Over the weekend, someone in my Facebook feed linked a charming video that looked vintage 80's, but that I thought could have been post-produced into a grainy facsimile:

I noticed the author on the YouTube page was Randy Eli Grothe, who was recently laid off from the DMN and wrote a widely-linked farewell.

I asked Randy for clarification on the vintage of the film and its inspiration and got this note in reply:

Thanks for your interest in this lost neighborhood classic!

The members of the cast were all members of the Dallas Morning News photo department. The film was shot on Super-8 (remember that?) and I edited it using that tedious method of cutting the film in pieces and splicing it back together by hand.

We had a treasured member of the photo department leave in the 80's and we liked him so much we threw him a Goodbye Party not once, but for five or six years in a row. Each year we would put signs up at the DMN announcing that Jay Godwin was leaving the paper, please come to his Goodbye Party - just to generally confuse everybody in the building. The party became quite successful to the point near the end where Jay Godwin would arrive, greet a backyard and houseful of people, and not know any of them.

Anyway, in the context of this party (which was at my house in East Dallas except for one year at Sons of Hermann), we would always try to make a movie to project on the garage. "East Dallas Vice vs. Godzilla" was created for one of these backyard showings. We think it aired around 1986, the exact date has been lost due to many frozen margaritas among the party-goers.

My son Jackson was into Godzilla at the time and he also had a ton of dress-up materials lying around his room, so it seemed natural to pair it all together. And "Miami Vice" was extremely popular at the time. On another level, the film works as a kind of a postcard to the East Dallas of the 80's, with scenes of the much-loved Little Gus hamburger joint and Lower Greenville.

Several of these photogs ended up being future Pulitzer Prize winners. William Snyder, the co-star in the role of Sunny Crockett, won 3 Pulitzers and then directed the News photo department's Pulitzer coverage of Hurricane Katrina; he now teaches at Rochester Institute of Technology. Ken Geiger, Godzilla's evil BMW driver, won a Pulitzer for Olympics coverage and now works as a photo editor/digital guru at National Geographic. Nuri Vallbona, who on her knees begged the monster for mercy, was part of a Pulitzer team at the Miami Herald.

My jump-roping daughter is now a photo editor at The Daily Beast in New York.

My son Jackson, who played Ernest Tubbs, Jr., is a blues/rock guitarist in Austin.

When I got laid off from the DMN recently, I found the time on my hands to dig out the film and have it transferred to DVD, and eventually get it posted on YouTube. It had been in a film canister in a dark closet for over 20 years.

It was time for Godzilla to go viral ...

Randy Eli Grothe