Godzilla

Everyone who has seen "Men in Black" - as long as they got to the theater 10 minutes before it started - saw a preview for an upcoming movie called "Godzilla. " The preview - movie people also call them teasers or trailers - ends with an announcement that "Godzilla" will open on Memorial Day 1998. This is not what most people would describe as "coming soon. " The Godzilla teaser - which shows a monster foot crashing through the skylight of a museum and crushing a T. rex skeleton on display - is surely one of the earliest ever.

You came. You saw. You destroyed Tokyo. Daily News readers whipped up a slew of suggestions - 70 in all - for our Pitch a Godzilla Movie Idea contest, which asked entrants to come up with a treatment for the next Godzilla feature. Godzilla has gone into retirement, but we're convinced that if Toho Studios takes a gander at some of these concepts, they'll orchestrate a comeback for the big guy similar to George Foreman's renaissance. Valerie Hanssens of Frankford won a collection of Godzilla videos for her suggestion: "Regarding Godzilla" "In 'Regarding Godzilla,' " she wrote, "Godzilla sustains a serious head injury and loses his memory.

Here's the bare-bones plot of Tri-Star Pictures' $100 million sci-fi blockbuster "Godzilla," scheduled for release May 20: A huge lizard with big spiked plates down his back - a dead ringer for a dinosaur - shows up in the middle of New York City. It's up to Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno and Hank Azaria, among others, to stop the creature before it whomps and stomps Manhattan - as well as the rest of the world - into dust. Does this sound familiar? Of course. After all, there have been 22 previous movies about Godzilla.

"The reckless ambitions of man are often dwarfed by their dangerous consequences. " - Raymond Burr, "Godzilla 1985. " There are things into which no man should delve. Excavating 1970s pop culture, for example. Or, from the Japanese perspective at mid-century, atomic power. Godzilla, whose 23rd and most expensive movie opens Wednesday, was born of a national psyche freshly wounded by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The monster, an obvious metaphor for atomic destruction, debuted in 1954 in director Inoshiro Honda's cautionary tale "Gojira.

Tokyo has been trashed throughout the century. An earthquake laid waste the first time. A world war, the second. A radioactive reptile is responsible for the rest - Godzilla. Ever since the baby boom's biggest boomer made his film debut 42 year ago today (Why not celebrate an odd anniversary?), Godzilla has delighted in mashing the architectural monstrosities that blight the city's skyline - destructive rampages some see as not-unreasonable forms of urban renewal. Godzilla has always been an acute social critic.

If the 1954 Godzilla - dreamed up by Japanese producer Tomoyuki Tanaka as he flew over the nuked Bikini atoll - can be read as an allegory about atomic-age anxiety and dread of the Bomb, what is Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich's new Godzilla an allegory for? How about modern-day media hype and marketing overkill? With its mega-mantra "Size Does Matter" affixed to buses and billboards, Taco Bell TV spots and four-foot promotional pencils courtesy of TriStar Pictures (I'm writing this review with one)

The big lizard is under heavy wraps. Only disembodied glimpses are permitted: a scaly foot on a T-shirt, a set of angry eyes on a billboard, a tail, a claw, a taxi dangling from its cruel jaws. By not allowing anyone to see Godzilla in his 22-story glory before Tuesday night, Sony Pictures is sacrificing advance merchandise sales. Licensees have signed promises not to display any product that shows the full monsty until the movie finally chews up theaters. That's because Godzilla is no mere movie, says Peter Dang, executive vice president of consumer products for Sony's film arm. It's a franchise.

"The Host" is like a South Korean version of a Japanese monster movie. The cultural differences make it something the Japanese creature features never were: a nearly great film. Packed with politics, family conflict and satiric references to some of the more absurd aspects of Korean cinema, "The Host" never forgets to be a scary, icky, over-the-top fright fest, either. Directed by emerging genre masher Bong Joon-ho, whose 2003 "Memories of Murder" turned the police procedural inside out, "Host" starts with a neat-freak American military scientist insisting on flushing experimental biohazard material into Seoul's Han River.

Exactly what the American-made "Godzilla" will look like is a big secret. Although TriStar Pictures plans a mega pre-release advertising campaign, it has decreed that the image of Godzilla will not be a part of it. Which leaves us to speculate about various ways in which this "Godzilla" will differ from the 22 previous Godzilla movies made in Japan, as well as ways in which old and new will probably be alike. HOW AMERICA'S 'GODZILLA' WILL BE DIFFERENT It will be fancier.

If it's true that real beauty comes from within, there is no better example than Godzilla. No one who grew up with the Toho Studios movies of the '50s and '60s doubted for one minute that Godzilla was a guy in a costume, kicking over Erector sets meant to suggest the outskirts of Tokyo, or some other hapless Japanese city. The point is, it didn't matter. Godzilla's enduring popularity had nothing to do with effects - we can't even call them special. The movies' crude presentation was not relevant - in fact, it only added to their charm, like the bad dubbing and those horrific shorts the Japanese children always wore.

