Finally...

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.

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????

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.

Why was this so common in early kaiju dubs?

Nobody:

Tsukioka:

*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?

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?