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The cartoon was interesting with the analogues of traditional Godzilla rivals and enemies; iirc, a giant bat for Rodan, a yeti for King Kong, and the original Zilla revived by aliens as a cyborg for Mechagodzilla. Not to mention the time travel episode where Godzilla dies a hero defending the remnants of humanity from a new species of rapidly-evolving monsters created by a mad scientist, and they bring BFGs back from the future to take them out while they're still in their larval stage. Also, the cast of King of the Hill (minus Hank) get giant robots to hunt Godzilla.
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Feb 16, 2018 07:29
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The godzilla cartoon was certainly better than the king Kong cartoon where the protagonist man was cybernetically linked with the gorilla.
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Feb 17, 2018 17:49
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Re-watch update: Godzilla 2000 much better than I remember it, Godzilla X Mechagodzilla not nearly as good as I remember it. GMK is still a blast.
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Mar 1, 2018 06:10
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I saw G2K in theaters, the only one I've been able to do so. I had a good time and I've always liked that movie, and that's probably my favorite G suit as well.
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Mar 1, 2018 14:04
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K. Waste posted:Personal ranking from the different Godzilla periods so far: Millennium 1) Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack 2) Godzilla: Final Wars 3) Godzilla 2000: Millennium 4) Godzilla x Mothra x Mechagodzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. 5) Godzilla x Mechagodzilla 6) Godzilla x Megaguirus Of the four major periods I've overseen, the Millennium films have easily the lowest quality rate overall as well as the steepest drop-off from the best to the worst films.
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Mar 2, 2018 07:09
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I don't think I could ever put Final Wars above Tokyo SOS or 2000. GMK is definitely reigning champion of the Millenium period, though.
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Mar 2, 2018 07:17
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I could quibble with you about some of those but really they're your opinion so who gives a poo poo. I really might have to agree with Megaguirus' placement though. It's just such a nothing of a movie. It doesn't know what it wants to be, it can't even commit to the insane Showa vibe it SOME times has and it just looks so cheap and ugly after 2000 Basically here's the deal with Godzilla movies and their quality drop off. Showa Era, made at a time where films in general didn't really look all that great. Especially the 60s movies- Hedorah is the last really good looking movie of the Showa Era, though they tried with ToMG. Didn't succeed but they tried. There is one big exception but we'll get to that. Basically the 60s were a peak time of Movies That Looked As Good As Possible VS Budget (And Time) Needed. Even then some of the best looking Showa movies had a healthy break for the production team to knock it out of the park, even if that break was another lower tier movie. The ONE outlier, if you're going to be pedantic as possible, is Return of Godzilla since that is in the Showa era chronologically. But that is a huge outlier for a few factors. It's drat near a decade after the last movie, and it's when Japan was, appearing to be, recovering from the Oil Crisis. more on that below. During the late 60s to the 70s, Japan got hit with a crippling oil crisis that basically destroyed their economy. They are still feeling the effects of it to this day and it tanked many, MANY, special effect driven movie franchises. Even some of the more notable TV series, like Ultraman and Kamen Rider. That coupled with the rising cost of films VS the stagnant budget meant that the movies started looking cheaper and cheaper. Despite this, as has been discussed, the late Showa movies did some really spectacular stuff and road their aesthetic as hard as they could. Cheap in the 60s and 70s does not mean what cheap does now. Return of Godzilla was a huge movie in a lot of ways and is absolutely gorgeous. Say what you will about the plot, but the suit work, the ambition, the set design, the tone and effects were all knocked out of the park and have yet to be surpassed in totality. Shin is the only movie after to rival it, and 1954 is the only movie before it. You can make a few guesses for why but that can wait for another day. Biolante is the next movie and also has some really stellar production to it, taking a hearty couple of years off from Return. It doesn't reach the same heights but has some truly memorable and wonderful effects. This is right at the end of the 80s, right when Japan's economy started to fall back from its brief return. Ghidorah is next, made two years later, and it shows a change in priority. Return of Godzilla was a big Hollywood affair made to look as good as it possibly could, taking several cues from the 1970s King Kong and building off of them. Godzilla VS Ghidorah 1991 betrays the mentality that would plague the rest of the franchise. Churn it out as quick as possible to make as fast a buck as they could with diminishing budget. The city set of Ghidorah is almost laughable though the monster suits themselves still fare extremely well. But from here, the ambition of Return and Biolante dims quite a bit. They stick to the safer elements that they know they can easily handle. Space Godzilla is where the whole thing falls to pieces, because it's the critical mass of the budget not matching the product at all after four continuous years of these movies. While the three new suits all look great, they only get away with that because they are still using the same Godzilla suit from movies previous