Interesting, Theres Something About This That Feels LessMechagodzilla And MoreGodzilla If He Was A Robot.

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.

*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?

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.

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?

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.

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.