The Godzilla Thread - Plus other giant monsters, no matter how popular or obscure

Recon said:
I remember reading somewhere that "Gojira" was the name of an executive at Toei who was not to be fucked with, the monster was named accordingly.
I get a kick out of the old flicks because those huge model cities tickle my autism. Such detail, such care went into them.
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I heard the old Gorilla + Whale portmanteau.
 
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According to Eiji Tsuburaya, the creator of Godzilla: "At the time, there was a tough- looking guy working on the Toho lot. His nickname was 'Gojira'. We just adopted it for our monster. It caught on and certainly has immortalized him!"
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Not exactly an executive then, some Japanese teamster. Toho, not Toei. My mistake. The Kujira thing makes sense, tho. I'd go with that if I hadn't read this.

 
Sword Fighter Super said:
I actually liked the 1997 American abomination Godzilla. Effects were good, and the destruction was cool.
Also, the soundtrack was amazing.
I know the rest of the movie sucked "that's a lot of fish", but I still enjoyed it.
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I remember watching the animated cartoon spin off of this iteration of Godzilla. It wasn't perfect, but it was great for a saturday morning cartoon.
 
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Kaiser Wilhelm's Ghost said:
I remember watching the animated cartoon spin off of this iteration of Godzilla. It wasn't perfect, but it was great for a saturday morning cartoon.
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I've never checked it out for myself but I've largely heard positive things about the Zilla cartoon from fans of more traditional Godzilla stuff
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RumblyTumbly said:
So aside from the Toho monsters, what other kaiju do you guys like?

Any Ultraman or Gamera fans in here?
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Not so much an Ultraman fan but I did love the Heisei Gamera trilogy with 2nd one being my favorite. I haven't watched any of those movies in awhile, maybe I'll do that this weekend.
 
XYZpdq said:
I've never checked it out for myself but I've largely heard positive things about the Zilla cartoon from fans of more traditional Godzilla stuff
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It's worth a quick watch, most of the storylines actually advanced the plot of the film better than the movie did and actually did a decent job of capturing some of the characters as well. I haven't seen it since I was 11, but it was one of the few non-anime series from that time period I never missed an episode for.
 
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The Zilla animated series is pretty darn good. The only major issue I had with it was unavoidable. Basically, I didn't like that it had to work within the framework of the Tristar film, but they show did its best to make up for some of the weaknesses. They even gave Godzilla his atomic breath back! That was nice of them.

It was clear to me that fans worked on it, or at the very least, the people that worked on it did their homework. We got a Destroy All Monsters inspired three parter, Monster Island, and was even formatted kind of similarly to the Hanna Barbera cartoon (no Godzuki though, thank heavens, lol). And they also add some new things like giving Godzilla a mate in one episode, and having a robot buddy that gets blown up and trashed in just about every episode (I swear this was inspired by South Park).

Some of the monsters Godzilla fought were pretty cool too. They did a Giant Cobra, a Giant Bat, and some sea based creature that seemed to be a mix between Biollante and a Cthulhu. Non of the Toho monsters showed up (although there is one monster that seems to be this show's take on Mechagodzilla, but I'll let you all decide).

And yeah, I actually kind of liked the characters. They were a tad more colorful than their movie counterparts. Actually, when I first watched the show, I completely forgot that some of these characters were in the movie, but they left more of an impact in the show. There is some romantic teases among the team, which isn't always my cup of tea, but they never go too overboard with it.

Overall, its a good show, and further proof that the 1998 film wasn't an all encompassing disaster. We did get some good things out of it like the Heisei films finally being released in the states, this show, and in sparked Toho to make more Godzilla movies, so all in all, the Tristar film showed that "from all bad, comes good".
 
Old Gamera is ok. First one's a cromulent monster movie, the later of the first series are enjoyably goofy. Gamera vs Jiger is underrated between not being in MST's work with the franchise and most people are plebs and don't share my refined world's fair spergery.
I like Ultraman but I seem to end up keeping a bit of distance from the franchise. I really liked R/B but then Aizen left. I loved the idea of an adversary Ultra who nerd raged at the current Ultra for doing it wrong.

As for Final Wars, meh. Maybe I wanted King Ghidorah spinning around with swords in his mouths or something,, I dunno. but I was more "ah, that's nice" then marking out like I did for Kitamura's stuff in Versus and Twin Snakes.
 
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RumblyTumbly said:
Time to expose how dumb I was back then.

The Trendmasters Godzilla toylike featured several monsters from the 90s films such as Mecha Ghidorah, Battra, and of course Spacegodzilla, who was treated as the big bad of the set. A couple of these monsters were also featured in the SNES Godzilla game called Super Godzilla.

The sad truth is that the 90s films hadn’t been released stateside yet, so I didn’t know that these monsters actually came from movies! I just assumed they were invented for the games and toys. I distinctly remember the Spacegodzilla toy commercial using live action footage of Spacegodzilla and I thought “wow. They went all out for this commercial!”

So imagine my surprise when I got on the net in 96 and found out there were 5 more Godzilla movies that hadn’t been released yet. I felt like an idiot for not realizing that these new monsters actually did come from movies.
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When I was a kid I had a Jumbo Machinder Godzilla that had launching fists and IIRC some sort of spark gimmick. Might be misremebering the spark gimmick but it definitely had launching fists.


My favorite Godzilla movies involve Mechagodzilla. Showa, Heisei, Millennium, I love me some Mechagodzilla.
 
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Shokaract said:
Do the ones from Pacific Rim count? Because I really like Otachi.
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Of course, since Guillermo del Toro made it as a homage to kaiju movies 🙂

While the Showa era of Gamera movies were aimed more at kids, the monster fights did get quite graphic and I think the filmmakers got away with it because monsters were the ones getting dismembered (the Godzilla Showa movies didn't show that gratuitous violence until the 1970s). Also the Showa Gamera movies featured space monsters who were not under the control of other space aliens but planned on conquering the Earth for themselves. I guess that is why I enjoyed the characterization of SpaceGodzilla and the MonsterVerse version of King Ghidorah.
 
Clown College said:
Sure they do, but let's not talk about the ones from Pacific Rim 2 'cause, well , that was one hell of a shitty movie.
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That's a shame. I saw that Charlie Day was in it and I just imagined Kaiju fights mixed in with IASIP style shenanigans.
 
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