”Godzilla” is an enduring series in the history of world cinema. Every few years, we can shout: “Godzilla is coming again!” This Japanese monster that has been popular for more than half a century, every time it appears always attract people’s attention.
Godzilla has a similar appearance to dinosaurs, lives in water, and spit out flames, energy waves, lasers, etc., depending on what it eats. In addition to the “Godzilla” series, there are also many movies based on large-scale water monsters, such as “Pacific Rim”, “Extremely Deep”, “Abyss”, and “The Loch Ness Monster”.
Why are water monsters so popular? In fact, people all over the world are very interested in strange creatures in the water.
Human fascination with aquatic monsters Psychologists of the
psychoanalytic monsters, especially humanoid water monsters, reflects a “death instinct” in us. The fetus was in the amniotic fluid of the mother for 10 months and experienced a feeling similar to drowning but not dying. Although the brain did not have a clear memory at that time, it was deeply subconscious. Being taken into the water by “people in the water” such as mermaids is like returning to a “dormant state” as peaceful as a fetus.
So the sea, dangerous as it may be, and possibly hiding all kinds of monsters, is just that fascinating. Almost every nation near rivers, lakes and seas has legends about water monsters. Most of the water monsters are mysterious or terrifying. Although some water monsters are as beautiful as supermodels (such as the Siren in Greek mythology), they are also appropriate. It is the villain who is beautiful and harmful.
If there is on land, should it be in the water?
In addition, from a psychological point of view, there is a kind of “learning transfer” in people’s views on unknown things, and the experience of the previous study will be used in the next study. Sometimes this migration is a disservice, as is the case when studying marine life.
Many ancient people who love to open their minds believe that there are not only fish and mermaids in the water, but also various aquatic animals that can correspond to animals on land, such as seahorses in China and abroad (not the kind that can be seen in aquariums), sea pig.
There are also sea rhinos and sea bears in the cartoon “SpongeBob SquarePants”, and giant monsters such as sea giraffes and sea lions in “One Piece”. They are just land animals with scales and fins and tails.
Both Chinese and Japanese believe that there are man-eating monsters (Kappa) in the river that can pull people into the water. The prototype may be a combination of a big turtle and a monkey living by the water.
European explorers believed that there were elephant-like tusks in the sea. Early European nautical maps were even full of various monsters. I wonder if the long-legged fish monster in the movie “Journey to the West” was inspired by these maps. It all stems from fearful, curious deductions, or just guessing about the unknown.
This practice of adding fins and tails to marine creatures without authorization has been used in early scientific research, such as walruses. Although Swedish naturalist Konrad Geisner collected very detailed information on walruses, in his “History of Animals”, he couldn’t help but add fins and tails to walruses that did not exist. The same goes for other animals, and adding these parts makes a new sea monster.
When the sea monster met reality The sea monster Leviathan that appeared
in the “Bible”, and now some scientists believe that it is actually a whale, so after a predatory sperm whale fossil was discovered, it was named Leviathan whale.
A sea lizard with a length of about 2 meters found in the Pacific Ocean is also called “Godzilla”, but Godzilla’s limbs in the movie are obviously closer to theropod dinosaurs (T-Rex, etc.). In 1958, the captain and crew of the Japanese Antarctic expedition ship “Soya” also saw unidentified giant marine animals. Captain Matsumoto called it “Antarctic Godzilla”. But the difference is that the captain thinks that this is not a reptile, but a sea beast. In 2002, another person found on the photos that there may be humanoids twenty or thirty meters in length in Antarctica that can walk upright, which the Japanese call Ningen. There are rumors that this is a monster secretly created by Japanese scientists, but this inference is completely nonsense.
