Godzilla (1954)

Radioactive Footsteps

Godzilla (commonly referred to by others as Godzilla 54) is a character from the original 1954 Gojira film. While he does not appear in The Knights of the Multiverse proper, he is incredibly important to the story of Earth Prime.

## Personality

Godzilla was very animalistic in nature, rampaging through Tokyo with no clear destination in sight. However, this was most likely a case of "hatred taking over any other emotion", as with how his family was killed by a hydrogen bomb test, leaving him burned and scarred. Enraged, Godzilla took it out on any boat that entered near his habitat and later, showed his true rage when he laid waste to the entire city of Tokyo, sparing no one.

## Appearance

Godzilla 54 had most of the same basic elements of his successor's appearance, with three rows of dorsal fins running down his back that glowed when he fired his atomic breath, short arms that were strong enough to tear down electric towers and large feet capable of crushing almost any smaller structure unfortunate to be standing underneath him. However, some key differences in the head include how when he tilts his head upward, it resembles a mushroom cloud. He also had small, round eyes with small, dark pupils.

## History

### Origins

Not much is known about the original Godzilla's origins beyond simple theories, the most commonly accepted one being that he was some kind of prehistoric reptile that slept underwater for millions of years until the previously mentioned hydrogen bomb test killed his family and left him burned and scarred, mutating him into a giant, atomic-blast breathing monster.

### Trail of Destruction

After awakening, Godzilla began attacking various ships in the waters just off of Japan, prompting the Japanese government to send out some survivors, but he soon destroyed a good number of them too. Now free to act as he pleased, Godzilla made his way to the closest settlement, which unfortunately was Tokyo. He made a stop on the nearby Oda Island, even scaring a group of scientists and islanders that were searching for him when he veered his head over a hill. The Japanese Government quickly rallied their navel forces, ordering them to drop depth charges and any other explosives they could to destroy the monster. It appeared that the explosives had done the trick, and declared it dead. However, the world's relief was cut short when not soon after, he emerged in Tokyo Bay, completely unharmed. After laying waste to the wharf and many surrounding cruise line ships, he returned to the water. In the meantime though, the Japanese Self-Defense Force set up an array of electrical towers around the coast line with 300,000 volts of electricity running through them. However, not even this, along with a large amount of armed forces, weren't enough to even slow Godzilla down, as he broke through the towers with ease, melting them with a beam of radioactive heat from his mouth, and merely brushed off each bullet and tank blast. Godzilla proceeded into downtown Tokyo, transforming the Japanese capital into a sea of flame overnight. With his rampage complete, he returned to the bay where he was attacked by fighter jets before finally disappearing beneath the waves.

In the aftermath, Tokyo was an uninhabitable wasteland, burned to a crater and contaminated with deadly radiation. The Japanese Government was at a complete loss of how to deal with the creature, but an answer came when a scientist name Daisuke Serizawa offered a weapon he had created - the Oxygen Destroyer, a weapon capable of, as the name implies, destroying all of the oxygen in the water its released in, turning all of the organisms in the area down to their skeleton. Taking a boat out to the middle of the ocean, the crew found Godzilla sleeping on the ocean floor. Not wanting the details of his creation to fall into the wrong hands though, when Serizawa went down to deploy the Destroyer, he cut off his oxygen supply to die alongside the beast. After a few moments, Godzilla rose to the surface to try and escape, but it was no use, as he sank under the waves and the weapon disintegrating him down to the bone.

### Aftermath

After Godzilla was destroyed, many scientists warned that Godzilla was most likely not the last of his species, and if nuclear testings were to continue, another Godzilla would most certainly appear. The aftermath of Godzilla's rampage was documented and broadcasted all over the world, pushing the world leaders to try and develop new, cleaner sources of energy than nuclear weapons, as well as to buckle down all world defense systems to prevent another disaster like Tokyo. Speaking of Tokyo, while it took many years for the radiation levels to level down and, thanks to the advancements made in the proceeding years, were cleaned up and contained. Tokyo was completely rebuilt, where overtime it grew into the technological capital of not just Japan, but the world.

## Notes

To keep true to the spirit of the original film, all footage of Godzilla 54 is animated in black and white.

In this continuity, Godzilla 54's death is rewritten to be similar to how its presented in ome of the Millennium era films, where he is only disintegrated down to his skeleton. This is in order to leave open the possibility of adapting some of the stories that use the skeleton, such as the creation of Kiryu.