without any renovation or upkeep, and it shows with how damaged the suit is even in the final product. Destroyah was the one with AMBITION, but not the budget to see that ambition through. They do a lot with their limited budget, but it still betrays them more than helps. The Burning Godzilla suit is a wonder and how they made it work is fantastic, but it was almost literally a death trap and was VERY much working within the limits of their budget, and not a product of it. Still it has a great look to it, even with the whole thing barely holding together. Godzilla 2000 was made after a considerable break, though perhaps too quick for its own good. It has an excellent style to it that covers up a lot of the issues, but those issues are still very much there. After that Toho basically gave up and just ordered a new movie every year no matter what without the budget to match. Even GMK, for as good as it was, suffered mightily in the Mothra prop, which is entirely hard plastic and easily the worst Mothra prop in the franchise, and Ghidorah who looks similarly fake and plastic-y. Baragon and Godzilla stand out but no love is given to the other two. GXMG is the worst offender of the whole range though. There the production team were stuck with a Godzilla suit they despised, as the Kiryu Godzilla suit could not move or emote or really do much of anything, and they couldn't even use the GMK Godzilla suit because it was massively out of scale with Kiryu itself. They were not given enough time or money to fix the Kiryu Godzilla suit OR modify the Kiryu suit to match GMK better, and so they had to use what they had in a way that genuinely harms the final product. Basically the movies were made too fast, with too little budget, and the production costs are less forgiving now than they were in the 60s and 70s.
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Mar 2, 2018 07:50
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Does anyone have a take on which version of G2K is better (Japanese original and American re-edit)? I've read that a lot of fans swear by the American cut due to tighter editing and some other creative choices that apparently liven the film up, and I haven't seen the American cut since I was a kid so I can't compare the two.
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Mar 2, 2018 07:55
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Completely random, but I was just thinking about the bonkers version of children as written at the beginning of was it GxMG?, where they get let down when instead of the guy using magic to cook tiny food he's using super crazy futuristic micro robots. Because if there's one thing modern kids hate, it's technology.
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Mar 2, 2018 11:40
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Mecha Gojira posted:I don't think I could ever put Final Wars above Tokyo SOS or 2000. GMK is definitely reigning champion of the Millenium period, though. Final Wars is fuckin' nuts, and despite its admittedly larger budget being stretched paper thin over its convoluted premise, it's still the most visionary and stylistically idiosyncratic of the millennium movies. Kitamura does a good job of unburdening himself of the dull procedure that dogs most of the '90s and 2000s films. He's superficially inspired by the '70s films, but ultimately he takes Final Wars and escalates it into a completely different realm of absurdity. Kitamura has described it as a 'greatest hits' movie, but what he leaves out is that this is a greatest hits that includes X-Men, The Matrix, Independence Day, Star Wars, Armageddon - the 'greatest hits of Godzilla' is just an excuse for a pastiche of various peculiar generic conventions and themes that emerge across various subgenres of sci-fi and fantasy film, including space opera, dystopia, comic book films, alien invasion and disaster flicks, etc. The inside joke is that Godzilla is simultaneously subverted as not being particularly special within genre fiction, but then Godzilla comes to stand-in for this figure of emancipatory individualism, paralleled by the narrative of the protagonist Shinichi. While Godzilla has been 'retired,' or 'put on ice,' the Earth has been invaded/colonized by sci-fi fantasy tropes in the form of de-individualizing commodity. The X-ians arrive and Kitamura primarily foreshadows their invasion by depicting commodity and fan-culture - people lining up in droves to wish the aliens 'Happy Birthday,' pop stars dressing as aliens and changing their names to 'X.' Of course, nothing about the film's basic plot makes any sense: it turns out the aliens share the M-base with Gigan and the mutants, and also they have to already interact with humanity enough to produce half-alien/half-human "Kaiser" offspring? Gigan is this great, prophetic enemy of Mothra, but then he accidentally cuts his own head off? Thematically, however, this expresses that the film is a farce. The X-ians are not new, they have always been here. They do not have any particular plan - they're a very poorly organized operation that makes poo poo up as they go along. They spread their invasion psychically through commodity, the pop star giving up his (probably already fake) name for the unknown X. But at the same time, this unknown X - much like the category of "Kaiser" - is also simultaneously an expression of individualism, and is indeed precisely why the psychic invasion works, because the crisis between collective identity through consumerism and the importance of the individual is a false choice. The X-ians have always been here, blowing up their ship and killing their best monsters did nothing except 'reboot' the status quo. The X-ians are a stand-in for Toho. K. Waste fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Mar 2, 2018 |
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Mar 2, 2018 18:02
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I would love for someone to do an annotated version of Final Wars. Seriously, it's hard to go three minutes without a new reference to something coming up.
