60 Years of Godzilla Part I
Godzilla, King of the Monsters: the first 60 years of destruction in title cards.
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I love how GFW is the only Toho movie with a completely-English title. It just fits.
Beautiful.
Anonymous asked:
Do you have any plans or ideas regarding Whoofy's mother?
My story logic for that was in this panel:
I liked the idea that the various sons of Godzilla through the years (Minya, Godzilla Jr., Baby, Godzooky) seemingly sprung fully formed from the big G’s head. There was never a mention of a mother, or even another Godzilla-type monster. Certain alternate versions of Godzilla (notably SpaceGodzilla) were also formed by something like his blood hitting something in space and spawning the creature.
There’s also something slightly seedy about the phrasing “my DNA fell into that volcano”, though I can’t remember if I intended it at the time.
Anonymous asked:
I think it's safe to say you're having a blast parodying Minya/Minilla from the 60s movies. Do you have any thoughts about his return in "Godzilla: Final Wars" and his sub-plot? What about Godzilla's son from the 90s movies?
Here’s a confession: I haven’t seen Final Wars yet. Yikes. I’d already seen an awful lot of monster movies before Kaijumax, but now that I’m working on this series, I’ve been trying to fill in the gaps, and I’m making an effort to be very broad in my approach (that is, watch a few Ultramans, a few Kamen Riders, a few Super Sentais, a few Gameras, a few Godzillas…) and that’s one I haven’t gotten to yet. But to answer your question, once I do see it, I very likely will incorporate that into the story.
I like the Godzilla Jr. in Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla, designwise, but he and “Baby” from one of the Millennium MechaGodzillas are pretty boring to me, since they seem to end up being targets or helpless things without much to do. Obviously, I like to draw references from everywhere if I can, but I haven’t had much luck with them so far.
Anonymous asked:
Does Ape-Whale love his son regardless of his tough exterior? How would he react to Whoofy getting in serious danger?
I don’t know. He’s kind of a jerk. I like to think of him as being maybe one step beyond how Godzilla treats Minya; he wouldn’t let him die, but he’s not going to go out of his way to protect him much (it’s that questionable ‘tough love’ stuff).
MINI-MILLENNIUM GODZILLA
I’ve started to do some sketches, some requested, some not, but all monsters.
GOJIRA aka GODZILLA (1954)
Note: Due to an error, the full version of this review did not appear in KAIJUMAX Season 3 #2. Here it is:
Though not by any means the first giant monster movie, Gojira, directed by Ishiro Honda and featuring the monster creations of Eiji Tsuburaya, distinguished itself by moving away from the crisp stop-motion effects of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms from the previous year and instead creating an emotional story not unlike that of 1933’s King Kong, now updated to the atomic age. Using Gojira’s attack as a reflection of the all-too-recent atomic warfare of WWII, as well as a not-subtle reference to the Lucky Dragon no. 5 fishing boat that was caught in the fallout of the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests, the film captured the paranoia and panic of disasters that humans should have seen coming.
A straightforward disaster-response movie in some respects, Gojira cleverly triangulates its characters around the titular monster: a soft-hearted biologist who wishes to spare Gojira and study him, his haunted colleague, Serizawa, who knows he has the weapon to kill the monster but fears what the governments of the world would do with it if they knew of its existence, Serizawa’s frequently terrified fiancee, a brave salvage fisherman, and, in the English version, an American newspaperman played by Raymond Burr who seems to know a lot of these characters’ body doubles. In a rare feat, the English Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a very different but almost as good counterpart to the classic original. Where Gojira has a great deal of political maneuvering, disaster coverup, musings on what science could make of such a creature, and a maudlin love triangle leading to Dr. Serizawa’s selfless sacrifice, King of the Monsters is more of a voyage of journalistic discovery, ending with a truncated and much more optimistic final scene in which the danger has been permanently eliminated and “the whole world could wake up and live again.”
Besides setting up what was to become one of the longest-running movie franchises of all time, Gojira was the first to make explicit its portrayal of a rampaging creature as representing vague existential threats to humanity (variously: nuclear war, ecological collapse, nature’s fury, etc.), and gave the human characters a darker undertone to what before had been largely a lot of running, screaming, and looking on in bafflement. Though the version westerners saw at the time was simpler and less dark, and let humanity off the hook for all of its war- and ecology-related missteps, it nevertheless gave a deep sense of menace that would continue in the series for about one film before they said “screw it, kids love Godzilla” and made him dance.
Though my tastes in monster movies typically run more to the absurd, Gojira is a undeniably beautiful film, with emotional dialogue scenes, lavishly shot miniatures, deliberate pacing, and an indelible new archetype: a monster who could become cinema’s catch-all metaphor for each decade’s deadliest new global threat.
Anonymous asked:
Does that bird kaiju that saves Whuffy have a name? So loyal.
He was meant to be an old ally along the lines of Rodan, but made into a bird both in order to differentiate him from Rodan and because I already have a pteranodon character (Giant Monster Terongo, Terror of Pago Pago). I think I named him “Birdogon” in my notes.
In addition, Kaijumax color assistant Jason Fischer suggested I make his cry of pain into “Wark” to suggest a kinship to the chocobos from Final Fantasy. I’m nothing if not open to more dumb references to pop culture monsters, so in it went, as his dying bleat.
RIP Birdogon.
Anonymous asked:
Does that bird kaiju that saves Whuffy have a name? So loyal.
zandercannon answered:
He was meant to be an old ally along the lines of Rodan, but made into a bird both in order to differentiate him from Rodan and because I already have a pteranodon character (Giant Monster Terongo, Terror of Pago Pago). I think I named him “Birdogon” in my notes.
In addition, Kaijumax color assistant Jason Fischer suggested I make his cry of pain into “Wark” to suggest a kinship to the chocobos from Final Fantasy. I’m nothing if not open to more dumb references to pop culture monsters, so in it went, as his dying bleat.
RIP Birdogon.
The panel in question.
timetraveller4242-blog asked:
Are there any beloved and unquestionably "good" Kaiju in the Kaijumax universe? Y'know, like "Rebirth" series Mothra (or really Mothra in general) or "Friend To All Children" Gamera?
There will be major references to Mothra and to Gamera in upcoming seasons (seasons 3 and 4, respectively), but the “goodness” of these characters will be highly questionable.
One of the things that I like about taking the prison drama template is that the goodness and badness of a character are all situational, and that we are forced to find little snippets of things we like and don’t like about every character as we go. So I’m afraid we won’t find much in the way of “good” characters, but I hope we find some flawed but likable ones along the way.
So in addition to a Kaiju Movie Review (Hint: Honda + Minya) the Kaijumail section of Kaijumax includes these little tidbits… Now to figure out how to describe a kaiju that looks like me so I can show up in the background….
Accepted!
iamoutofideas
