Kaiju bios

King Ghidorah

King Ghidorah (キングギドラ Kingu Gidora) is a created by that first faced in the , .

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Height: 100-150 meters

Weight: 30,000-70,000 metric tons

Wingspan: 150-175 meters

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King Ghidorah's name is composed of "King" (キングKingu) and "Ghidorah." The "Ghidorah" part of King Ghidorah's name comes from the Japanese word for "hydra" (ヒドラ Hidora), which is spelled very similarly to the katakana for Ghidorah.

King Ghidorah was referred to as either "Ghidrah" or "Ghidorah" in the American versions of his first three movies, , and , presumably because they sounded more like "hydra." He wasn't referred to as "King Ghidorah" in an original American release of one of his movies until .

King Ghidorah is a golden dragon monster with two legs, three heads on long necks, giant bat-like wings, and two tails. King Ghidorah's multiple heads were inspired by Yamata no Orochi, an eight-headed dragon from Japanese mythology.

King Ghidorah was brought to life on the movie screen by a stunt actor inside an elaborate three-piece suit, with a team of puppeteers to control the suit's many appendages allowing realistic movement. His design was mostly created by based on a minimal description in the script: "It has three heads, two tails, and a voice like a bell."

King Ghidorah's roar in the Showa era is very much akin to laughter, albeit at a higher pitch.

King Ghidorah does not have much of a developed personality because he is under someone's control in most of his appearances. The only times he was not under mind-control throughout most of the film were , , and .

He temporarily was free of mind-control in , and . In each instance, he became confused due to no longer receiving commands from his masters and was overwhelmed by and his allies, eventually trying to retreat. It seems that each of King Ghidorah's heads can think for themselves separately, although the middle head appears to be dominant which could easily be a cause of not being coordinated.

In , King Ghidorah was said to be evil, and he destroyed civilizations on several planets for unknown reasons. He tried destroying and its civilizations, but he fought the three monsters that got in his way and retreated eventually.

King Ghidorah has traditionally been depicted as an evil destructive creature from outer space, although his origin has varied throughout his appearances.

In the , King Ghidorah is an alien dragon said to have attacked under his own power many thousands of years ago, wiping out the planet's entire civilization. He later attacked , but was repelled by Earth's monsters. At some point, he was taken control of by the and used as a pawn in their invasion of Earth. King Ghidorah was destined to be taken control of by different alien races, losing his history on the way. The later claimed to have created King Ghidorah, but whether this is true or not is never definitively explained, given the monster's ancient history.

in

Thousands of years ago, King Ghidorah attacked the planet , eradicating the planet's advanced civilization and rendering Venus an uninhabitable wasteland. The few Venusians that survived the monster's attacks fled to , where they interbred with the native humans and gradually began to lose their identity.

In the present day, a meteor shower was visible in the skies above Earth, with one meteor crashing down in the Kurobe Valley in . A scientific team led by Professor Murai traveled to the valley to examine the meteor, which exuded a strange glow and even produced its own magnetic field that fluctuated in strength. After several days of study, Murai and his colleagues observed that the meteor was actually growing in size. One day, the meteor began producing an extremely powerful magnetic field before splitting open and launching a ball of fire into the sky above. The fireball exploded several times before finally taking the form of King Ghidorah, having come to do to to Earth what he did to Venus in the past.