Toho’s other breakout kaiju star of the 1950s. I’ve always felt that what sets Rodan (1956) apart from its brethren is its wild primordial quality. Godzilla has some of that too, of course, but it’s intertwined with something else…something more divine and folkloric. Rodan is a rawer terror; a colossus forged in the darkest mantles of the earth that has waited eons to bubble up and destroy us. These qualities are reflected in Rodan’s design, which is less abstracted from its prehistoric forebears than Godzilla’s (though still kaiju-like in key respects, such as the bulbous eyes and exaggerated brow ridge) and re-enforced by the creature’s gurgling, bass-heavy motif provided by the maestro Akira Ifukube.

Rodan has a long association with fire and/or lava (he’s often sleeping in a volcano, or awakening from within a volcano, or getting some sort of volcanic power upgrade) so I thought it’d be fun to have him screeching from atop an erupting summit. The magma flow on the base was, to my surprise, one of the more challenging aspects of the whole sculpture, and something I’d like to work on improving in the future. Getting the right color and texture of the streams without it looking like just a bunch of long orangey-red blobs is really tricky. As for the kaiju, I’m quite pleased with the pose this guy settled into. Sometimes these things look more dynamic in my head than they do as completed sculptures, but here it’s easy for me to imagine Rodan belting out one of his piercing squawks before taking to the sky.

Credit, as always, to the original designers: sculptor Teizo Toshimitsu and suit designers Yasuei & Kanju Yagi.