Based on Ray Bradbury’s 1951 short story, directed by Eugène Lourié and with animation by Ray Harryhausen, this is a very Godzilla-style movie — actually, it’;s the other way around as Godzilla came out a year later — as a giant dinosaur known as the Rhedosaurus in unfrozen by an atomic bomb test. What really inspired this was the successful 1952 re-release of King Kong.

As Operation Experiment — these dumb scientists — blows up a big part of the Arctic, physicist Thomas Nesbitt (Paul Christian) states, “What the cumulative effects of all these atomic explosions and tests will be, only time will tell.” Time doesn’t take all that long, as there’s soon as the dinosaur shows up. In the story, it was a brontosaurus, but not it’s a four-legged tyrannosaurus, which never existed except as a stop motion monster. Everyone thinks Nesbitt has lost his marbles when he says he saw the dinosaur, but soon its making its way through America, destroying everything.

Soon, there are 180 known dead, 1,500 injured, damage estimates $300 million as the Rhedosaurus makes its way to Coney Island, before Colonel Jack Evans (Kenneth Tobey) shoots it in the throat with a bazooka. The blood from it causes a virus that causes even more people to die and the beast goes into the water, only to reemerge in the amusement park, where Lee Van Cleef of all people shows up and has a radiation gun that he uses to shoot the dinosaur in its neck wound. As all military operations usually end, the entire Coney Island park burns to the ground.

There are some famous people in here, if just their voices. Beyond James Best as a radar man, the tones of Bill Woodson (who did The Odd Couple credits) and Merv Griffith are in this. As for the skeleton that is used, that wasn’t made for this. It was from RKO’s prop department and first showed up in Bringing Up Baby. As for the Rhedosaurus, he’s the dragon in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

One of the most successful movies of 1953, this would lead the way for every kaiju that would come in its wake. It was released in Japan by Daiei, who would soon have their own giant monster with Gamera.

You can watch this on Tubi.