Godzilla

This was one of my favorite monster movies of all time as a kid. My grandmother used to let me stay up until 2:00am Saturday night watching the double-feature horror films on television. There were only only three television channels in Philadelphia at the time, on channels 3, 6, and 10. PBS wasn't even broadcasting at the time. Everything was black and white, although color television may have been available by then. I didn't have a television for most of my adult life and the first color television I ever owned I did not get until I was in my thirties. I have a television now but I don't have cable so I just use it to watch DVD's and yes, VHS tapes. I have a copy of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle that I would have difficulty getting rid of even if I did not own the technology to play it.
I remember being horrified the first time I saw blood on a news program in color in 1972 at my mother's apartment in Westmont, NJ. There was a shot of the aftermath of a car crash that showed blood in bright red on a telephone pole. This was also during the waning days of the Vietnam War. Unlike the sanitized long distance night photography of the war in Iraq cranked out by the corporate propaganda machine that runs the media and the government today, the footage from Vietnam was up close and personal, quite bloody and graphic. The images coming from that combination of swamp and hellhole were instrumental in galvanizing opposition to that unpopular war. They wised up after Vietnam and now only show the very distant green night vision of aerial attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, making the conflicts look like the playful screen of an innocent video game rather than the actual horror and destruction.