GINO: Godzilla In Name Only. In 1998 Tristar's Godzilla: The Movie proved to be an abberant side-road in the Godzilla/Gojira mythos, so much so that he was renamed by fans to prevent any further confusion as to who was the real Godzilla . Gino looked a bit like Godzilla, s/he was called Godzilla, but was s/he Godzilla? Fans said no.
Instead of the handsome, almost indestructible rubber-suit monster that fans of the Daikaiju genre had grown to love, the new Godzilla was little more than a CGI lizard. The super-biological, allegorical functions of a city-destroying monster were removed, replaced with a lightweight spin on the giant monster trope.
There are also some hints that the producers of the Tristar Godzilla held the original Daikaiju concept in contempt.
"To fully background himself in the character, Emmerich watched 14 or 15 of the Toho Godzilla movies on laser disc. 'Then I gave up. It's just the same movie over and over again. They always had another monster in it, and I never got anything out of two monsters fighting. For reasons I can't explain myself, kids all over the world kept watching these movies' " - Dean Devlin
An essay on what went wrong with the remake can be found at http://gojistomp.org/essays/godzilla98gb.html