“So I think that’s one of the biggest advantages that King Kong has over Godzilla. “A gorilla has really long arms, whereas Godzilla has relatively short and stumpy arms,” Nathaniel begins in our interview. In Nathaniel and Ryan’s paper, “Godzilla’s Extraordinary Growth Over Time Mirrors an Increase in Anthropocene Angst,” they describe the titular character as a “ceratosaurid dinosaur and Lazarus taxon.” In comparison, King Kong is just a big gorilla, albeit very anatomically similar to his non–Skull Island brethren.Īn Ode to the Humans in ‘Godzilla vs.
(Previous matchups between the two titans were used as evidence since the latest movie wasn’t yet released during the time of the interview.) We’ll try our best to avoid spoilers, at least until the end. Nathaniel and Ryan looked at three main areas that would impact a fight between Godzilla and Kong: anatomy, geography, and intelligence.
So when the two logged onto Zoom, a conversation ostensibly about using science to settle a decades-long debate quickly became a way for each to hash out their relationships with the iconic monsters. But there’s a difference between collaborating on a piece solely about Godzilla and weighing in on a battle royale between lizards and apes. Ryan watched the black-and-white Godzilla movies as a kid on Saturdays, while Nathaniel saw them as a teenager while watching Mystery Science Theater 3000. They each grew up with the original versions of the characters. In 2019 over coffee, the two professors forged a bond when they realized they could write a paper examining Godzilla’s evolutionary growth in cinema dating back to the 1954 original.