NEW YORK - Pedro Martinez brought charm, levity, appreciation, and a high baseball IQ to the Phillies after they took a chance on resuscitating his Hall of Fame career by signing him in mid-July. But he didn't bring the weapons to tame "Godzilla. " "Godzilla" is the nickname Hideki Matsui brought along with him when he left Japan in 2003 and signed with the Yankees. In the Land of the Rising Sun, the 35-year-old Matsui enjoys legendary status equal to Martinez's in the Dominican Republic.

Roland Emmerich has an ongoing project: destroying the world. In 1996's Independence Day, the German director sent aliens to wipe out the White House. In 1998, he unleashed Godzilla to wreak havoc on the streets of New York. In 2004's The Day After Tomorrow, he froze the planet in a new ice age. But in his new film, 2012, to be released Nov. 13 and already the eye of a vast promotion storm, things get really bad. Emmerich, who has earned the unofficial title of "Master of Disaster," admits having searched Google for a doomsday scenario even more spectacular than his previous destructions of Earth.

The Cartoon Network's new anime entry, Bakugan Battle Brawlers (9 p.m. Sundays), arrives burdened with some heavy baggage. It's a slender if feisty cartoon with a massive mythos. On the one hand, it's the story of Dan, a spunky adolescent with rock-star hair who wears what looks like a colorful space-station suit adorned with a matching vest. Like many kids, Dan is addicted to Bagukan, an incredible game. You see, one day these playing cards came drifting out of the clouds all around the world.

IF A BUNCH of terrified Gen Xers with a video camera had filmed Godzilla instead of the Blair Witch, it would look a lot like "Cloverfield. " The movie apes the viral marketing campaign of "The Blair Witch Project," and rests on the same gimmick - a short prologue informs us that we're about to see footage recovered from a digital camera found at the site of something nasty. In this case, it's classified Defense Department material, recovered at what is ominously described as the "former" location of Central Park (since New York hasn't actually been destroyed, suspense is lessened)

"The Host" is like a South Korean version of a Japanese monster movie. The cultural differences make it something the Japanese creature features never were: a nearly great film. Packed with politics, family conflict and satiric references to some of the more absurd aspects of Korean cinema, "The Host" never forgets to be a scary, icky, over-the-top fright fest, either. Directed by emerging genre masher Bong Joon-ho, whose 2003 "Memories of Murder" turned the police procedural inside out, "Host" starts with a neat-freak American military scientist insisting on flushing experimental biohazard material into Seoul's Han River.

Fifty years in Hollywood and he looks like he hasn't aged a day. Still winning audiences with those flashing eyes and that toothy grin. Still voicing his lines in the familiar rasp that fellow actors recognize as, um, well, a warning that they're about to be reduced to smoldering ash by a blast from his atomic death ray. But, hey, lots of big stars have quick tempers. What's kept him popular is a dramatic range that stretches from camp to contemplative, and an ability to deliver a performance that's never less than smashing.

The New York Yankees finally got a much-needed win against a surprising nemesis. Jason Giambi hit a go-ahead, two-run homer with two outs in the eighth inning, and the New York Yankees rallied past the visiting Tampa Bay Devil Rays, 5-4, last night. "I love being in that spot, and it's great to come through," Giambi said. "Hopefully, this will get us going and get us on a little bit of a tear. " The Yankees improved to only 5-10 against the last-place Devil Rays, after beginning the season 80-31 against them since they began play in 1998.

We've had Godzilla vs. Mothra, Freddy take on Jason, and Abbott and Costello meet the Mummy (not to mention the Invisible Man, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Captain Kidd and Boris Karloff). Following in the footsteps of these movies featuring characters who can no longer hold our interest on their own, but who might be OK if pitted against another fading nemesis, comes "Alien vs. Predator. " Here's the tale of the tape in the latest battle of the withering titans: Series history Predator: When the Predator admires his spaceship trophy case in the Los Angeles-based "Predator 2," we see the skull of an Alien.

Godzilla is the Loch Ness monster of the Pacific, a Sleeping Ugly. In this essential 1954 creature feature that's as potent as King Kong, the sea reptile has been dormant since Jurassic times. He is awakened not by a kiss but by the blast of an H-bomb test that starts him on his radioactive rampage across Tokyo. If you think you've seen Godzilla (or, as the Japanese call him, Gojira), think again. Although a dubbed version starring Raymond Burr was widely shown in U.S. theaters and on television during the 1950s, it bears little resemblance to Ishiro Honda's solemn monster noir re-released on the occasion of the film's 50th anniversary.

They blink, bob their heads, and thrive on heat and humidity. They eat fruits and vegetables, climb the sides of their cages, and The leathery-looking creatures are Godzilla and Rim-Rim, two iguanas taken to the Montgomery County SPCA in late July within two days of each other. Animal handlers believe their presence at the Conshohocken shelter is unprecedented. "Most people consider the SPCA a place for dogs, cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, hamsters and birds," said Kim Bonanni, SPCA humane educator.