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Toho wanted more Godzilla films, then new monsters to fight Godzilla and each other. Tsuburaya invented Rodan, a bad-tempered flying pteranodon; Mothra, a graceful, mothlike monster whose rubber suit was 40 ft. (12 m) long and required an actor and seven technicians to operate; King Ghidorah, a three-headed, twin-tailed dragon; and Varan, king of the aquatic lizards. Varan's 1958 debut contained a scene that prefigured the shark attacks in Spielberg's 1975 Jaws, including the scary-music cue.
Tsuburaya and director Honda began to ride the crest of Japan's "monster boom," with creature features jamming theaters, and monster dolls, kits, books and records filling toy stores. As interest in space travel rose, they took the boom into the cosmos with Earth Defense Force (retitled The Mysterians for the U.S.) and The Great Space War (a.k.a. Battle in Outer Space). Then they set out to conquer TV with a science-fiction series inspired by America's The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. The series was to be called Unbalance: Horror Theater, but in 1964 gymnast Yukio Endo won three gold medals at the Tokyo Olympics with a complicated move known as the Ultra C. Almost overnight, ultra became a catchword throughout Japan. So the show debuted in 1966 as Ultra Q — and became a hit. Working by then under the auspices of his own production company, Tsuburaya Productions, the monster master soon followed Ultra Q with an even more popular series, Ultraman, which has inspired film, TV and merchandise spin-offs that continue to thrive.
By the end of the '60s, Tsuburaya was juggling multiple film and TV projects. His trademark dark glasses, porkpie hat and warm smile were fixtures in Japanese movie studios and fan magazines, where he was known affectionately as oyaji, "the old man." But he was also suffering from heart disease, and on Jan. 25, 1970, he died in his sleep. He was 68. The day after his burial service, Emperor Hirohito awarded him Japan's Order of the Sacred Treasures for his services to culture.
Tsuburaya left his special-effects imprimatur on more than 150 films (250 by some counts), many of them lost during the war. They embrace every genre from monster movies to historical epics to the 1965 Frank Sinatra World War II drama None but the Brave. He also left behind Tsuburaya Productions, now run by son Kazuo, which has extended the old man's characters into new films and TV series, live shows, fan conventions and licensed merchandise. A 1998 Hollywood remake, Godzilla, grossed over $500 million, and a 2004 re-release of the original sold 9 million tickets in Japan alone.
Tsuburaya's greatest legacy is his meticulous craftsmanship, often in the service of a kitschy, youth-directed art form that other practitioners took lightly. "Dreams for children," he modestly called his work. But they were serious dreams. Tsuburaya's monsters seem more real, even more human, than their competitors. And the warnings of his films — about nuclear weapons and environmental degradation — resonate today. "Godzilla's overwhelming strength, combined with his having been rejected by both nature and man, gave him a sense of pathos that made him a classic monster," Shogo Tomiyama, producer of 11 Godzilla sequels, says in Ragone's book. "As the monster stalks off into the sunset, he faces a lonely life. Who would call out to him to come back?" The children of Eiji Tsuburaya, millions of them, that's who.