Given that Legacy of Monsters takes place in the gap between the films Godzilla and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, this is technically our first sighting of Rodan in the Monsterverse timeline. Here, the giant pterosaur-like Titan is nesting in a volcano in what appears to be Thailand — an intriguing development given that, by the time of King of the Monsters, Rodan is contained in Mexico. But, visually, the creature looks essentially the same.
“This Rodan is basically the same monster from Godzilla: King of the Monsters. And I love that design,” Konrad says. “So we didn’t really want to touch it, but it’s an ongoing thing, as you’re telling a story, you always find new details in an asset that need improving or working on, or other stories you can tell with them. While we didn’t do a lot with Rodan in this case, the company that took that work on, [Rodeo FX], they did change things a little bit, but it was more to make the rendering of it a little bit more efficient.”
Viewers were likely a bit surprised to see how little Godzilla features in Monarch’s second season. The giant lizard only appears twice in season 2, first during a sixth episode dream sequence that sees the creature destroy Tokyo, and again during its penultimate hour, which sees Godzilla and Titan X face off. And, according to Konrad, that minimalism is on purpose.
“When Godzilla shows up, it’s on. But there’s only so many sorts of big, action-y moments you can really do with Godzilla,” he says. “A lot of those moments have been done, like Godzilla on the ropes in 2014, looking at the soldiers on the ground like they’re ants. And then, Godzilla doesn’t quite understand humanity in the way that Kong does. So there’s less you can really do without starting to violate what the canon of the character is. But I always like a Godzilla scene. I always like those challenges.”
Instead of Godzilla, the mysterious Titan X takes center stage for much of season 2, a new monster that, from its earliest moments, seems quite different from many of the other creatures we’ve met in this universe, from its more demonstrative and expressive demeanor to its actively maternal tendencies.
“It’s a lot of the same premise of Star Trek, for instance, where [Gene] Roddenberry has this rule about how every alien needs to have eyes so you can empathize with them,” Konrad says. “I think their eyes end up being a really important part of Titan X and in the visual filmmaking language, we use a lot of close-ups of the eye to give a lot of emotionality to [the creature].”
