Godziban Episode 17 – 「ミニラの息子」Go!Go!ゴジラくん#8 【ゴジばん】(Review)
Godziban Episode 17 – 「ミニラの息子」Go!Go!ゴジラくん#8 【ゴジばん】
aka ゴジばん
November 29, 2019
Written and directed by Hideyuki Kobayashi
It’s time! The two parter comes to the conclusion after a month of waiting! What will happen to the egg, Minya, the danger, the cliffhanger? It’s a Godziban miracle that I didn’t go insane waiting for the dramatic conclusion to this episode!
Go! Go! Godzilla-kun
It’s Egg part 2: The Eggening! At night…lightning strikes and the three Dorats appear! Yes, the Dorats who become King Ghidorah in the Heisei series have arrived, and they want the egg! As of now the egg is in Minya’s arms as they sleep through the night. The Dorats fly to Minya and use their Dorat magic to make it start floating away! Minya gives chase and manages to grab it, but the Dorats decide they can just float away the egg while Minya is holding it and he will eventually fall off. There is a lot of floating and MInya holding on for dear life (and dear life of the egg), but Minya is a tough son of a gun and holds on to the egg despite their best efforts to shake him off!
Minya refuses to give up, so the Dorats start blasting him with lightning! Poor Minya! He collapses and the Dorats move toward the egg, but the egg is too small for them to all eat so they instead just decide to leave! They fly back to the top of the cliff they appeared on and disappear!
The next morning Minya wakes up, covered in scorch marks, but the egg is still there! He takes it back to the nest, then the egg starts making noise and begins to crack for hatching. It’s baby Rodan! Rodan and Minya watch the sun rise. Godzilla-kun and Little return to check on Minya, and now they can meet the Rodan baby as well!
Hedoji
No more stargazing, back to wandering. This time the wasteland looks more grey than usual, but it might just be a trick of the darker palate they were using. The joke format is the same format as usual. Until…
Suddenly more talking is heard but with a slightly different voice for Hedoji, and Hedochi says “Wow Wow Wow!”
The cast is bigger, the Godzibanning is better, we got ourselves a real show! Plus it proved once again that Minya is the best, Minya will go through hell for his friends and just wants to love despite being the spawn of a giant anger monster. If you don’t like Minya, you are just wrong. Sorry, but it is true!
Categories: Movie Reviews Tags: dorats, Godziban, Godzilla, Godzilla Junior, Hedorah, March of Godzilla 2019, Minya, Rodan
Godziban Episode 14 – 『ゴジラ・フェス2019』ゴジばん生上演ダイジェストムービー【ゴジばん】(Review)
Godziban Episode 14 – 『ゴジラ・フェス2019』ゴジばん生上演ダイジェストムービー【ゴジばん】
aka ゴジばん
November 8, 2019
Written and directed by Hideyuki Kobayashi
There was a Godzilla Fest for the 65th birthday of Godzilla on November 3, 2019 and as part of the celebration there was a Godziban production play. This show is behind the scenes clips and portions of the final production. I can’t tell if it was a new play or if it was using the prior play architecture from the previous puppet shows they did 15-ish years ago.
The play answers one big question…THERE IS An OLD MAN GODZILLA! With a CANE!!!! A cane with a snowglobe or crystal ball on the top of it!!! This is insane and awesome! The old Godzilla is ShoGoji, the first generation Godzilla from the Showa-era 1954 original movie (hence the ShoGoji nickname you may have heard of!)
There is some subplot involving a medal coin/medallion/similar object, I am not exactly sure what was going on with it but it seemed meaningful even though it wasn’t directly involved in the egg drama. The main plot has been partially adapted already for the youtube show (though already modified to where they are different adventures!) but does involve the Big Egg on the side of a sheer cliff that we just saw in the show. This time the egg is clearly a Mothra egg, copying the coloros from the Mothra movies exactly.
The three Godzilla brothers attempt to climb the cliff as we’ve seen, except this time they fail and fall down the cliff in exaggerated play format. Eventually Godzilla-kun gets the idea to just slam his tail into the side of the cliff, which is enough to dislodge the egg so Minya an Little catch it. At this point this seems more disruptive than the skit in the series where they just go to investigate the egg and it falls out of the next via earthquake. I’m glad to that change at least.
