Jack Boulware

Godzilla-style creatures battling each other inside a steel cage. This is Boston’s oddball comedy/performance act Kaiju.

Godzilla’s Mutant Children
The Weird World of Kaiju Big Battel!

A breakdancing potato. A cleaver-wielding can of soup. A club sandwich, a giant slug, a radioactive sea urchin, a pair of plantains with machine guns. All fighting it out inside a steel cage. The comedy/performance act “Kaiju” (Japanese for “mysterious beast”) represents what might happen if you tossed professional wrestling, manga comics, Godzilla movies, and the show Jackass into a high-caffeine coffee grinder. Crowds line up around the block, from New York to Los Angeles. Hilarious and weird? Absolutely.

In a “Kaiju Big Battel,” acrobatic wrestlers in elaborate monster costumes duel each other to the death, leaping and diving, smacking each other with props, and stomping a cheap cardboard city skyline as if in a Godzilla movie. Blood and slime shoot out into the screaming audience. A badly toupeed referee attempts to keep some sort of order, and a ringside announcer calls the play-by-play action in breathless ESPN sportspeak.

“It draws on a lot of pop culture elements – American pro wrestling, Luche Libre Mexican wrestling. In terms of entertainment, I think there’s nothing really like it,” says Kaiju Chief Officer David Borden. “What attracts people is that it’s so novel, and so out of the ordinary, that they have to check it out. What keeps them coming back, is they’re amazed these people do these athletic moves.”

Kaiju started in Boston in the mid-90s, when Borden’s brother Randy, an art student at the time, made some foam-rubber costumes for a short film and never finished the project. The costumes gave him an idea. The brothers grew up watching Ultraman and Japanese monster movies. Why not make up a bunch of monsters and have them fight each other?

The idea kept growing. An accidental typo led to T-shirts being printed with the slogan “Kaiju Big Battel,” and now Kaiju carries the cultural cross-pollination to the nth degree. Printed materials are rife with intentional misspellings, broken English, and exclamation points. Over 40 different Kaiju monsters boast detailed biographies, filled with manga themes of industrial accidents, world domination, and family honor. It would take an entire book to explain all of the intricacies. Which in fact, there is, along with DVDs, T-shirts, toys, magnets, and stickers. Old monster costumes are cut into pieces and sold as collector’s items. A half-hour live action television show is next. For a generation of youth raised on Japanese TV animation, Kaiju is an entertainment dream – Asian pop kitsch, mutant monsters, cool martial arts fighting, and plenty of backstory trivia to study and memorize.

For instance, Studio Kaiju’s version of the universe, which goes something like this: A secret covert group of world leaders called the Kaiju Regulatory Commission monitors the planet’s population of monsters. The Kaiju Commissioner created the Kaiju Big Battel as a method to save the world from destruction by giving monsters a place to fight each other, specifically “to release pent-up monster aggression without human casualty.” The Dr. Cube mad scientist character, wearing a box for a head, creates monsters in a laboratory to help him take over the world. Cube’s posse includes the hazardous-waste Gomi-man, SDS-1 the giant slug, a “ravenous dimwit space bug” named Sky Deviler, and Hell Monkey, who smashes opponents in the face with cream pies doused in Hell Monkey Hot Sauce. Following along so far?

A group of hero monsters fight Dr. Cube to protect the world from evil. The American Beetle character, in Stars-and-Stripes spandex, is described as a “jingoistic insect obsessed with manifest destiny,” and listens to Kid Rock CDs. The twin plantain characters, Los Plantanos, are supposedly refugees from a corrupt South American military regime with a sock-puppet dictator. The breakdancing Silver Potato shoots hot melted butter at enemies.

Other monsters have no allegiance to good or evil, they just fight for themselves. Uchu Chu, an “intergalactic pest,” hails from the planet Xertoid. Unibouzu the radioactive sea urchin looks like a giant pickle with spikes. Call-Me-Kevin is a six-eyed alien from the aquatic planet of Piscon 7. And Kung-Fu Chicken Noodle represents the product of a factory accident in Canton, China.

Audiences’ favorite character by far is Kung-Fu Chicken Noodle, who dispatches opponents with an oversized meat cleaver. “He is a walking, talking, fighting, can of soup,” says Borden. “We never pushed him as a character. But once we realized he hits an immediate nerve, we positioned him to be more of a running character.”

Most of the characters are based on existing Japanese movies and TV shows, but there is no quick formula to creating a Kaiju monster. “Take a chicken, take a skunk, put some spikes on it—I wish it was that easy,” Borden says. “Everything’s kind of done for a reason. But sometimes it is arbitrary. Sometimes it’s like, wouldn’t it be cool if he had this weapon? Someone designs the weapon, makes it out of foam. And all of a sudden this guy’s bringing in a huge saw blade to the next battle.”

Based in a neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, Kaiju world headquarters operates from a converted laundry building stuffed to the ceiling with props and costumes. Five fulltime employees perpetuate the Kaiju mythology, calling on a roster of over 40 performers and crew members to stage each Big Battel show. The productions are obviously a logistical challenge, but to Borden, the biggest appeal is wowing people.

“I always enjoy when people are walking out of the room, going a mile a minute, talking about all the stuff they saw,” Borden says. “That’s when I know I’ve done my job right.”

And does the audience get slimed every show? “Most often, yeah.”

(A version of this story appeared in American Way magazine)