Godziban Episode 02 -「さよならの恋人たちの巻」かまってゴジラ#1【ゴジばん】(Review)

November 29, 2019ByTars Tarkas

Godziban Episode 02 – 「さよならの恋人たちの巻」かまってゴジラ#1【ゴジばん】

aka 「さよならの恋人たちの巻」かまってゴジラ#1【ゴジばん】 aka Gojiban aka ゴジばん【GEMSTONE ゴジラ応募作品】

August 16, 2019
Written and directed by Hideyuki Kobayashi

Episode 2 of Godziban is here and encapsulates the variant features of the show, for this week’s episode features the Kamattee Gojira skit as the main story (and then has a Hedojii bumper) Yes, which segment is featured will vary week to week, it’s pure variety, baby! Also by extreme galaxy brain reasoning, we are numbering the episodes of Godziban based on their appearance as part of the ongoing series, treating the pilot as basically episode 0. This is consistent with the numbering of the skit entries in the descriptions of the episodes on the youtube channel. (Sometimes the descriptions are just in Japanese, sometimes they have an English translation, but it is usually simple enough to figure out what it says as it usually is just a synopsis of the episode. And recently there have been more official English versions!)

Kamatte Gojira
One feature of the Kamatte Gojira series is that it is live action, but also there is a puppet there. A lady is dumped! On a walkway over traffic! And breaks the heel on her high heels! Cue So_You_Had_A_Bad_Day.mp3 to play…

The lady is in a funk, but then hears the weird noises of…Kamatte Gojira! It’s gross, so she kicks if off the walkway onto the street. Hey, animal cruelty isn’t nice, lady! Later on street level, the lady sees Kamatte Gojira hanging from a tree as she passes by, still making noises. By now she’s decided to take it home and love it, so she does!

Hedojii
We continue the same Hedojii format, but the sun is setting on the wasteland desert so there is a red glow on everything.

InMovie Reviews

Godziban Episode 01 – “We Godzilla Three Brothers! ” Go! Go! Godzilla-kun # 1 (Review)

November 27, 2019ByTars Tarkas

GODZIBAN Episode 01 – “We Godzilla Three Brothers! ” Go! Go! Godzilla-kun # 1 (Review)

aka ゴジばん

August 9, 2019
Written and directed by Hideyuki Kobayashi

It’s Godziban! Post GEMSTONE contest, Gojiban got picked up by Toho to become an official web series, and thus Gojiban continues it’s skits and expands its universe week by week! Godziban is the English name for the series, I’m not just having an attack of auto-correct here. Every episode is made up of skits, most of them multiple ones, so we’ll announce the skits as they happen.

Go! Go! Godzilla-kun
Godzilla-kun is going to train Little and Minya to be good fighting monsters. First up is breathing fire! Can the monsters shoot flames? Godzilla-kun can! Little can! Minya can….not! D’oh! Minya continues to try with encouragement but all we get is a sneeze. Minya tries once again with more effort, but all we get is a fart joke! Poor Minya.

The three monsters then head to three piles of rocks. Each monster will try to destroy their pile. Godzilla-kun blasts his pile of rocks with his breath. Little blasts the top few rocks of his pile with his breath. Minya shoots a smoke ring that does nothing to his rocks. With much effort, Minya then shoots TWO smokes rings that do nothing to his rocks. See, he doubled his effort! Minya is told to try again, and as he does, Godzilla-kun stomps on his tail. Minya then shoots dozens of smoke rings that blast all three piles of rocks and lots of random scenery. Minay is a fountain of untapped power, but still activated by callbacks to Son of Godzilla

The Godzilla brothers then look to the clouds. Minya sees a banana. Little sees grapes. They all see pineapples, strawberries, muscats, lots of fruit. This reminds them that they are hungry. So it’s time to feast on fruit!!! After eating tons of fruit, it is time to go to the mountains and shoot their flame breath into the air. They do so until the air erupts into fireworks! “Yatta!” they declare, and then say goodbye.

