In my Top Ten riffs ever. When a line transports you into another state of mind and you have a mental image? It’s a winner.
Nothing to do with the riff, but I love the line in that movie, “The nerve! Coming here with your face!” 
This is one of the first episodes I saw. Sometimes after school I’d go over to a certain friend’s house and he’d put them on, and I remember seeing the Godzilla episodes. I only remember random bits, mostly Mothra, but we probably didn’t watch the entire episode. We had video games to play and stuff!
There were a lot of Joel era episodes I had missed. Other than what I own on VHS or DVD like Pod People, Mitchell, and Cave Dwellers. I would have been five or six at the time of this episode’s airing. Our family didn’t get a satellite dish until MST3K started running on the Sc-Fi Channel. But! I will throw some two cents on the topic of starting points, and I do agree. Godzilla is still relevant and accessible. My girlfriend’s son has a curiosity with Japanese culture at the moment and has expressed an interest in Godzilla after seeing some of the more recent films. If I wanted to warp his mind with a twisted sense of humor, I’d start with those Joel era Godzilla episodes.
I managed to find a DVD dub of the VHS on eBay last week, so of course, I snapped it up. It didn’t set me back that much. The video quality isn’t great by today’s standards, but again, it’s ripped from the VHS, so I wasn’t expecting the picture quality to be the best. Just having the episode in my hands is enough.
I lucked into something similar 7 months ago. Esty is your friend.
It’s a classic episode to be sure … a solid 7 out of 10.
But my heart belongs to Godzilla vs. Megalon. Its just so dense, rich, and varied with so many memorable riffs from start to finish. So, Godzilla versus The Sea Monster? Better luck next time, kooky …! What a mess!
Someone uploaded it to a page once and encouraged everyone to download a copy so I did (same with Megalon). Then, just to be sure, I also bought it from Cheesyflix before he had to shut down his MST3K store. So I have all the episodes that were never released, although the quality is not great, it’s easy viewing.
I’m you in reverse. Both are classic shows while this is where my affection is. Perhaps it’s how relaxed the joking is and how the riffs sneak up and hit you. The Lobster humor is a particular highlight as are the Planet of the Apes (1968) jokes. The skits pound Godzilla and Mothra dead center and are among my favorite skits of the early seasons. This is like an old friend I sit back and enjoy and it hasn’t failed me yet.
Godzilla’s foe this time around is Ebirah, whose name is derived from the Japanese word for shrimp (even though he looks more like a crab). The human part of the story involves a not too bright young man named Ryota whose brother Yata went missing at sea. So, he and a couple of his buddies steal a yacht to search for Yata (rereading it, that is horrible). As I said, they aren’t that bright. They run afoul of Ebirah and find themselves stranded on an island which is being used as a base by some paramilitary group and get separated. Ryota ends up on a neighboring island where Yata is hanging out with some natives who worship Mothra, one of the buddies ends up in a labor camp with a bunch of enslaved natives, and two of the others run off with an escaped native gal and stumble upon a slumbering Godzilla, who is woken up.
But we couldn’t care less about the human stuff. We certainly didn’t come to see Godzilla make inappropriate advances towards the native gal (allegedly it was intended to be a King Kong film, but they couldn’t get the rights, so they inserted Godzilla in the script). We want kaiju fights. The first bout has Godzilla tossing boulders at Ebirah which display some unusual physics. The second bout gets rather ugly, as Godzilla rips off Ebirah’s claws.