In The Simpsons episode ‘Simpsons Tall Tales’ (S12E21), the family find themselves on a freight train to Delaware after Homer loses his temper refusing to pay an airport tax. They meet a singing hobo who tells three stories portmanteau style. The first features Homer as Paul Bunyan, the legendary American folk hero who grows too big for his home town. In the story, after being cast out, Bunyan and his ox Babe fight Rodan. Lisa corrects the hobo, saying that this isn't part of the tale. A post-credits sequence in the Rick and Morty episode ‘Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion’ (S5E07) makes a similar reference to kaijū culture. We cut to another universe, where a group of young bugs are at school. They’re training for a mission to travel to another universe to tell the people there about the cure for AIDS. One of the bugs asks if the portal they’ll travel through might remove all their clothes and make them giant and impossible to understand (the instructor responds, ‘It's not like interdimensional travel strips us of our clothes and makes us screaming monsters. Or, maybe it does, impossible to know’). Naturally, this is exactly what happens, and the kaijū-sized bug is destroyed by the military while subtitled ‘Buginese’ wonders, ‘My clothes … Where’d they go?’ These two examples demonstrate how engrained references to kaijū are in western culture, particularly in American media, the second largest market for kaijū films after Japan. In this chapter, we’ll continue to look at how western cultures localised kaijū tropes (or memes) through the production of variants of kaijū movies.

Western kaijū media ranges from parody, as in the two examples above, to homage, such as ‘The Zillo Beast’ episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars (S02E18 and E19). The Zillo Beast is an obvious nod to Godzilla, a giant reptilian creature that rampages across Coruscant after being brought there for scientific testing. The Beast returned in a one-shot Marvel comic, ‘The Age of Resistance’ (2019), in which Kylo Ren tackles a giant beast worshipped by the Bethany, a Wookiee-like warrior race. Marvel are no strangers to kaijū stories. Their Godzilla: King of the Monsters series ran for twenty-four issues between 1977 and 1979.