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Mar 3, 2018 00:50
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Final Wars is the Ready Player One of kaiju films.
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Mar 3, 2018 01:41
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Also there's a huge American military dude swinging a katana around. I think it's either the dad from Speed Racer or just very similar looking.
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Mar 3, 2018 03:30
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Just the idea of 'anime Godzilla' being a novelty is kind of mild now because Final Wars is already, as they say, anime as gently caress.
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Mar 3, 2018 03:40
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Kinda weird that we had two American cartoon Godzillas before an anime one. And the second Godzilla cartoon was really good.
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Mar 3, 2018 04:39
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Dylazodelan posted:Does anyone have a take on which version of G2K is better (Japanese original and American re-edit)? I've read that a lot of fans swear by the American cut due to tighter editing and some other creative choices that apparently liven the film up, and I haven't seen the American cut since I was a kid so I can't compare the two. From what I'm aware, they're really not all that different; the main reason to go for the American edit over the Japanese original is because the Japanese original is a loving bastard to find in English, whereas you can just go grab the American edit on a decentish DVD for like $5. e: yeah, the American edit doesn't lose anything too major, and while it had a bad rep for "camping up" the movie for a long time, all the changes were Toho-approved and the Japanese version's pretty goofy in the first place. Toho Kingdom, who are pretty much the Godzilla-nerd equivalent of Wookieepedia, actively suggests going for the American version because the Japanese version is paced like poo poo according to them. e2: huh, apparently the blu-ray has both cuts, so my initial point doesn't matter. I would definitely go for American, yeah. e3: while looking this up, I found out that apparently Mike Schlesinger, the guy who wrote the American script for G2000, wrote a direct sequel to G2000 that got a decent ways into pre-production, was to be directed by Joe Dante, and would have had Toho directly involved working on the technical aspects of the movie. gently caress WHY DID THAT NEVER HAPPEN. WeedlordGoku69 fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Mar 3, 2018 |
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Mar 3, 2018 04:47
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Inescapable Duck posted:Kinda weird that we had two American cartoon Godzillas before an anime one. And the second Godzilla cartoon was really good. Quite frankly, the Hanna Barbera Godzilla is equivalent to the 90s Toon Godzilla. It's just two very different standards for when they were made. The interesting thing is that the 90s Toon is kind of a rough satire and breaking down of the Hanna Barbera Godzilla. Similar cast, similar set up, though interestingly Godzilla is far more subservient in the 90s cartoon than he is in the Hanna Barbera show. This is mostly born from the fact that 90s Toon Godzilla is basically a bigger Godzooki who views Nick as his parent, while Hanna Barbera Godzilla is mostly helping the idiot humans because they watch his young for him. The key thing that separates them is that the 90s Godzilla was made at a time when Big Guy and Rusty was the norm, while HB Goji was made in the early 70s Scooby Doo era. And the reason it took so long to get an anime Godzilla is because Toho has been extraordinarily picky about who they let handle the brand. Shame they let Gen do it but whatever Also yeah the two different cuts of G2K aren't hugely different. Just go for whatever you can find.
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Mar 3, 2018 04:55
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I mean, whether you like him or not, Gen Urobuchi is one of the hottest anime writers in Japan right now and one of the very few who's honestly kind of a "name" in and of himself (the only other anime writers I'm familiar with are Mari Okada and Sho Aikawa, and the latter... not exactly for good reasons) it's not exactly a shock that Toho handed Godzilla to him
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Mar 3, 2018 05:23
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That's why I only said it was a shame Not that it was strange
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Mar 3, 2018 05:29
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Basically what anime Godzilla translates to is just more talking. See, this is why Final Wars is good. Not every potential of a medium is best expressed through pathos, sometimes you need to get willfully tasteless. If you're going to do anime Godzilla the last thing I want is a dry reboot of the old divine punishment narrative where every aspect of the story is expressed primarily through dialog. I want blood spewing from Godzilla's nose because he caught sight of a school girl's panties. I want the theme song to be "Godzilla-san" (1955, comp. Tadashi Yoshida, vocals by Takao Saeki): http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x31y792 K. Waste fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Mar 3, 2018 |
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Mar 3, 2018 06:38
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You can DO anime Godzilla without it being a piece of poo poo like the Netflix movie which just has some really awful things going on in it and ALSO without it going full tilt tasteless Shin Godzilla IS basically an anime on the other side of the spectrum. Lots of talking but it's not about the rote DIVINE PUNISHMENT bullshit it's just a bunch of over the top characters chatting each other up. Basically we've had two anime Godzilla movies and neither of them were animated.
