Last year, the famed Japanese studio Toho celebrated its 75th anniversary. Yes, they released movies from their national treasure, the genius director Akira Kurosawa, but it’s fair to say that Toho is the house that Godzilla built, or its Mickey Mouse, the big icon that brought in the big grosses.

With the opening weekend success of Cloverfield, the giant monster movie shot fast and furious with handheld cameras, there have been several top monster lists hitting the web. No such list would be complete without Godzilla, the original city stomping lizard himself. Even though he hasn’t made a movie in a few years, he’s still a pop culture icon here, and in his homeland of Japan.

Steve Ryfle, a contributor for the L.A. Times and Creative Screenwriting magazine , is also the foremost expert on Godzilla, and his Godzilla biography, “Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star,” is the definitive book on the big guy. As Ryfle explains in the book, the idea for Godzilla was born, legend has it, on a plane.

Toho producer Tomoyuki Tanaka was flying home to Tokyo. Toho was going to make a horror film called In the Shadow of Honor, but the deal fell through and Tanaka had to come up with a new idea for a movie in a hurry. On the plane it hit him. The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms had just been released in the United States and was a big success. “The Beast” in that film was a dinosaur revived by nuclear energy. Now Japan would have its own giant atomic dinosaur.

Like many ‘50’s science fiction movies, Godzilla would serve as a warning against nuclear power, and in Japan the bombing of Hiroshima wasn’t that distant of an event. “The theme of the film, from the beginning, was the terror of the Bomb,” Tanaka said. “Mankind had created the Bomb, and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind.” As Ryfle wrote, “For those who delve beneath the surface, Godzilla is no mere movie monster. He is a paradox of sorts – a horrible embodiment of the Bomb that created him, and yet a pitiable victim of it; a symbol of Japan’s post-war regrets and nuclear fears and, alternately, the nation’s rage and retaliation.”

In the more current Godzilla films, CGI and more advanced effects have been incorporated, but Godzilla still remains a low-tech man in a rubber suit, even over fifty years since his film debut. As Ryfle told Tom’s, “The basic formula of a stunt actor in a latex costume, miniature sets, mechanical models and explosions has remained mostly intact because it has become a tradition, and something that is viewed as an essential part of a unique genre with its own aesthetics.”

Above: Godzilla gets his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

Even as a kid, it wasn’t hard to tell Godzilla was a guy in a suit. Watching Godzilla films as a child, you’d think it would be fun to play in that suit, stomping on little buildings and swatting toy planes, just like you’d think being your favorite character at Disneyland would be a great job, until you realized how hot the suit gets in the summer. Playing Godzilla was likewise no day at the beach.

Above: He may not be giving George Lucas a run for the money, but Godzilla has done well with merchandising like video games, and toys.

The suits weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred pounds, and trying to move around under all that weight is tough. During the course of making a movie, Haruo Nakajima, who was the man inside the suit from 1954 to 1972, would lose ten to fifteen pounds. There were also mishaps and accidents. Nakajima passed out several times from the heat of the costume and the bright lights on the set. “In the movie Varan the Unbelievable, a miniature tank exploded between his legs and burned his nuts,” Ryfle says.

As Ryfle explains, keeping Godzilla a guy in a suit isn’t just a matter of budget. “Japanese FX artists are very skilled at digital effects, and an all CGI Godzilla could be done in Japan, but Koichi Kawakita, the SFX director for the ‘90’s Godzilla movies has said that to abandon the man-in-suit would take away Gozilla’s ‘Japaneseness.’” And as one L.A. Times reporter covering the making of a Godzilla film put it, the “feel of cheap camp is all part of Godzilla’s enduring charm.”

“Because Hollywood FX people are obsessed with cutting-edge technology, it’s easy to look at the Godzilla franchise as something stuck in a low-tech time warp,” says Ryfle. “But the Japanese filmmakers don’t necessarily see it that way. They still place a high value on things that are made by people, with human hands, as opposed to ones and zeroes floating around on a hard drive. So ever since its inception, Godzilla has had a handmade quality that makes him rather unique.”

Perhaps the reason Godzilla is still remembered since his debut in 1954, and after twenty-nine movies, is he’s the fun monster you don’t outgrow. To paraphrase the last line of the film Godzilla 2000, maybe there’s a little Godzilla in all of us.

Above: A storyboard drawing for Godzilla 3-D, a project that was in the works during the '80's 3-D revival that never made it to the screen. A 3-D Imax Godzilla film is reportedly in the works.