Friday the 13th Part III features a Godzilla easter egg that was nodding towards an unmade blockbuster. Director Steve Miner can be credited with first introducing the world to Jason Voorhees as the main slasher of the Friday the 13th franchise. Miner started off directing the second film in the series, which replaced Jason's mother Pamela with Jason himself as the killer. Miner later returned to him Part III, which finally introduced Jason's iconic hockey mask.
Friday The 13th Part III also hinted at what was supposed to be Miner's next project, Godzilla: King of the Monsters 3-D. The scene in question shows one of Jason's soon-to-be victims Debbie reading an issue of horror magazine Fangoria that includes stories about special effects artist Tom Savini (a nod to Savini's make-up contributions to the original movie), as well as a commemoration of Godzilla's 25th anniversary. The blood raining down on the Godzilla article notifies Debbie of her boyfriend's body hanging from the ceiling, but Miner's Godzilla project would - unfortunately - end up just as dead as Debbie.
The brief appearance of this Fangoria article in Friday the 13th Part III proves Godzilla was already on the director's mind in 1982, though, a year before development on Godzilla 3-D began.
Unlike the Friday the 13th films, Miner's proposed Godzilla wasn't going to be quick, cheap, and dirty. The movie's special effects were supposed to consist of a combination of stop-motion miniatures, animatronics, and even the classic "guy in a suit" approach. David W. Allen, one of the most highly regarded stop-motion animators ever, in addition to legendary special effects artist Rick Baker, were both signed on. The latter was supposed to design a giant animatronic Godzilla head but never got around to building it before development stopped.
If those credits weren't enough, Godzilla: King of the Monsters 3-D was almost to be the theatrical debut of one Fred Dekker, now recognized as the director behind cult classics Night of the Creeps and The Monster Squad. Ironically, Dekker wasn't a huge Godzilla fan, so he wrote the film as an action-adventure with Cold War-era political thriller elements instead of a more traditional kaiju destruction flick. The protagonist, named Peter Daxton was supposed to be a charismatic Navy colonel with an arch-nemesis in Russian spy Boris Kruschov, while Daxton's son Kevin comes to found a strange bond with the title monster over the course of the movie.
There is a myriad of reasons why Miner's ambitious project never came together. Studios were not about to take chances with a movie this big directed by someone who was only known for low-budget slashers. Godzilla wasn't at his most popular, either. This was nearly a decade after the goofy Showa era films of the 1960s and '70s, and just a year before The Return of Godzilla launched the more mature Heisei era and revitalized the King of the Monsters. Studio executives considered Godzilla to be kid's stuff at the time also. However, it turns out low-budget horror directors would suit Godzilla well, as Legendary's MonsterVerse films utilized filmmakers like Adam Wingard with the same sort of genre backgrounds. This brief Friday the 13th Part III moment now nods to a Godzilla film that never came to be.
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April 25, 2021 at 05:10AM