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Mar 3, 2018 06:45
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Burkion posted:Quite frankly, the Hanna Barbera Godzilla is equivalent to the 90s Toon Godzilla. Interesting. I know zilch about the H-B Godzilla, any interesting details to it? Do they make any use of the other Kaiju or have their own stuff? 90s toon Godzilla fought a lot of interesting monsters, many of which were analogues to traditional kaiju, including a giant shapeshifter (complete with The Thing nod at the end), a giant bat that stood in for Rodan and apparently wrecked the Eiffel Tower, a giant yeti for King Kong, Antarctic iceworms and the movie Zilla resurrected with alien technology as a cyborg making a fun Mechagodzilla counterpart.
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Mar 3, 2018 06:52
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Inescapable Duck posted:Interesting. I know zilch about the H-B Godzilla, any interesting details to it? Do they make any use of the other Kaiju or have their own stuff? 90s toon Godzilla fought a lot of interesting monsters, many of which were analogues to traditional kaiju, including a giant shapeshifter (complete with The Thing nod at the end), a giant bat that stood in for Rodan and apparently wrecked the Eiffel Tower, a giant yeti for King Kong, Antarctic iceworms and the movie Zilla resurrected with alien technology as a cyborg making a fun Mechagodzilla counterpart. Oh my gently caress the poo poo H-B Godzilla had to deal with One thing to keep in mind is that H-B Godzilla was made at a time in animation where budgets, logic, coherent scripting, and any kind of any sense was possibly illegal and most assuredly frowned on. Like, for the time period, it's remarkably serious compared to its contemporaries- most of the jokes are relegated to Godzooky, who is a weird Scooby/Scrappy hybrid that still manages to be pretty competent and useful most of the time. As far as the monsters go, they didn't have the rights to do Toho beasties so they went the same kind of route that the 90s cartoon did, reinventing and re imagining them based on the archetypes. We had fire birds and other weird poo poo. There were cyborg whales, giant insects, a giant squid that looks more like Oodako than it does a squid, a 'Power Dragon' that looks a LOT like Rodan, Basically if you like weird rear end monsters and nearly mad-libs style script work, and don't mind 1970s animation, give it a whirl. It's a brilliant bit of insanity that is unjustly forgotten by most fans. Seriously the time travel episode might actually be insane.
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Mar 3, 2018 07:08
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K. Waste posted:Just the idea of 'anime Godzilla' being a novelty is kind of mild now because Final Wars is already, as they say, anime as gently caress. Final Wars has more superhero tokusatsu in its DNA than anime, I think.
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Mar 3, 2018 07:14
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I'm quite familiar with the nature of 70s cartoons. I might have to watch it one day, preferably while high. Does make me wonder, you think the MUTOs, and for that matter maybe some of the Skull Island creatures might make their way into the broader Godzilla mythos or remain something just of the Legendary franchise? Zilla got to appear but basically as a joke, but the MUTOs have really neat designs.
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Mar 3, 2018 07:15
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Mechafunkzilla posted:Final Wars has more superhero tokusatsu in its DNA than anime, I think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T35uDyMY5I Definitely.
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Mar 3, 2018 07:21
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To be fair, there's a lot of super hero tokustasu in anime. You can trace most modern genre fiction in Japan back to either Astroboy or Godzilla and both have direct links to Ultraman and Kamen Rider for a reason
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Mar 3, 2018 07:23
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Weirdly enough, Japanese Spider-Man also had a significant influence on the genre. (specifically the Power Rangers concept of a superpowered hero also having access to a giant robot for dealing with things above his weight level)
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Mar 3, 2018 10:41
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Let the MUTOs stay dead. They just looked like insect versions of the Cloverfield chicken. I want to see godzilla fight a jormungandr style sea serpent.
