It's fairly common knowledge that the first Godzilla film was a thinly-veiled allegory for nuclear devastation. However, while parables about ecological ruin and government fallibility never quite left the series, Godzilla's growing appeal among small children meant that his sequels would get progressively more colorful and silly as the years went on. Terror of Mechagodzilla, the subject for this episode, came out when its star was depicted as an unambiguous superhero; it wound up being the final installment in the franchise's Shōwa Period (iterations of Godzilla are named after whoever happened to be emperor of Japan at the time).