As I was watching Godzilla Minus One, the (terrific) new Japanese reboot and recontextualization of the Godzilla origin story, I found myself thinking of another Godzilla entirely. Not the one in the 1954 original film, or the versions from the many, many films over the years, including the most recent 2014 US version of the monster. No, the version I was thinking of was…the 1978 Hanna-Barbera animated version.

If you don’t remember this version of Godzilla, one, good for you, and two, it was terrible, in the way so many Saturday morning cartoons were in the 70s, with six-frames-per-second limited animation, terrible scripting and voice acting, and a general vibe of “it’s for kids, who gives a shit.” Naturally, as a child, I ate it up. I’m not proud, it’s what we had as GenXers, and we didn’t know any better. Pity us, oh, you millennials and Gen Z folks.

Every episode was essentially the same: The crew of the ship Calico sailed around, stumbling upon kaiju-sized monsters who were wreaking havoc by melting the world’s ice, or tunneling under San Francisco or what have you. When things were about to take a turn for the worst, the captain of the Calico, Carl Majors, would press a button on an object on his belt. That object turns out to be a Godzilla Beeper, because in an instant, the massive monster would emerge from the sea, help vanquish the current monster in a not-too-violent manner, and then head off until the next episode.

Oh, and there was Godzooky, the Scrappy-Doo of the Godzilla universe and apparently Godzilla’s nephew, who loitered on the Calico for “comedy relief,” which meant he was incredibly annoying, even for kids who had eaten so many Froot Loops on a Saturday morning that they were having high-fructose corn syrup sweats.

The set-up of the Godzilla animated show offered far more questions than answers—How did Captain Carl Majors stumble upon the Godzilla Beeper? How was it tested? Isn’t it odd to give such a singular piece of tech to some random boat captain? Does Godzilla offer his help willingly or does the Godzilla Beeper control the monster, and if so, what are the ethics of this technology? Given the immediacy of Godzilla’s response each time the button is pressed, does Godzilla in fact lurk underneath the Calico, just waiting to be called on, and everyone just sort of pretends he’s not there? If Godzooky is Godzilla’s nephew, where is Godzilla’s sibling and their mate? Why did they abandon their child to a crew on a ship? Are there Child Protective Services for kaiju?—but the gist of it is, Godzilla is a friend and ally to humans, available to them at their convenience to confront and, when necessary, vanquish, other more inimical creatures.

Contrast this with the Godzilla of Godzilla Minus One. It is emphatically not a friend, nor an ally. Its first appearance establishes it, without question, as a feral and unstoppable force. It doesn’t consider humans as the enemy only because it doesn’t consider humans at all, except as something irritatingly in its way. Later, Godzilla, now larger and meaner thanks to irradiation from US nuclear tests in the Pacific, heads toward a still-recovering post-WWII Tokyo, killing thousands and reducing parts of the city back into the rubble it had just crawled out of.

Why? Well, that’s just it, there is no why. There is just this unfathomable, unknowable creature, which cannot be bargained or reasoned with, stomping on Tokyo because it is there. It’s going to have to be killed, because if it’s not, then neither Tokyo nor, eventually, humanity, is going to be around much longer. Godzilla Minus One is terrific in no small part because its Godzilla is not a friend, it is a force, violent, implacable, unable to be reasoned with or controlled in any meaningful way.

It is, in this way, more similar to the Godzilla of the 1954 original movie than any other Godzilla before or since. Both Godzillas are blank slates of momentum, onto which the filmmakers have written the cultural anxieties of their time, both punishing a downtrodden Japan by offering a window into its then-current fears, nuclear annihilation being only the most obvious. These Godzillas are not about the monster; they are about the people beholding the monster. They are about the people creating it as well.

How do we go from the undeniable terror of Godzilla in these 1954 and 2023 incarnations, to the cuddly on-call deus-ex-monster of the 1978 cartoon series? The latter does not seem compatible with the former. The answer lies in the fact that of what lies between the 1954 original and the 1978 animated series, and something I like to call, for lack of a better word (or at least, a word that exists but I can’t think of), “protagonization.”

