DEEP DIVE: What Japanese Godzilla Movie Did Yoshimitsu Banno Work on After 'Smog Monster'?

Yoshimitsu Banno in April 2013. Photo by Brett Homenick.

By now, you've likely heard the old yarn about how producer Tomoyuki Tanaka was furious at director Yoshimitsu Banno after seeing Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1971) for the first time and angrily declared that the filmmaker had "ruined Godzilla." Of course, this apocryphal account has been debunked elsewhere on this blog, but it's a claim so blatantly false that it can be debunked even further. 

When Tomoyuki Tanaka was planning to relaunch the Godzilla series in the years following the disappointing box-office returns of Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975), three science-fiction authors were tapped to develop stories for the proposed film: Yoshio Aramaki, Taku Mayumura, and Ryu Mitsuse. Nowadays, these names have been included in other articles about the making of the production that would eventually become The Return of Godzilla (a.k.a. Godzilla 1985, 1984). 

With Yoshimitsu Banno in April 2013.

Usually, these write-ups point to Tomoyuki Tanaka as the one who selected the writers to pen possible Godzilla scenarios, but this seems not to be the case. So, if it wasn't producer Tanaka, then who was it?

According to the man himself, it was Yoshimitsu Banno. In 1978, Banno became head of the planning department of Toho Eizo Co., Ltd., and it was in that capacity that Banno selected the aforementioned SF authors to submit their stories. According to Banno, Tanaka rejected their treatments for budgetary reasons. 

Hiring three science-fiction writers to develop a major, SFX-laden motion picture for Toho had worked well in the past. This formula ultimately led to the creation of Mothra (1961) after science-fiction authors Shinichiro Nakamura, Takehiko Fukunaga, and Yoshie Hotta were hired by Tanaka to flesh out the story for that production. Unfortunately, in the case of The Return of Godzilla, the formula didn't produce the same results.

The information contained in this blog post comes from a conversation the author had with Mr. Banno on April 2, 2013, supported by contemporaneous notes.