Godzilla (1954)

Did you know that this film is free to borrow and watch on the Internet Archive? Almost 70 years old this year, this movie still holds up as an excellent watch. It is a lot more somber than you would expect. Most people nowadays associate Godzilla with tacky merchandise and an epic scale of destruction, but originally Godzilla was posed as a very frightening consequence of nuclear war. If you have only seen Godzilla, King of Monsters!, I would still recommend giving the original version a watch-through; the ending has a noticeably different tone. 

There is quite a lot of interesting retro technology featured in the film. Old telephones, antenna TVs, and automobiles, it is a fascinating movie for media archeology purposes. This movie epitomizes our lab’s motto “We dig culture.”