While most films whose footprints are found on the landscape of popular culture are admired for aspects of their brilliance, every now and then one comes along whose imprint is planted firmly in ridicule. The tagline, “Size Matters,” could not be more apt in describing the colossal backlash against Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla. Japanese film studio Tôhô Co. Ltd gave Tri-Star the rights to make an American version of their beloved “King of all Monsters” under several conditions that were almost all completely ignored. Instead, the world was given what has come to be known almost officially as simply “Zilla.” Fans of Japanese producer Tomoyuki Tanaka’s original Godzilla called it G.I.N.O. (Godzilla In Name Only)

Though Devlin and Emmerich abandoned fans, the franchise, and a script by Pirates of the Caribbean scribes Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, there’s no question that they attempted to compensate for what they lacked in competence with sheer size. The amount of lumber used in set-building was enough to build fifty homes. Thirty-five tons of steel, two and a half million gallons of paint (enough to paint the Golden Gate Bridge), and two thousand foam fish came together to make reality out of the very large reptilian fantasy.

The film’s concept begins with an atomically enhanced iguana who has grown to gargantuan proportions thanks to French nuclear weapon testing in the Polynesian Islands (in case, we might presume, they had to surrender them in case of national emergency). After the monster has a run-in -- literally -- with a Japanese fishing boat and leaves his print -- literally -- on Panama, he eventually winds up trying to take a bite out of the Big Apple… yes, literally.

Thus it is that even after more than half a century of such films as Them! and It Came From Beneath The Sea, the American government still finds itself unprepared to do battle with a gigantic monster. Enter Ferris Buehler’s Matthew Broderick to save the day (instead of taking the day off, for a change.) Broderick’s Niko Tatopoulos joins the long line of paranoid doomsayers to serendipitously predict worldwide calamity, in his case, thanks to a lengthy study of Chernobyl earthworms. With his science now credited with several stories of cold-blooded menace, Tatopoulos and friends must stop the monster before it asexually reproduces (if that’s not an argument against nuclear weapons testing, we don’t know what is) and destroys… well, everything.

Despite its classification as a box office bomb, the film still enjoys the fruits of its disdain. Several references to Devlin and Emmerich’s Zilla have surfaced in recent Godzilla films. In 2004, Godzilla: Final Wars brought back the CGI Zilla for a battle against the suited Godzilla in which the latter dominated. A Saturday morning cartoon, Godzilla: The Series featured the offspring of the ill-fated Zilla from the film cavorting about the globe with Tatopoulos and friends as they battled various monsters. And a 2006 Doritos commercial parodied a scene from the film when Zilla picks up a Doritos truck and shakes the chips into his mouth.

Bad beyond its box office, colossal in its failure, Zilla poses no threat to unseat Tanaka’s Godzilla as king of the monsters. But there’s no question that the Zilla’s size is rivaled only by the contempt of Godzilla fans the world over.