"Scooby Doo at sea with Giant Monsters". That effortlessly sums up this animated adaptation based on the famous Godzilla franchise. This is Godzilla, stuffed into every 70s cartoon cliché you can think of. Yet despite its unoriginal premise, dated production values, and formulaic nature, Hannah Barbera's GODZILLA does showcase some tremendous monster fights with an old school charm. Here is how the formula works. Bunch of perpetual travellers and their goofy talking animal friend stumbles onto this week's plot and our new creature of the episode. They get into a scrape, creature appears. Bunch fends off creature with the help of Godzilla. They get chased around a bit by human (or humanoid) foes and somehow the plot device to summon Godzilla becomes useless. Finally they get some convenient twist that allows them to once again summon Godzilla, just as the big monster re-emerges. Giant monster battle ensues, Godzilla wins, and the bad guy would have succeeded if it were't for those meddling kids. Minus off the giant monsters and it is your typical Scooby Doo plot. Instead of travelling in the Mystery Machine, our bunch consisting of no nonsense leader Captain Majors, science exposition person Dr Quinn, her assistant the token African American Brock, irritating kid Pete and the Godzilla's goofy cousin Godzooky, all travel in the research vessel Calico. These characters are as one dimensional as executed from cartoons of the era. Their dialogue serves only for exposition purposes, literally explaining the plot to each other, or for comedy purposes; especially when it comes to Godzooky. Godzooky is Scooby Doo, right down to his cowardly demeanour, his interactions with the crew, even his voice. Credit goes to the voice actors who do rather well given the material they had to work with and the overall juvenile tone.On the production side, this cartoon suffers from bad cases of off-model artwork, recycled animation, and the now-infamous ever-changing scale of the monsters and backgrounds. Art detail ranges from hilariously bad and flat to the occasional impressive level of detail (mostly in the reused stock footage). The infamous scale issues have monsters like Godzilla seemingly changing size at random. At one point, the whole Calico ship can fit in Godzilla's palm, the next scene shows him having to hug the ship with both arms to carry it. Or perhaps a scene where Godzilla walks up to an airport control tower to smash it. The next scene shows him stomping his foot down on not just the control tower (which was previously shown to be up to Godzilla's waist) but a couple of plans parked on the runway too!. Despite these glaring shortcoming, there are some particularly awesome episodes and edge back to the spirit of the Godzilla movies. And in some ways, this is an improvement over some of the more horrid Godzilla movies like Godzilla Vs Megalon.For starters, there's Godzilla himself and the monster fights. Yes, they replaced Godzilla's roar, and yes the monster fights sound like grown men making beastial noises at each other. But damn if they weren't awesomely storyboarded. When our titans clash, the entire scene rumbles and shakes with every gargantuan blow, the ground trembles with each giant step. At close-ups, Godzilla's own roar rattles the screen with his sheer power. Animation allows more mobility for the characters compared to actors in suits, and this cartoon makes good use of the animation medium, delivering fantastic fight sequences that would have been near impossible to pull off in live action with rubber suits. All this is set to powerful background music, some of which are reused from previous Hannah Barbera productions, but used here to good effect. Godzooky is also an improvement from the live action movies' "Minila", Godzilla's supposed dim witted, possibly deformed, son.For every cartoony episode, you have those that return to the live action film's nuclear power cautionary tale. For every crappy monster design like that cyclops thing, you have designs that illicit pure terror like the Breeder beast. Some episodes deal with isolated incidents while in others the fate of the entire world hangs in the balance. Then, the series closes on a powerful high note with Godzilla taking on heavily armed military forces like in the original Japanese classic.Compared to other cartoons of its time, Godzilla does stand out among the better ones. As a Godzilla production, it is right there in the middle. It has its flaws, but it has some good redeeming factors as well. While it may not hold up to today's standards, Godzilla would no doubt fascinate kids and anyone's inner child with majestic monster mayhem.

I saw this show as a kid and it just never appealed to me all that much even though I was a big Godzilla movie fan and I still am. This show just really outlines a problem in my book, us Americans strange need to make Godzilla into something he is not. We never make him look like the Japanese version, we mess with how strong he is and we generally seem to want to name stuff Godzilla when they just are not Godzilla. Even the movie which was rather bad at least got his roar right, this does not even do that. They add a stupid monster named Gadzooky too which is a real annoyance, but then again the Japanese do have a baby Godzilla that would be seriously lame in "Godzilla's Revenge". Still the idea of Godzilla being summoned like an attack dog or something is rather lame too, though they sort of did that in "Godzilla vs Megalon", however in most of the movies even where he is good he comes of his on accord. The fights in this series are sorely lacking as well as I find it rather pathetic that the fights in the live action movies are better, more epic than a cartoon show. I mean it is animation, you are not bound to the laws of physics and stuff you can do anything and most of the battles are horrible. And why does Godzilla always blow fire in America, in Japan it is a radioactive breath, here he always breaths fire, he is not a dragon, but then the fact they remove his cool back plates and make his head bigger he does look more like a dragon than Godzilla and Gadzooky most certainly looks like one.

Although this has got to be one of my favorite series from my Childhood, as I look at it with the eyes of an adult I see many, many flaws. The animation was great and I love the monster designs. But why no origin stories, allot of seventy shows did that and it really bugged me. How did Captain Majors get control of the greatest monsters of them all. That's one, two, if they had Toho's permission to use Godzilla's name and likeness, then why not use the original sound effect. I love Ted Cassidy, but I would have preferred the classic roar. Next, breathing fire? Godzilla never breathed fire, it was a form of radiation that blows stuff up. Why change it to fire? To dumb it down I imagine. Lastly but not least. None of the new monsters have names, they were the Firebird or the Eartheater. No imagination in the writing. The voice over cast does a great job and I still love this series, despite it's fault, after all, isn't that what love is all about? 7 STARS

I like to watch this cartoon when there is nothing else on despite it being rarely on TV. This cartoon is funny if you're a kid but since I am 12 I think the idea of Godzooky personaly stinks. I mean I can cope with Minya but Godzooky will get annoying.