Between the original movie and the cartoon are fourteen other Godzilla movies, from 1955’s Godzilla Raids Again to 1975’s The Terror of Mechagodzilla, and during that time a curious thing happens to Godzilla: he stops being an unknowable terror and becomes, more or less, the guardian of Japan. It doesn’t happen immediately; the first few sequels have Godzilla still wreaking havoc at will. But by 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, Godzilla has tempered his indiscriminate havoc enough to team up with two other monsters to defeat Ghidorah, and by Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973), Godzilla is shaking hands with a human robot he’s teamed up with, and no longer terrorizing Japan, preferring instead a quiet existence on Monster Island, which is essentially a retirement home for kaiju.

Godzilla got domesticated because he became a star. Being an unknowable terror is fine for one film, and possibly for a sequel or two. But apparently the thinking is, if you want to keep people coming back film after film, eventually you have to make your monster someone the audience roots for, even if the monster is still nominally a bad guy.

We see this in horror franchises with some frequency: Freddie Kruger went from a terror to a quipster in the space of a few Nightmare on Elm Street films. Jigsaw of the Saw films is given an increasingly complex and sympathetic backstory over the course of that series’ several films, even (indeed, especially) after his death. And of course there’s Hannibal Lecter, who went from the monster in The Silence of the Lambs to the (anti-)hero of Hannibal, with no film in-between to chart his progression. It’s not only in the horror space. Marvel’s version of Loki, as an example, went from a hissable villain in the first Thor and Avengers films to a huggable cinnamon bun of a protagonist in the two seasons of Loki, thanks to being a fan favorite.

These protagonizations, wherever they occur, have their blessings and their curses. The blessing is on the business side: you can tease out a series longer if you do make the character more approachable. The curse is on the artistic and character side: the very things that made people initially respond to the character are the things that get shaved off in making the character likable enough to support several movies.

You might not think this is a problem with a 100-meter-tall kaiju, but not only has the terror of Godzilla been neutered by this protagonization process, it’s happened more than once. Indeed, it’s happening now, in the US-made “Monsterverse” version of Godzilla. In the 2014 Godzilla, which started the Monsterverse series, the kaiju was a lumbering avenger of the natural order, beating the hell out of Very Large Things, and if San Francisco was the casualty of him smacking around two other monsters, them’s the breaks. Contrast this with the trailer for this year’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, in which a shockingly neon Godzilla is teaming up with King Kong to take down yet another monster, and the two of them are sprinting toward danger like two buddy cops. Godzilla has been protagonized once again, and in being so, he has, literally, lost some of his gravity.

This is one reason, I suspect, that Godzilla, creature and franchise, has been rebooted more times than just about any other creature or series. Since 1954, there have been thirty-eight films Godzilla films, thirty-three Japanese and five US, and within that number the Godzilla story has been rebooted no less than ten times, either by giving Godzilla a new origin story, or by having the latest film toss out the chronology of all but the 1954 original (this doesn’t count the various animated series, which mostly exist in their own pocket universes). This isn’t a “multiverse” situation; the filmmakers have simply said, “Hey, you know all those movies and all those characters? Forget about ‘em.” During the “Millennium” era of Japanese Godzilla films (1999–2004), all but one of the films ignored the events of the immediately preceding one. Did anyone seem to mind? Apparently not.

This is possibly because, as easy as it is to make Godzilla the friendly monster who will fight those other mean monsters when you press the Godzilla Beeper, he, like most things meant to scare the crap out of you, is at his best when he’s the thing that’s out there in the dark, and he’s going to kill you, not because he hates you, but because you’re small and in his way. It’s not a coincidence that the best reviewed Godzilla movies—the 1954 original, 2014’s US version, 2016’s Shin Godzilla, and now Godzilla Minus One—are the ones where Godzilla is at its most primal, and least concerned about humans and their puny affairs.

Given the reception of Godzilla Minus One, which is now the most financially successful of all the Japanese Godzilla films at $100+ million, with more than half of that coming from the US alone, it is inevitable that there will be a sequel to it. What I hope is that Toho Studios will not be in a rush to protagonize Godzilla yet again, and that the iconic monster gets at least one or two more films to be unknowable and horrifying before he becomes everyone’s very large pal. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for.

But if it is, well. There’s always another reboot.