dramatic works that would have been eligible for a Hugo in 1966, though there wasn’t a clear consensus of what should have won.

The front-runner on several of our ballots would have been Alphaville, Jean-Luc Godard’s noir detective story set in a technocratic dystopia ruled by a computer. Godard’s filmmaking is beyond dispute; the use of modern architecture, the stark lighting, and the innovative camera work in some ways make this the most timeless movie we have seen during our viewing of historic Hugo film and TV.

However, Alphaville has aged poorly in terms of gender roles;

It seems strange that Jean Luc Godard could
imagine a future in which the government is
a computer, but had difficulty imagining that
women might be more than objects.
(Image via Film Forum)

Alphaville’s protagonist slaps women with little provocation on a regular basis, and most women in the movie have little agency or dialogue. Some members of our cinema club could not finish the movie because of this rampant misogyny.
It is difficult to assess a movie like this, in which the technical filmmaking is innovative and impressive, but much of the content is utterly unpalatable today. That said, in the context of the times, it does seem surprising that the 1966 Hugo Awards would ignore Alphaville; the movie was significant enough that it was reviewed contemporaneously in all the major papers, and even mentioned in the first season of Star Trek.

The 10th Victim has aged better in many respects in terms of gender representation as it features a female protagonist who’s just as competent and ruthless as her male counterpart, though some supporting characters fall into old and cliched tropes. The contrast with Alphaville is stark. It was the first time that Hugo finalist Robert Sheckley’s work had been adapted to the silver screen, and Italian director Elio Petri made it a modest international success. Depicting a future society in which government-sanctioned hunting of humans is a popular form of entertainment, the movie is stylish, beautiful to look at, and over-the-top camp. Despite some pacing issues, the welcome critique of capitalism and the top-tier acting (Italian legend Marcello Mastroianni and OG-Bond-girl Ursula Andress have superb on-screen chemistry) have earned the movie a place in the cult canon.

B-Movie horror auteur Jacques Tourneur directed his final — and possibly best — film War-Gods of the Deep. Loosely based on an Edgar Allan Poe poem, the movie depicts a conflict between the eccentric residents of a small Cornish village and 19th century pirates who live under the ocean and who have been made immortal by strange volcanic gasses. Featuring Vincent Price as the captain of the underwater pirates, the cast is top notch, and despite a very modest budget, the sets and production have a lot of atmosphere.

Though it's far from a perfect movie, the cast of
The 10th Victim is incredibly charismatic, and the
movie is filmed with panache.
(Image via MidnightOnly.com)

Interestingly, one of the science fiction films that year that would have the most impact on future filmmaking flew under the radar at the time: Planet Of The Vampires. The Italian-American co-production, which features an exploratory team encountering infectious alien spirits on an eerie planet, has been often cited as an inspiration for a variety of movies including Ridley Scott’s Alien, Brian de Palma’s Mission to Mars, and the upcoming D.C. Superhero movie Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. While the acting is competent, and the set design is mostly run-of-the-mill, what elevates Planet Of The Vampires above many of its peers is the ending. This is a movie that takes a hard right turn in the last 20 minutes, and finishes with panache. (In what could be one of the all-time great double features, Planet Of The Vampires was released in the USA packaged with Boris Karloff’s compellingly weird “Colour Out Of Space” adaptation Die Monster Die!).

Invasion of the Astro Monster, directed by Ishirō Honda, is the most science fictional entry in the entire Godzilla franchise (Two members of our cinema club hadn’t read a synopsis before watching it and were surprised when Kaiju show up 20 minutes into a movie that starts out looking like a well-produced space exploration film). It is an extraordinarily silly movie, featuring evil aliens who kidnap Godzilla and Rodan, and use mind control technology to weaponize the monsters against the Earth. That being said, it is one of the most entertaining movies of the year, and at least one of us said she would have put it at the top of her Hugo ballot had she been able to vote at the Worldcon in 1966.

As the first decade of dramatic presentation Hugo Awards came to a close, science fiction on screen

Though Fantastic Voyage and Star Trek
were greeted with enthusiasm,
fans jeered and booed throughout
the screening of Time Tunnel.
(Image via IMDB)

was slowly gaining in respectability in the general public, but also among fandom. Studios and directors had begun to seek out conventions as a place to test market their new works; the 1966 Worldcon saw three such premieres, with Star Trek, Fantastic Voyage, and Time Tunnel all being screened at the con. And despite the lack of Hugos presented in the category, the convention presented special commemorative plaques to Ric Noonan for Fantastic Voyage, and to Gene Roddenberry for Star Trek. (Irwin Allen, who was at the convention to present Time Tunnel was surprised not to receive a similar honour … and put out a press release claiming that he had.)

This burgeoning respect had been a long time in coming, and 1966 would be the last year for a decade that the Hugo Awards would neglect to recognize science fiction on screen. It is a shame however, that some of the films that helped build up to such recognition were not celebrated at the time.

Ignoring Foreign Films in 1964

This blog post is the seventh in a series examining past winners of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award. An introductory blog post is here.  

There was no Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1964.

Godzilla vs. King Kong remains
one of the most successful Japanese
movies of all time. Still didn't 
earn a Hugo Award nomination.
(Image via DenOfGeek)

As had happened in the previous several years, fans had been solicited for nominations in a variety of categories including Best Dramatic Presentation. But of the 165 people who sent in nominating ballots, fewer than a dozen people offered suggestions for what should be considered in this category.

