Godzilla (1977)

In 1977, Luigi Cozzi secured the Italian rights to Godzilla (1954). Unable to sell the black and white film, he colored it himself. And padded it with actual news footage of war and death.

No technology for colorizing a film yet existed, so COZZILLA (1977), as fans came to call his version, was colored by hand, frame by frame, with colored gels laid over the image. The result is not color so much as a lurid, tie-dyed neon wash. He named the process Spectrorama 70 to make it sound like a blockbuster.

Needing the film to run longer, Cozzi added actual film of the atomic bombing of Japan and its victims. His Godzilla opens on the real bomb and the real dead. The original Godzilla was always a parable about the bomb. Cozzi dragged that buried horror up into the light.

Cozzi was no hack. He made Starcrash, has kept Dario Argento's horror shop in Rome for decades, and was a lifelong Godzilla obsessive, so this was devotion as much as commerce. The psychedelic poster he commissioned became the cover of the first issue of Fangoria, where a generation first saw the image with no idea what it came from.

Toho owns the color negative, the planned disc was scrapped, and Cozzilla survives only as a bootleg.