🐲🎧 Monsters Conquer the World Podcast is back for more Godzilla (but it’s only Godzilla if it comes from the Godzilla region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling kaiju)! This time we’re digging in to 1972’s Godzilla vs. Gigan, a wacky tag-team rock ’em sock ’em epic about a cartoonist, weaponized corn, and a misbegotten amusement park!
Hit up your favorite podcast app to listen in or just smack this link-a-rino^
Obviously there was no way in hell kid-me could ever resist box art that fucking radical. Weirdly handsome dino-monster with a mouthful of big-ass fangs? CHECK. City-enveloping explosions? CHECK. Bitchin’ fighter jets screaming into said photogenic monster’s face? CHECKITY-CZECH, SON.
15. Least favorite Gamera movie
????????
I love that this Kaijuly challenge has lots of Gamera questions, but my brain can’t parse out strings that have “least” “favorite” and “Gamera” in the same sentence. Even when Gamera is bad, it’s still pretty great. There are a few different entries you can make arguments for, but I’ve never been able to make the charges stick. I went into it in a little more detail during the 30 Days of Gamera challenge last year.
16. Favorite non-Godzilla Toho kaiju
Mothra
This is always a tough question, especially since I’m not sure if “non-Godzilla” means “any Toho kaiju other than Godzilla” or “any Toho kaiju not featured in the Godzilla series.” I’m assuming it’s the former rather than the latter, but even if it’s the latter this still kinda works (since Mothra got her start in a solo movie and had her own spin-off series later in life).
The Toho kaiju canon has so many rad creatures it’s always tough to pick or rank faves, but Mothra is such an iconic character for monster cinema at large (PUNS!) that I can’t deny her. She’s a perfect foil for Godzilla, she’s visually astonishing, she has a fully developed and unique personality, she brought colorful whimsy to the genre in a way that felt perfectly natural and expanded the tonal/emotional scope of kaiju fiction… Mothra is BAE forever and ever.
Runner-up: Minya How can this be? Shouldn’t this be switched?!?! While I love the fucking shit out of my main man Minya (and the good he did for the Godzilla series), I think he owes his existence to Mothra injecting kaiju cinema with a healthy dose of wonder and fantasy. Minya’s my spirit animal, but I don’t think he would have made it to the silver screen without Mothra’s careful guidance. Much love to both of these goobers.
17. Favorite Gamera battle
Gamera vs. Jiger
Honestly that gif should be explanation enough, right? In my 30 Days of Gamera post on the topic, I called Gamera vs. Jiger the Ron Swanson vs. Tammy of kaiju. If you don’t know what that means, pleasetreat yo’ self to every episode of Parks and Recreation. If for some reason you don’t have time to watch every episode of the best live action sitcom since Frasier (HOT TAKE), Gamera vs. Jiger takes the cake for me because they spend the running time of the movie doing increasingly horrific things to each other. Ending with, you know, Gamera spearing Jiger through the fucking skull with an ancient artifact:
This is the best genre in the universe.
Runner-up: Gamera 3: The Revenge of Iris I love Gamera fights because of “gags”: not necessarily jokes, but little set-piece moments that happen within fights. Like Jiger’s brain getting lanced up above! One of the best Gamera gags of all time happens in G3:
MOTHER. FUCKING. PLASMA. FIST.
In a surprising parallel to Evil Dead II, Gamera “loses” his hand, and out of desperation elects to do some gruesome self-surgery. After he explodes his own hand off, he looks at the stump, looks at Iris still going strong, says “Fuck it!” and blasts his stump with fire again creating a FIRE HAND that he punches straight into Iris’ stinking fucking guts.
Say it with me gang: “THIS IS THE BEST GENRE IN THE UNIVERSE.” Original “HOLY SHIT PLASMA FIST FOREVER” post here.
Gonna steal a page from @namesisfortombstones‘ book and go with the man turtle himself, Gamera! He may have started off as the Go-Bots to Godzilla’s Transformers, but he quickly forged his own persona and his movies garnered a vibe all their own. A giant Atlantean, fire-breathing, flying, tusked turtle that’s a friend to all children? Hell yes. Starring in wacky monster-brawl movies with goofed-out, kid-accessible plotlines and gonzo monster gore? HELL YES.
Runner-up: Guiron Did you see my 30 Days of Gamera posts last year? Like half of my answers were Guiron. Guiron’s the shit. Giant knife-headed guard-dog alien dinosaur that shoots shurikens out of his temples and sliced Space Gyaos into cold cuts while chuckling evilly. Guiron rules.
11. Favorite movie case cover from a kaiju film
Impossible to answer?
I’ve honestly never really thought about this before, thank you Kaijuly! I find this one impossible to answer because kaiju movies have so many different releases and they all seem to have different art. I’m a big fan of the original Japanese movie posters, which get used for some home video releases, but I also like the original artwork created for others. Even more fascinating are the covers that straight up lie to you about the content of the movie. There has never been a Gamera vs. Godzilla movie, so what the hell is the case above advertising? I’ve seen kaiju movie packaging falsely promise King Kong, Godzilla, Gamera, Frankenstein, and even Superman in movies where they are nowhere to be found. It’s absolutely bullshitty, but it’s also kind of hilarious in its brazenness. Even better, it’s really fun to imagine what those crazy cross-over movie mash-ups would actually be like.
If you don’t have the only Godzilla film not officially released on DVD in the U.S. and are hard-pressed to find a decent copy or aren’t in the know about where to find one (or haven’t seen it PERIOD), I present BOTH the original Japanese version, The Return of Godzilla, and its heavily altered U.S. version, Godzilla 1985, as decent bitrate SD x264 .mkvs with a bevy of good audio options and foreign language dubs.
You’ll probably need a decent video player like VLC or MPC-HC for these, and MKVMerge GUI if you want to add more audio options to the Japanese version.
Technical information:
Video sources and specifications:
Toho BD (The Return of Godzilla, x264 @ 1950kbps, 720x460,
23.976023p)
rustybottlecap