In response to the extraordinarily low number of ballots cast in the Best Dramatic Presentation category in 1961, a paragraph was added to the WSFS constitution as Section 2.1: “At the discretion of an individual convention committee, if the lack of nominations or the final votes in a specific category shows a marked lack of interest in that category on the part of the voters, the Award in that category shall be cancelled for that year.”

And for the first time in 1964, this clause was invoked by the Worldcon Committee, who called the disappointing ballot count evidence of a “total lack of interest in the category.”

But we would suggest that this ‘lack of interest’ in 1964 reflects both that it was an exceedingly mediocre year for celluloid science fiction in North America, and that the Hugo Awards remained a largely parochial award that rarely recognized works made outside of the United States or the United Kingdom.

During a 40-year stretch from 1964-2003, no foreign films were shortlisted for the Hugo Award: no nominations for Stalker, Akira, Fantastic Planet, City of the Lost Children, Solaris, Planet Of The Vampires, or for Alphaville.

In terms of the 1964 Hugo Awards, it seems a travesty that the Chechoslovakian epic Ikarie XB-1

Ikarie XB-1 is among the best science fiction movies
ever made, and far ahead of its time on many fronts
including depiction of competent women astronauts.
(Image via JanusFilms.com)

didn’t get any recognition. Loosely based on Stanisław Lem’s The Magellanic Cloud, the movie chronicles the multi-year voyage of humanity’s first expedition to Alpha Centauri. The production design by Karel Lukás is among the most influential in the history of science fiction cinema, inspiring everyone from director Stanley Kubrik to designer Matt Jeffreys to architect Eero Aarnio.

The sets built by Lukás help bring to life one of the most mature and human-focused science fiction stories on screen that had been filmed to date. Although the story starts slowly, the filmmaker builds viewer’s emotional investment in the crew and their relationships, and the payoff is excellent because it makes later moments connect.

There are numerous details that we loved about Ikarie XB-1: The non-military international crew, the belief in science, the reaching out to new civilizations in peace and friendship, the fact that the crew has women in positions of authority, the moments of philosophical musing. Combined with the high production value and the technical expertise of the editing and filmmaking, this is a stone-cold classic of science fiction.

Another notable omission from Hugo contention in 1964 was The Mouse On The Moon, an odd

One of the many shots from Ikarie XB-1 that gets
compared to Kubrik's 2001.
(Image via JanusFilms.com)

science-fictional sequel to Peter Sellers’ surprise 1959 hit The Mouse That Roared. This was a great-looking movie despite being made on a shoestring budget with only one member of the original cast returning for a second movie. Notably, the recasting included future Doctor Who companion Bernard Cribbins, Terry Thomas who received a Golden Globe nomination for the movie, and Margaret Rutherford who would go on to win an Academy Award a few months later for her performance in The V.I.P.s.

This little-remembered sequel, which depicts the fictional European micronation Grand Fenwick using their terrible wine-making skills to develop a space program to rival the Soviets and Americans, is charming.

Given its then-unknown director, lack of resources, and insane plot, the movie has all the ingredients of a flop. But inventive reuse of props and sets from other productions, breakout performances from some then C-list actors, and first-rate cinematography made this one of the most surprisingly winsome science fiction movies of the year.

The Mouse On The Moon helped propel director
Richard Lester to a longstanding collaboration 
with The Beatles, directing multiple movies
with the various members of the band.
(Image via ParkCircusFilm.com)

The movie (along with his short film The Running, Jumping, Standing Still Film) helped Director Richard Lester earn the opportunity to direct The Beatles’ first movie A Hard Day’s Night.

Several more mainstream movies might also have merited some attention from the Worldcon voting membership: Roger Corman’s X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes is a well-done mad-science gone wrong parable whose narrative arc is not dissimilar from that of The Invisible Man. It’s among the best movies Corman has ever directed.

Likewise the 1963 cinematic adaptation of John Wyndam’s The Triffids is a competent and visually interesting film, though it excises the novel’s most interesting themes surrounding labour and colonialism. The result is mostly similar to a decent zombie movie.

On television, and in retrospect, the obvious major contender for a Hugo Award casts a very long shadow: the first season of Doctor Who. Revisiting these episodes with 50 years of hindsight is an eye-opening experience because within the first two serials (those that aired in 1963) you can see almost everything that made the show such an enduring classic: the sense of wonder, the dynamic between the Doctor and companions, and the engaging plots.

If we had been nominating in 1964, the serial we would have put on our ballots would be the second one The Daleks. Although that series introduced Doctor Who’s most enduring foes, the story has more in common with the 1960 movie The Time Machine than it does with later Dalek stories; the bifurcation of a race into a hideous violent species (Morlocks/Daleks) and a peaceful beautiful race (Eloi/Thals), the moralizing over the effects of global warfare. Made on less than a pittance of a budget, with barely two sets, the actors make extraordinary use of what little space they have to act.

In 1963, the best science fiction on screen was not coming from America: It was coming from Czechoslovakia, from Japan, and from England. If Hugo voters had been able to cast their nets a little more widely, they would have found some dramatic presentations worthy of a Hugo Award in 1964.