The triplet Dorat monsters (that made King Ghidorah in the Heisei-era films!) fly by to be rude and demand the egg for themselves. Godzilla-kun fights them as Little and Minya take the egg to safety. The three Dorats are more than a match for Godzilla-kun, but then ShoGoji appears and drives them away. Not for long, as they then transform into King Ghidorah and return. The King Ghidorah puppet is truly monstrous, huge and dangerous looking. It smashes poor ShoGoji as Little and Minya scream in horror! But all is not lost, for ShoGoji then transforms himself into a gigantic Showa-era Godzilla (and is himself another massive puppet) and gives King Ghidorah a thorough thrashing.
King Ghidorah is beaten, ShoGoji transforms back to normal size and the Godzilla Brothers thank him. The egg hatches and it is the Baby Mothra we all know and love, who proceeds to say “Moshi Mosu!” again and again.
It’s bye-bye time!!!
There is also a tiny clip of Hedoji and Hedochi puppets at the end!
The play was fun as it is cool to see the origins of the show and what potential future puppets could show up. A grandpa level ShoGoji complete with fancy cane who wanders around defeating giant threats while serving as an inspiration to our heroes is a great concept. Thumbnail previews already show the Dorats will be appearing very soon on Godziban and the celebration had displays with other kaiju that should potentially appear later. Basically I need to get around to setting up the cast page, lol!
There is full version of the play someone recorded and put online. It is not a full episode of Godziban but it is related enough that you might find it interesting! It is basically the same except with all the scene transitions and the Hedoji/Hedochi jokes in the beginning of the show. It is a good way to see how the real play was set up (even if the backgrounds are just sheets instead of the more lush backgrounds the plays seemed to have from photos of the time).
Read more…
Categories: Movie Reviews Tags: dorats, Godziban, Godzilla, Godzilla Junior, Hedorah, King Ghidorah, March of Godzilla 2019, Minya
Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (Review)
Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah
aka Gojira vs. Kingu Gidora
1991
Directed and written by Kazuki Omori
Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah is the third of the Heisei series of films, and the first to include a classic Toho kaiju in a new form (other classic monsters such as Mothra and Rodan would soon arrive as well.) The big story with Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah is not the plot or the monsters or any of that jazz, but the controversy surrounding the release of the film. Back in 1991, the US was still having rough relations with Japan economically, following a period where Japan seemed to be buying up much of America at wholesale prices. Japan’s edge had started to slip at this point, and they would soon be in the middle of a decade-long recession, but fear of Japan soon controlling the world war rampant in the dimmest of bulbs, who coincidentally just happen to have radio and TV shows. They were upset over the sequence where the precursor to Godzilla, the Godzillasaurus, slaughters a bunch of US troops during World War 2. The fact that men from the future who were white also went back in time to ruin Japan economically in retaliation of Japan’s dominance was also touchy. Accusations of anti-Americanism flew wild, and Japan had to say “What the frak?” No one seemed upset over the thousands of dead Japanese people in the film, the fact a Japanese woman was one of the time travelers, a white guy was a good robot, or the fact that everyone in the future where Japan dominated hated the country and thought of them as corrupt and deserving death for their arrogance.
But talking heads are morons, so who gives a crap what they thought in 1991? All I am concerned about is if that had any decision in the delaying of release of the post-Biollante films in America. Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah did not hit the US market until at least 1996, because I bought the VHS of it while I was in college. A few bootlegs circled at conventions, but outside of the grey market you could not get a glimpse of new Godzilla for five years. Of all of the Heisei era films, I think I enjoy this one the most, largely due to the human characters not being that annoying. It was very much better than its predecessor, Godzilla vs. Biollante, which was terrible (when Godzilla wasn’t fighting the army) and featured a stupid monster that I hate. Biollante’s poor showing at the box office basically forced Toho to tell the director he is bringing back a named monster, something that happened again when GMK: Tokyo SOS director Masaaki Tezuka was forced to put Ghidorah and Mothra in a film neither had any business being in. Toho could easily avoid this by not having lame monsters like Biollante or Megaguirus, but I guess that is just too difficult. Rumors swirl that this was originally going to star King Kong in a rematch against Godzilla, but negotiations went sour.
Enough rambling, let’s get to this production! We will have the cast breakdown, and then jump into the feature
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The best special effects money can buy!
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