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The design feels a bit too Biogoji for the Showa continuity. It would have been cool to see an updated take on one of the Showa suits like Kinggoji or Mosugoji.

You had “Toho returns to the Showa series via escape room” on your 2022 bingo card, right?

Tweety Bird has a pretty well defined personality: a sadistic sociopath who puts on an innocent facade in order to get away with cold blooded torture.

I feel like Tweety Bird is the Mickey Mouse of Warner Brothers. An icon they’ve made unavoidable, yet nobody can really describe the character’s personality or anything particularly funny about them. How would you even explain Tweety if your goal was to sell Tweety cartoons? A bird who’s just kind of nonchalant about everything?

*Repeatedly Mashes L1 then Square OP is just made that they’ll never have a buzzsaw built into their belly.

Kaiju fans, can I be real with you for a second?

At least as far as the Rodan design, for me it was less about realism and more that I thought it would be cool to see a take on him with elements inspired by Azharchid Pterosaurs.

Like scale up that baby Sauropod to adult size and your already halfway there to a pretty menacing iteration.  Of course you’d want to have something with more Rodan specific features but elements like the upright quadrupedal stance and stork like head and neck make for an impressive yet predatory visage even when on the ground, which I think works for a Kaiju known for snacking on human sized treats.  So it’s pretty cool to see some of those elements make their way into this anime (though Rodan seems to be strongly puny in this for so reason).

It’s amusing, many of these redesigns (Rodan and Anguirus especially) look like what the “realistic” fans expected from a hypothetical new american movie between 1998 and 2014. But now we live in the post-2019 era, with the latest american movie going mostly in the opposite direction, trying to stay faithful, and instead it’s the japanese anime that does this and it feels like an exception to the rule rather than the rule.

Finally...

After years of nigh-unwatchable “public domain” releases by the likes of Alpha Video and Retromedia, Gappa the Triphibian Monster is coming to Blu-ray and DVD via Tokyo Shock on February 25. The company previously issued it on DVD in 2000, but it was non-anamorphic and is long since out of print. Knowing how Tokyo Shock’s recent kaiju releases have gone, however, best to snap this one up fast before it suffers the same fate.

What about the time in Godzilla vs King Ghidorah that he fell into the subway?

compilation of Godzilla falling into large holes

One thing that’s always confused me is that its almost always the specific quadrupedal bat stanced wyvern bodyplan that Vermithrax originated.  Which is odd considering bats are A. tiny by comparison and don’t need to support a lot of weight, and B. aren’t particularly good at walking around anyway.  You’d think if they were really concerned with realism they’d go with a design that was better suited to handle weight and locomotion, like the more upright quadrupedal stances seen in Pterosaurs or the bipedal stance seen in birds as well as some wyverns in Japanese media.  I kind of wonder if part of its constant use may be down to it being less time consuming in CGI to use the same basic animation rigs that have been present since the controls for Vermithrax’s Go Motion model.

A Thought About Pop Culture Dragons

When I was a kid, in the ‘90s, I remember dragons were always depicted one of two ways:  either as a standard European Dragon (you know, four legs and two wings, breathes fire, etc.) or as a standard serpent-like Asian Dragon.  While Asian Dragons still pop up from time to time, at what point did the traditional European Dragon drop off and get replaced with Wyverns (two legs, two wings)?

Like, it definitely predates Game of Thrones becoming a popular TV show though I think it definitely has helped solidify it (I remember they changed the design for Smaug in the Hobbit films to a Wyvern to try and cash in), but it was already a trend in the years leading up to it.

I don’t remember Wyverns being a thing at all in media prior to, say, Reign of Fire.  Like, I know there were Wyverns in movies before that, but it’s like that movie serves as some sort of border - prior to that Wyverns were rare, after they seem to be the most common.  Why?  It couldn’t have been THAT movie, of all things, to do it, could it?

I suspect @tyrantisterror might know, being the resident dragon expert.  :p

I don’t want to hijack that other swell thread for this but isn’t it kind of weird that the official stock image of the whole gang has velma seemingly leaning her entire weight on their dog’s head?

I don’t want to hijack that other swell thread for this but isn’t it kind of weird that the official stock image of the whole gang has velma seemingly leaning her entire weight on their dog’s head?

Why was this so common in early kaiju dubs?

Nobody:

Tsukioka:

No, that’s Coronosaurus.  Coriolanus is a species of Mixosaur found in the Besano Formation.

coriolanus? isn’t that a type of parsley?

Full Frontal Rodan.

Master of the air.

What if it turns out these aren’t actually the heads but the individual streams of the gravity beam being fired by the much larger Ghidorah still in space.

Said Ghidorah might itself be the beams of an even larger Ghidorah.

Tyrannosaurus eclipsing Allosaurus in popularity was one of the greatest disasters in palaeofiction.  In the 1925 Lost World Allosaurus was the main theropod threat and Tyrannosaurus was the cool obscure one that comes in and wrecks everything. Now T. rex is inescapable and there's no way to really escalate from here since Tyrannosaurids were the top tier theropods in terms of size/power/sensory perception and every single proposed "bigger" theropod has a million asterisks on that qualifier.  Jurassic Park managed to get around this by going for a more personal threat with the Raptors, but now they’ve been relegated to Chris Pratt’s godawful harem and they won't touch Spinosaurus with a ten foot pole anymore because Ibrahim et Al. happened and they ignited a neverending flame war the first time they tried.  This is why the only option the writers see left to escalate the threat is genemodded superdinos (which no-one likes anyway).  Sadly this viewpoint seems to be vindicated by the indifferent reaction towards the big non-T. rex theropods in Fallen Kingdom, which seems to universally be “it’s just T. rex but smaller”, though a lot of the blame still lies on the production for completely failing to distinguish the newcomers from T. rex in terms of behavior or even appearance, either drawing from the real world or making something up (I’m still waiting for my invisible Carnotaurus in a movie).  For a while while seemed like giving T. rex feathers might have been a chance to reinvent itself in pop culture more along the lines of it’s actual status, as that weird large theropod with more in common with birds than it’s peers, but as a result with a lot more “advanced” features than previous super predators.  Unfortunately the visual media dragged their feet long enough for the evidence to flip back to a more classical look and we’re back to square one.