Hedojii
The Hedoji show will continue to follow the same format, with elder Hedoji and young Hedochi wandering a wasteland, Hedochi asking a question, Hedoji giving a big pronouncement, and Hedochi making a zinger to end the show. So far we have never seen what wasteland they are wandering. Is it just other parts of Monster Island? Is it the future, where mankind’s environmental destruction had destroyed everything and only beings made from pollution live? Are they just lost in a national park and wandering around in circles because Hedoji is too prideful to ask for directions? A mystery we may never solve.

The end credits is the Gojiban song from the pilot and will play out over all the credits for the series.

InMovie Reviews

Godziban – ゴジばん【GEMSTONE ゴジラ応募作品】 (Review)

November 25, 2019ByTars Tarkas

Godziban

aka ゴジばん aka Gojiban aka ゴジばん【GEMSTONE ゴジラ応募作品】

March 20, 2019
Written by Hideyuki Kobayashi
Directed by Hideyuki Kobayashi and Jun Shimazaki

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, 2004 in Tokyo to be precise, there was a Godzilla puppet show called Gekigoji. It was officially licensed by Toho and performed by the Koganemushi Theatrical Company. Koganemushi has produced a bunch of puppet shows featuring a variety of cute monsters and also some Ultraman shows such as this one. The Godzilla show was around 30 minutes long (according to fan lore online) and featured a variety of puppets including Godzilla, Minya, Little Godzilla, a huge King Ghidorah puppet, Gorosaurus, Mothra, Anguirus, Baragon, and Gabara. There does not appear to be an official recording of the play but pictures from the event have shows up online (largely from Koganemushi’s own website, and helped spread to the English speaking side by Monster Island Buddies)

That seemed to be the end of it until 2019 called. One of the Koganemushi people who goes on twitter as g_zanika announced he is bringing the puppets out of retirement to make a 10 minute long film for a contest. The GEMSTONE contest picked the short as the winner, and before you can say “Godzilla” they had announced there would be a new biweekly series featuring the puppets called Godziban (that’s the official English name, before that we called it Gojiban) appearing exclusively online. The series is a bunch of skits, the main one involves Godzilla-kun teaching his two brothers Little and Minya how to be great monsters. There is also a Kamatte Godzilla, where the Kamatte Godzilla from Shin Godzilla appears to women in need. A long-running short gag sequence is Hedojii, which has old man Hedoji (Hedorah as a wizened scribe) and his grandson Hedochi wandering through barren wastelands. Hedochi will ask a question which causes Hedoji to give a long answer explaining the way of things. Then it all ends on Hedochi making a joke. Go! Jet Jaguar is an animated segment where Jet Jaguar answers questions and has adventures. Moshi Mosu features two baby Mothra as they speak to each other through two cups connected by a string. These segments all have precursors in the original 10 minute video, but I am unaware if any of the material comes from the prior stage show. Gojiban has started providing English versions with their latest videos and often incorporates fan comments into the segments. there is even a comic strip version now called Godziman (Gojiman)! It is great having a new, ongoing Godzilla media project that will eventually bring all sorts of new, weird, and wonderful monster canon into the world of Godzilla.

So let’s get started, first up is the original GEMSTONE contest video!

InMovie Reviews

Scooby-Doo And The Ghoul School (Review)

November 14, 2019ByTars Tarkas

Scooby-Doo And The Ghoul School

1988
Written by Glenn Leopold
Directed by Charles A. Nichols and Ray Patterson (supervising)

I know what you are thinking. What does Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School have to do with Godzilla? Well, stick with me, dear reader, and you shall see that this is a fitting member of March of Godzilla 2019! Before we get to that, we got to get to just what the heck Scooby-Doo mystery we’ve gotten TarsTarkas.NET caught up in! Back in the day (the 1980s), Hannah-Barbera made a series of 10 animated films packaged for syndication starring some of their strongest brands, it was called the Hanna-Barbera Superstars 10 series. Scooby-Doo And The Ghoul School is the eighth film in the series and the second of three Scooby-Doo features. All of them feature actual supernatural creatures instead of guys in masks scaring away people from abandoned theme parks to cover their crimes, which paint them closer to the then-current 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo series. Further cementing the connection, Shaggy is depicted here in a red shirt like he was in that series, and the entire group is just Shaggy, Scooby, and Scrappy-Doo.

