We’ve always dreamed of titans. From old epic poems to ancient creation myth, humanity has written about terrifying beasts and ineffable creatures which govern the world around us and are governed by stranger forces still. The monsters of yore were no less than demigods, nature made sentient. Faces given to time and entropy. Odysseus could not have slayed Scylla and Charybdis any more than he could have vanquished an ocean or mountain. The Earth itself.Article continues after advertisement
But somewhere along the way, humankind did rise up to conquer nature. We circumnavigated the globe. Bored tunnels through cliffs and underneath harbors. Took to the skies, higher and higher, until our grasp exceeded our own atmosphere. We built skyscrapers that dwarfed King Kong and photographed the afterimages of stars dozens of light years away. Whatever riddles our ancestors once used leviathans and sphinxes to explain have since been solved. Not by titans or gods, but mere human intelligence.
And though we still tell stories about massive organisms run amok, the mediums available to us have vastly expanded. The first motion picture in the giant monster subgenre is often cited as The Pet, a 1921 silent film animated by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. The plot follows a suburban couple who adopt an odd animal that stumbles onto their lawn. The wife names it “Cutey,” and Cutey has quite the appetite. The more the creature eats, the bigger it gets, until Cutey’s large enough to eat a whole dinner for two in mere seconds. While the wife dotes on Cutey, her husband attempts to do away with the exponentially growing pet with rat poison.