we gotta hurry up and find out what color all the carnosaurs were and how feathery cause there are so many of them that nobody cares about just because Tyrannosaurus is bigger. What if Tyrannosaurus is the worst colored one and Allosaurus is like just fuckin fabulous????

Its a pretty cool design choice.  If there’s a downside to the current kaiju resurgence its the lack of suitmation resulting in a dearth of old school kaiju body plans outside of legacy characters.

About the SSSS.Gridman kaiju: It’s interesting to see that, while they can do literally anything kaiju-wise through animation, they’ve opted to include at least some designs that would fit right into a live action tokusatsu show. 

Interesting, there’s something about this that feels less “Mechagodzilla” and more “Godzilla if he was a robot”.  Specifically its kind of like the character designers used the basic premise of a Mechanical Godzilla to design it without drawing from any previous Mechagodzilla designs, and thus it lacks certain staples like the chrome coloring and yellow eyes, as well as having more skeletal, robotic limbs due to not being a suit.  Its not necessarily a bad thing (though I agree with Matt that it’s a strange choice in a movie dedicated to visual nostalgia), but it does make you rethink what defines the character and ponder what other recurring elements previous designs had beyond “metal Godzilla” that tend to be taken for granted.

It gets better: Mathra is a legit monster from the ClueFinders series of edutainment games.

http://cluefinders.wikia.com/wiki/Mathra

Toho submitted the first ROM movie to the U.S. Copyright Office as MOTHRA II

…along some other titles before settling with the “Rebirth” title in October ‘97

This remains one of my favorite Kaiju Movie trailers.

GAPPA!!! trailer in the highest possible quality.

In this work, Godzilla, which continued to grow on the earth for 20,000 years, appears, its scale will be ‘the largest successive size’ beyond 'Shin · Godzilla’ individuals.

Google Translation of the Cinema Today article on Godzilla: Monster Planet (x)

You know, at some point boasting that your movie contains the tallest Godzilla ever stops being impressive.

(via astoundingbeyondbelief)

They should try the opposite for once.  “At just 37 meters tall, the new Godzilla is the smallest Godzilla yet.”

To be fair most of the design changes in the Heisei series were extremely minor, mostly slight deviations in proportion.  The only exceptions are the transition from Godzilla ‘84 to Biollante, likely due to the relatively long time between releases, and from Space Godzilla to Destroyah, for narrative reasons.

If Legendary Godzilla were going to have design alterations along the lines of the Heisei series, I don’t see the majority of the public noticing at all.  I could see them changing some of the proportions to be closer to interpretations of the design seen in other media, which often tend to give him a longer neck and larger head than seen in the movie.

So it looks like Dougherty is considering redesigning Godzilla a bit for Godzilla: KotM. I have some concerns about this. Mainly that I feel like it'll be kinda weird continuity-wise if they redesign Godzilla and try to explain it as "Evolving" like Dougherty's tweet says. A: That's not what evolution is, B: Please don't try to imitate Shin-Godzilla Legendary. After the weirdness of Shin-Godzilla I need a "Normal" Godzilla to feel comfortable.

Meh. Some mild design tweaks are to be expected. Helps sell toys

Usually I would agree, but Dougherty’s previous tweet got me thinking...

Something I wondered about Dougherty’s approach was whether he’d take direct influence from Shin Godzilla since he likes it so much. His “evolution in the flesh” comment seems to confirm that the answer is yes.

The way I see it there are two possible options, either Dougherty is joking around with all these comments or Godzilla: King of the Monsters will be done entirely using Suitmation, with a modified Godzilla design to accommodate the change in effects.

Something I wondered about Dougherty’s approach was whether he’d take direct influence from Shin Godzilla since he likes it so much. His “evolution in the flesh” comment seems to confirm that the answer is yes.

First Seen: Godzilla vs. Mechogdzilla II (Saw it at a friends house, he was the one who got me into Godzilla)

First Owned: Either Godzilla Final Wars or Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (Got both at roughly the same time on the iTunes Store, along with several fantasy/sci-fi movies from the 50-70s)

First Subtitled: Godzilla 1954 (From the 2006 Classic media DVD release alongside Godzilla: King of the Monsters)

First Theatrical: Godzilla 2014 (Shin Godzilla for first Theatrical Toho Godzilla film)

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First Played: Godzilla: Save the Earth (This is how my friend introduced me to the franchise, and what really got me invested in it)

First Ever: The Godzilla 1998 Novelization (Unless you count rubber bath toys of the same film)

What was your first Godzilla film?

First seen: GODZILLA 1985First owned: GODZILLA VS. THE SEA MONSTERFirst subtitled: GODZILLA VS. SPACE GODZILLAFirst theatrical: GODZILLA 2000

Sound off with your own!

“New World Cinemas”

“She is coming...”

Three most cursed words of the kaiju fandom:

“Toho Kingdom toons”