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Mar 3, 2018 15:54
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Reminder: the H-B cartoon song is top tier: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oTItRfN-LO8
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Mar 3, 2018 20:56
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K. Waste posted:Basically what anime Godzilla translates to is just more talking. i mean, honestly, that would sort of go too far in the other direction for me. anime silliness is most tolerable when it's kind of po-faced and sincere, not when it's just going out of its way to be as ridiculous as possible; stuff like JoJo and Mirai Nikki and the Fate franchise that trades on being utterly batshit and actually works, tends to do so because it has a consistent internal logic and plays everything with a straight face. what I want out of anime Godzilla is less "go as over-the-top and goofy as possible" and more "do cool poo poo that they wouldn't have the VFX budget for in live-action." the kaiju fights in a Godzilla anime should be loving insane, and yet the Godzilla anime we got barely has any kaiju action at all. like, take this bit from Neon Genesis Evangelion, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A89blUjT7z8 even without being wild and OTT (Eva is pretty much at the absolute most serious end of anime), this fight pretty much perfectly shows how anime's suited to making this poo poo awesome. the way EVA-01 moves through this fight is inhuman. it would be pretty much impossible to achieve with suitmation, and honestly pretty goddamn hard to do in CGI without looking crappy (they only recently figured out how to make xenomorphs look right in the Alien movies, and those have about 10 times as much money dumped into them as your average Japanese movie). if I'm watching a Godzilla anime I wanna see a loving terrifying and inhuman Godzilla that just obliterates everything in its path throwing down with other batshit insane cosmic horrors, because that's the primary benefit of doing animation over live action, you can do wilder poo poo with less money. the problem with the Godzilla anime isn't that it isn't embracing anime bullshit hard enough; it's that it's just loving uninspired.
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Mar 3, 2018 21:56
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Yeah the anime Godzilla seemed to run up hard against the "we do not actually have the resources to animate this" wall. This happens with anime a lot. What I'd like to see is a Godzilla film made with the participation of the Jim Henson Company. The technology at work even as early as The Dark Crystal or Fraggle Rock would be amazing for a Kaiju. (seriously the Gorgs had cameras in their eyes so the performers in the suits could see at their eyeline. They were totally self contained and the faces were radio controlled. Meanwhile on the Return of Godzilla BR you can see the holes in the suit's neck for the performer to look out of. It wasn't until 1993/94 that the suit's head could even move.)
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Mar 3, 2018 22:39
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Maxwell Lord posted:Yeah the anime Godzilla seemed to run up hard against the "we do not actually have the resources to animate this" wall. This happens with anime a lot. Remember the scene in Labyrinth where they fight the big door guardian robot monster thing with the axe bigger than Ludo himself? None of that was miniature work. At all. They really made up a massive gently caress off puppet to control and choreograph with the cast or their stunt doubles.
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Mar 3, 2018 23:08
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I just want a god drat movie where it's like the animated segments of Smog Monster, but, like, the whole thing is that. I don't want a glorified OVA, I want Godzilla of Sadness.
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Mar 4, 2018 00:05
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See NOW we're on the same goddamn page.
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Mar 4, 2018 02:03
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Maxwell Lord posted:What I'd like to see is a Godzilla film made with the participation of the Jim Henson Company. The technology at work even as early as The Dark Crystal or Fraggle Rock would be amazing for a Kaiju. Have you seen The Storyteller? There’s a giant Griffin in one of the tales (sadly I haven’t found a great video clip of it). Despite looking vaguely like a demonic Big Bird the overall effect is amazing and I’m sure they could whip up some insane kaiju. 
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Mar 4, 2018 15:37
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The anime godzilla movie would have been better if they had started the film with the 500m tall variant from the end of the film and gone upwards from there. Having a roar so loud it shatters the sound barrier and sends tank destroying shockwaves, a tail whip that flings a mounting slicing laser and so on would just be the baseline wackiness.
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Mar 4, 2018 17:44
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I didn't watch it, does anime Godzilla even fight other kaiju?
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Mar 4, 2018 18:16
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Mechafunkzilla posted:I didn't watch it, does anime Godzilla even fight other kaiju? It's adorable you think they even had other kaiju in the movie. The whole point of making an animated thing is to make something you could not do with a live action production. So instead of doing that, they aim lower than even the cheapest Godzilla movies and make something that's both aggressively boring and relentlessly tedious.
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Mar 4, 2018 18:19
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There'll probably be more kaiju in the second and third parts, but man, at least make a first part that stands on its own.
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Mar 4, 2018 18:28
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