I just watched some of the Mechagodzilla movies and contrasted it against the unwatchable horror that was Pacific Rim. True, the Mechagodzilla movies were utterly awful but in a different way. You could imagine yourself as a kid with toys, one in each hand bashing them together and pretending that deadly rays were coming out of their eyes. There’s an innocence to them that the high-tech junk completely lacks.
The re-boot did well in the movies, and now he’s supposed to meet King Kong.
Godzilla has been a generational draw, but I’d like to get him up to speed in 2018. Why can’t he attack North Korea and tear up their nuclear power plants, as he does in say Japan with an actor mocking Kim Jon Un and another actor playing Donald Trump, unsure how to react as he’s taking his press with the Clinton foundation trying to make money off the disaster? Now that would be a nice sub plot!
[Moderating]
Silver Lining, I’m unclear whether you’re trying to make a political jab there, because, to be frank, I’m not clear on what you’re trying to say at all. But if you are, don’t.
CGI is all very well, but some days, you just want to watch a guy in a rubber suit kicking over balsa-wood and cardboard buildings.
Watched the original US-version Godzilla the other day. They were very clever about shooting the footage that adds Raymond Burr, and I thought the whole adaption was quite respectful of the original.
It took me quite a while (when I was a kid) to realize that when Burr was talking to any of the principal characters, you only saw the backs of their heads. It was pretty cleverly done. It would seem to me to be unnecessary – why not just dub it into English? But the American Distribution Powers That Be apparently decided that American audiences needed an American character to empathize with.*
They had planned to do something similar with the sequel, but they decided it was too much damned work, so they just dubbed it as Gigantis the Fire Monster (or The Volcano Monsters). For all I know, the original decision might have been right. I only saw Gigantis a handful of times as a kid. It didn’t resurface for years, despite the popularity of the Godzilla movies, until the VCR revolution, when it was marketed as “Godzilla Raids Again”
*It wasn’t their fault that they named him “Steve Martin” – who would know that so twenty years later a banjo-playing actor-comedian would have the same name?
IIRC, about 60% of the Japanese footage was taken out of the original Godzilla. They had good reason - the first film was and is considered a serious work in Japan, one that not incidentally criticized the US for a 1954 scandal, where the crew of a Japanese fishing boat were exposed to high amounts of radiation from an above ground nuclear test. The original was first shown in the US in 2004.
Later Toho efforts were less serious of course.
As I stated in post #6
They actually used much more than 60% of the film – I have to Japanese original and the Burr version, and compared them, cutting almost nothing out of it. One of the few scenes cut was a reference to Hiroshima. I guess even with the lines spoken in Japanese, that cut a little too close to home. But the American-released version didn’t really pull any punches.
I’ve watched every Godzilla movie (either Japanese or English) multiple times. I love Godzilla.
That said, I’ve learned never to use my mother as anecdotal evidence of any pop culture trend.
Godzilla vs. Non-Sequitur
Can you explain? I’m lost.
He’s referring to this part of your OP:
Ah. self-blindness.
But I didn’t cite my mother as evidence of the trend of Godzilla-Love. That’s self-evident from the continuing success of the franchise. My interest in the whole thing was in how this until recently low-tech monster with his flimsy story lines managed to stay popular around the world for so long. Godzilla movies have been coming out longer than James Bond movies. And have fewer accusations of misogyny. Yet, ironically, the technically superior Beast from 20,000 Fathoms has pretty much fallen into obscurity*.
My thing about my mother (and my grandmother) watching them was simply to illustrate that even people that I would have thought completely immune to and uninterested in this kind of thing got sucked into its radius.
*Even more ironically, the 1998 Roland Emmerich version of Godzilla – the one with Matthew Broderick – was essentially a remake of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, as I’ve argued before on this Board. That it flopped, while the Japanese version continues to plow on (even making fun of the Emmerich incarnation) is another data point in the continuing success of the Godzila franchise.
I still remember seeing the first time Gamera did that. He got flat on the ground, pulled in his six extremetries, shot flames out of the shellholes, spun around, slowly at first and then faster until he became a flaming disc, then lifted off and flew away as a flying saucer.
After which one of the horrifed onlookers, a protagonist scientist, says… “An amazing adaptation!”
Wonderful silliness.
Gamera is also notable for being perhaps the only kaiju ever raped (by Jiger, in the lung) and who had an abortion:
"Gamera knocks Jiger around and has the upper hand until Jiger pulls Gamera to her. Jiger extends a stinger from her tail and inserts the barb into Gamera’s chest, laying an egg inside his lung. Gamera staggers away, roaring in agony…
…a parasitic infant Jiger growing inside Gamera. An operation is needed to remove the threat, so the children take the initiative by taking a walkie talkie and a mini-sub…
… The kids…manage to kill the baby…"
Each era gets the monster it needs, or deserves.
I used to watch the (1st) cartoon as a kid (the one with Godzooky) so it only made sense to transition to watching the movies when I got a little older (the original ones, this was still pre-Godzilla 1985, man that one sucked).
I loved Final Wars, especially when the “fake” Sony Godzilla got its ass handed to it in less than a minute.
I can’t believe I posted that non-word. My fingers got tongue-tied, but I thought I’d sorted it out. Anyway- extremities.
Me type pretty one day.