Gojira, Gigantis... in the Latin, godzillasaurus. Belching atomic flame and using Tokyo as a wrestling ring, Toho's famous rubbery dinosaur has many names, but within the mental lexicon of science fiction fans, he will always be the Big G.

There are few indisputable facts about Godzilla, and one of these is his origin. Lurking deep in the subaqueous depths of the Pacific Ocean, outside of the tranquil Odo Island, Godzilla hibernated from the dawn of time until modern days, until one of the earliest H-bomb explosions irradiated him, yielding a monstrous avatar of the atomic age. Godzilla rampaged through Japan, destroying any obstacle in his way, before finally being melted by an experimental oxygen destroying device. On these facts, everyone agrees, although some of the details have become fuzzy with time: For example, no one can agree whether or not a young Raymond Burr was a witness to Godzilla's initial reign of terror.

Behind the scenes, though, Godzilla's origin as one of the greatest giant monsters in scifi is cloudier. Even the origin of his name is a mystery: Originally, the concept was to do a movie about a monster that was a cross between a gorilla (gorira) and a whale (kujira), and so one theory argues that Godzilla's Japanese name, Gojira, is a simple portmanteau. Other rumors claim that Gojira was the nickname of a brutish stagehand at Toho Studio. Whatever the truth, Americans sidestepped the issue entirely with their Anglocized renaming of the monster, thus giving the world the wildly popular "-zilla" suffix: to denote monstrous, reptilian scope.

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