Now depending on where your seeing this review then you'll know that i'm a fan of the Godzilla franchise having seen alot of the original films in Japanese and i've seen all of the American films as well. However there are a few things related to the jolly green monster that i'm yet to take a look at and one of those is his original animated series and no i'm not talking about the one from nineties i'm talking about the one from 1978 and so here is my review of the debut episode of "Godzilla" called "The Firebird" enjoy.
The plot of the episode is a bird made of fire is causing havoc in the Arctic and so it's up to our heroes the crew of a ship called The Calico and Godzilla to put a stop to the creature before it's to late. Plot wise the episode was fairly good i'm not going to say that it's the best Godzilla plot out there because honestly the first film will always have that honour for me but in terms of a kids Godzilla cartoon made in the lade seventies it was a decent plot since it did a good of telling the story as well as showing us what this version of Godzilla is like.
Starring in this episode and the rest of the series is Ted Cassidy as Godzilla and Don Messick as Godzooky. Also starring in this episode and the rest if the series is Jeff David as Captain Carl Majors , Al Eisenman as Pete Darian , Hilly Hicks as Brock Borden and Brenda Thomson as Doctor Quinn Darian. Honestly I find out really odd that they brought Lurch from the original Addams Family to play Godzilla since Hanna-Barbara already have a guy who can do the roars of any creature on there pay roll that being Frank Welker so they didn't cast him is freaking beyond me.
In terms of what I thought about the acting in the episode it was honestly alot better then what I was expecting it to be. Which in this case isn't really a good thing since the Japanese Godzilla films even the bad ones have good acting in them but here the acting is just OK which for a franchise this legendary isn't a really a good thing yes the fact that they have the great Don Messick putting a solid performance does help things but one man doesn't make a team in this case.
Doing the animation for this episode and thus the rest of the series is Hanna-Barbera Productions and if you've seen in animated show from the sixties or grew up in the nineties then chances are you've seen there work. Hanna-Barbera are known to be very cheap especially when it comes to the animation and yeah the same is true here since there are alot of repeating backgrounds and there are some shots where you see the back of a person's head and you here them talking which is classic way to save money on animation since you don't have to animate the lips moving.
I really do not think that this is the best showcase for what Hanna-Barbera could do since even tho they have fairly low standards when it comes to the animation this episode doesn't even meet that. That doesn't mean that the animation in the episode is terrible because in all honesty it's not but there are better animated Hanna-Barbera shows out there and there are better animated shows from around the same time period as this show.
Now then this is a Godzilla show after all and so you'd think that this episode would feature alot of our favourite monster. You would be so wrong since he only shows up a handful of times in this episode most of which he's only there for a few minuets and then he disappears but he does show up and take part in the final fight with the firebird which I will get more into later in the review but I do feel that this episode especially should have featured more of Godzilla since his name is the name of the freaking show.
I actually like the design of Godzilla here they really didn't change that much from the original Gojira which for me is a good thing. For some reason tho they made his skin green which really isn't that big of a deal since the original Gojira is in black and white and so you could really make his skin any colour you wanted and it would make sense but what I really don't like is the fact that they gave him a permanent scowl which would work if he was the villain of the show but here he's meant to be the good guy and so they really didn't need that scowl at all in my opinion.
Now let's talk about everyone's favourite most useful character oops I mean't everyone's least favourite useless character in the how and this episode Godzooky. Why the hell the producers thought that this character was needed is beyond me since they already have a character designed for kids to like that being Pete and so why this useless character was added is beyond me. I honestly wouldn't mind the character that much if he actually did something useful in the episode but he doesn't infact it's him wondering of that causes Pete to get himself into danger looking for Godzooky.
Like with Godzilla I like the design of the villain of this episode who if you can't tell by the name of the episode if The Firebird. I just think that having a creature made entirely out of fire is just so freaking awesome and it highlights the creativity in the Godzilla franchise so you can have a monster or creature made out of anything and it would make sense so yeah I honestly cannot fault the design of this character whatsoever.
This show started airing on NBC on September 9th 1978 and the series lasted a full two seasons ending on December 9th 1979 and the show was paired with another show called Jana of the Jungle where together they formed The Godzilla Power Hour. With each episode being around twenty two minuets each I honestly don't see why they had to pair Godzilla with anything since they could have got a large amount of people watching this show just based of the Godzilla name alone but I guess it was more for Jana then it was Godzilla since Jana doesn't even have her name in the title.
Now then since this is an action show that does mean that we have to talk about the action that is in the episode. Which i'm not going to lie I found to be rather enjoyable yes it's not up to the standards of the usual Godzilla action scenes like we don't get to see Godzilla destroying any cities but we do get to see an honestly pretty cool final fight between the king of monsters of the firebird which is honestly my favourite part of the entire episode.
Overall I can't say that this is a bad episode because in all honesty it's not and I can't even say it's a bad representation of Godzilla either. What I can say tho is that for a show based of the Godzilla franchise this episode lacks alot of the things that we love about the Godzilla franchise which i've mentioned in this review but at the same time there is some enjoyment to be found from this episode as such it gets a 6 out of 10 from me.
All images used in this review was gathered from either the official Godzilla fandom wiki page or Google Images. I fully admit I wasn't expecting to find any high definition images not only from this show but also this episode and yet I was shocked to see that the vast majority of the images used in this review or pretty HD as such I have t recommend either website if you want to use images from this episode or this show.