Back in , my friend Rod King and I had the amazing opportunity to meet and speak to Ray Bradbury at length. During that time, Bradbury spoke fondly of his friendship with Ray Harryhausen.
The two met when they were 18 years old, just a little older than Rod and I were when we met Ray Bradbury. Soon afterwards, Jack Dietz and Hal E. Chester acquired the film rights to the story and folded it into a project they were developing with Harryhausen.
This gave Bradbury and Harryhausen the opportunity to collaborate on a project. The original story was quite short and tells about a dinosaur who is summoned from the depths by the mournful cry of a fog horn. The movie would include that scene, but given the era, it also imagined that a nuclear bomb played a role in awakening the creature. In early , Japanese film producer Tomoyuki Tanaka read an article about the success of the film, The Beast from 20, Fathoms.
He wrote down some ideas about a similar kind of monster movie set in Japan and enlisted the aid of Japanese science fiction writer Shigeru Kayama to develop his notes into a filmable story.
The result would be Godzilla. The movie proved so successful that Kayama would be asked to develop the story for a sequel known in English as Godzilla Raids Again. A year later, Kayama would adapt the screenplays into novellas for the young adult market.
