Poor Varan. The guy has a single film to his name - a film which, despite the creative stewardship of Ishiro Honda, Shinichi Sekizawa, Eiji Tsuburaya, et al in their heyday, simply isn’t very good. Originally meant as a quickie made-for-TV co-production with an American company before the western financiers withdrew their involvement, Varan (1958) was hastily refitted as a widescreen theatrical joint that nobody involved was particularly happy with. Thus the other eponymous 1950s Toho lizard was relegated to the kaiju deep bench, appearing henceforth only in a single cinematic cameo and in ancillary media like comics and video games.


But I’ve always liked Varan. He’s something of an amalgamation of Godzilla, Anguirus and Rodan (Toho’s three existing saurian kaiju pre-1958) but with enough of his own vaguely mystical flair to stand apart. His musculature is more humanoid than that of those other kaiju, and yet the head design, with its fixed grimace, feels more indebted to an oni or kappa of myth than anything that has actually walked the earth. I find the textures of the suit very appealing, particularly the bumps that populate his carapace, which suit designer Keizo Maruse achieved by pressing peanut shells into the latex. Maruse also used translucent rubber hoses for the spikes along Varan’s back, installing lights inside to illuminate them to eerie effect. I would have loved to approximate that here except I couldn’t figure out how to do that without using material that would have melted during the baking process. Maybe next time.

The big challenge here was actually getting the left knee and foot to bend in a way that didn’t look wildly unnatural. In the film, suit actor Haruo Nakajima has to resort to crawling on his knees (as would often happen with quadrupedal kaiju; usually the filmmakers would try to obscure the hind legs behind trees and buildings and such), and I wanted to pose Varan in a way that reflected that without actually having him on all fours. Meanwhile the hut that he’s terrorizing was taken directly from a scene in the film.


Credit, as always, to the original designers: in addition to the aforementioned Maruse, Teizo Toshimitsu sculpted the head while the Yagi Brothers molded the bulk of the body, from design concepts by Eiji Tsuburaya and Akira Watanabe.