“BAMBI MEETS GODZILLA” (1969)
The title says it all. This unlikely meeting of two anthropomorphized cinema icons is one of the great jests of the late 1960’s American Cinema, a period not known for its ebullient humor, but instead a period of grimly cynical anti-establishment disenchantment, paranoiac cultural dislocation, gritty decay of traditional moral structures. and the rise of hollow yet profoundly self-important faux artistry. Within that humorless landscape where bitter sarcasm began its apparently permanent substitution for genuine movie wit, Marv Newland’s flaky no-budget, ninety second film is a bracing tonic of culturally juxtpositional absurdity which bridges the innocence of Disneyesque sentimentality with the kaiju-based nihilism of Toho’s answer to the atomic nightmare.
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This used to be heavily promoted as an addition to many a midnight movie screening back in the day, and was usually far more entertaining than the feature. I remembered it as being a one joke film (albeit a good one) but the credits are also very funny, predating “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in debunking the process, and I love the tip of the hat to Tokyo: it’s so mock sincere yet sarcastic, the perfect postcard representation for that era of American cinema.
I thought I was the only person on earth who had ever seen this. It’s the shortest funniest film I’ve ever seen.