What the Hell is Kaiju?

The joy is in the details with this thing. There's a whole Kaiju "Monster Family," with 40-odd beasties?like "Cycloptopus," "Kung-Fu Chicken Soup" and "Sonic Tortoise"?engaged in a steady war of good vs. evil. Each monster has his own trading card and Web profile, written in tight faux-pidgin-English?for Kung-Fu Chicken Soup, "Big cleaver action gives the scary function, chases the weaker fiend. Roundish can can slippery the attacking monster, makes fighting always the exciter."

I met half of the Kaiju brain trust at the Wetlands DIY festival last month (largely a bore, with heavy emphasis on the WTO protests?plus they made me pay to get in). While his brother Randy designs the costumes, David Borden handles the business end of Kaiju. He's responsible for the trading cards, videos and t-shirts, but more than that, David has convinced colleges across the country that his B-movie wrestling is really pop art, and that he should get paid four figures for each staged Kaiju event. Rock on.

"Yeah, we've been doing this for like six years," he told me, as a tv screen in front of him blared the classic battle between Kung-Fu Chicken Soup and Club Sandwich. "It's big in Boston. We've been written up and stuff. We can stage a show and have 800 kids come down."

Club Sandwich?a grown man dressed as a friggin' sandwich, with a club?was beating the hell out of Kung-Fu Chicken Soup as he lay meekly on the ground. They were in a real wrestling ring, with cardboard buildings strategically placed to give a sense of scale, smack dab in the middle of a closed-off intersection.

"How do you get the places to wrestle?" I asked. "I mean, do you need a permit from the city or something?"

"Well, Boston is cool," David said. "They give us what we need. New York is very difficult. That's why we've never done a Kaiju battle here."

"Oh, you gotta get Union Square?" I mused, but David was busy leading me through the sea of merchandise on his desk.

"This here is the Kaiju Big Battel Fun Pack," he said, pointing to a plastic bag of goodies. "Inside, you got your Kaiju trading cards, pinball game, and refrigerator magnet." The pack was labeled "Y250" and "&Copy;2000 Kaiju International."

"This is pretty professional," I said. "Where do you get this stuff printed?"

"Chinese packaging places, man. You would be amazed how cheap it is. Now this is the model one Kaiju t-shirt?oh, and take some free stickers."

We talked more, about the birth of Kaiju (two brothers sitting around, naturally), my ideas for future wrestlers ("Iron Pig Man" was shot down) and whether Kaiju wrestling was real.

"It's half-and-half," David said. "Some things are planned, some aren't. We don't have enough money to plan everything."

Kaiju Big Battel is one of those decent-concepts-taken-to-the-nth-degree, gloriously generated by the kind of guys who spent fourth grade designing their own role-playing games.

Eventually these people will end up on The Daily Show and then everyone will be on their dicks.