But, this trend of pitting monsters and bad guys against each other couldn’t help but supersize in the world of internet fandom, where everybody’s inherent polarized nature has them lining up in the corners declaring that their guy is better than your guy. Two titans facing off has been a staple of genre filmmaking for decades King Kong was fighting Godzilla in the early 1960s and Universal was pitting its classic monsters against one another two decades before that. It is human nature - though, to be fair, foremost the nature of 12-year-old prepubescent boys - to see two formidable figures and immediately think, “Let’s make them fight!” Welcome to This Week in Genre History, where Tim Grierson and Will Leitch, the hosts of the Grierson & Leitch podcast, take turns looking back at the world’s greatest, craziest, most infamous genre movies on the week that they were first released.
