The year was 1971. Costs were spiralling out of control for filmmakers, especially ones who worked on pictures with special effects budgets. Toho’s Godzilla franchise was winding down, with each successive movie drawing fewer ticket buyers. The last one, Destroy All Monsters, had tried to use every monster-movie trick in the book to lure audiences. Rival Daiei studios were having success with their own giant monster, Gamera. One aspect of their success was cost-cutting through reusing previous film footage. For their next feature, titled Godzilla’s Revenge in the U.S., Toho would do the same.

Godzilla’s Revenge concerns a little boy, Ichiro, whose parents seem to be out of the house working as often as they are at home. Bullied by a group of neighborhood kids, and finding himself a latchkey kid in busy Tokyo, Ichiro tends to escape into the world of fantasy. He imagines himself on Monster Island (the main locale of the previous film), where his best friend is a shrunken Minya, introduced two years before in Son of Godzilla. Minya, too, finds himself picked on, in his case by a larger, wartier monster called Gabara. But papa Godzilla is teaching little Minya to look out for himself.

Most daikaiju fans see Godzilla’s Revenge as the beginning of the end, creatively speaking, for the Godzilla films. The previous effort, Destroy All Monsters, had been a wonderful blend of fanciful sci-fi elements; this new effort, however, seemed to go in another direction entirely.

In fact, the bosses at Toho were again following another trend set by the Gamera films in that they were aiming toward a younger and younger audience. Godzilla’s Revenge, it is clear to everyone, is almost certainly aimed at the kiddie Saturday-matinee crowd. The plot is simple and instructive (Ichiro must learn, like Minya, to stand up to his own bullies); the villains are vanquished at the end (both Gabara and a pair of bumbling bank robbers who kidnap Ichiro); and everything turns out just fine (the crooks are caught and Mom promises to stay home more with the kid).

The fact that pint-sized Minya looks like a soft, cuddly Beanie Baby version of Godzilla is another factor. And when he shrinks down to the kid’s size, he talks! (In the Japanese version, his voice was supplied by a girl; in the American, it resembles something between Don Knotts and a Hannah-Barbera cartoon character.) Neither the monsters, nor the bank robbers, nor the bullies are menacing enough to scare small children. And the music and special effects would not seem out of place in a wacky cartoon.

Godzilla’s Revenge isn’t that bad a film; but it’s probably only really good if you’re about seven years old. Many of the scenes are laugh-out-loud funny because of their ridiculousness. And putting it into the DVD player for the sake of the kids might be alright, but would actually be embarrassing if someone walked in and saw what you were watching.

Ultimately, it was the beginning of the end for a proud run of monster movies. But if this was the best they were capable of producing at the time – and the next decade would seem to indicate it might have been – then perhaps it was the right decision after all when they eventually packed away the green rubber costume and turned the lights off over miniature Monster Island. (For a while, anyway.)