Shaggy, Scooby-Doo, and Scrappy-Doo are driving on a dark and stormy night. Wait a second…

It was a dark and stormy night. Shaggy, Scooby-Doo, and Scrappy-Doo we driving to their new job as gym teachers at a Girl’s school. Normally I’d guess they don’t do background checks and just hire anyone, but as the school turns out to be full of monsters they must have hired the only applicant.

Miss Grimwood’s Finishing School for Girls, but the “Girls” is perpetually replaced by spray-painted “Ghouls”. Miss Grimwood is a typical fussy boarding school headmistress except for the fact she is a witch and thus does witch stuff. She’s assisted mainly by a floating hand and her small pet dragon Matches. There is also an octopus butler who I don’t think is ever named. Most importantly, there is a two headed shark that lives in the moat outside the school! Scooby-Doo beat The Asylum to the punch by decades! A running gag in the film is all the food at the Ghoul School is gross and spooky (thus Shaggy and Scooby can’t pig out at all in this movie!), and much of it is cooked by Miss Grimwood. We got a whole garden of rotten fruit, fungus fudge, toadstool tea, poison ivy punch, caterpillar cookies, and swamp brownies (made from swamp water and mosquitoes!)

InMovie Reviews

Recommended! Godzilland – Learning Subtraction (Review)

August 26, 2019ByTars Tarkas

Recommended! Godzilland – Learning Subtraction

aka すすめ！ゴジランド aka ゴジラと遊ぼう aka Let’s Play With Godzilla

1994

Well, if you gotta learn addition, I guess you gotta learn subtraction. Multiplication and division, sorry you are out of luck! But never give up hope that some random thing will pop up from who knows where! Unproduced scripts, story boards, a new generation of Godzilland merchandise with altered character designs but a budget for more topics. The future is full of endless possibilities, the only subtraction is your limited life span.

This is an episode from the second batch of edutainment Godzilland shorts, thus it has the expanded cast and live action wraparounds with Godzilla and the Big Sister lady. Please make sure you check out the full character breakdown and the other Godzilland episodes in this series.

Now don’t be frakken, watch some Gakken! Sing Godzilland theme song!

Live-action human sized Godzilla has made some cakes, but there isn’t enough strawberries for the amount of cakes. 6 cakes minus 4 strawberries equals two cakes left over with no strawberry adornments. This knowledge impresses the lady, who realizes he learned this on Godzilland and also brings up his girlfriend back then, Gojirin, which is embarrassing for Godzilla. Lady demands more knowledge about Gojirin, so Godzilla shares that she loves fruit.

We cut live to an animated flashback of Godzilland, where cartoon Godzilla is bringing an armload of oranges to share with Gojirin. Gojirin is watering her plants and assumes all the oranges are for her and is so happy, scarfing them all down. Godzilla is a bit shocked that he doesn’t get any oranges, but he’s seriously been a jerk this whole series to its good he’s now forced to be nice even if it is against his will.

InMovie Reviews

Recommended! Godzilland – Learning Addition (Review)

August 8, 2019ByTars Tarkas

Recommended! Godzilland – Learning Addition

aka すすめ！ゴジランド aka ゴジラと遊ぼう aka Let’s Play With Godzilla

1996

Gakken is backken and in the meantime they got a new logo! After the two year gap, Godzilland was revamped and retooled. There is a different theme song performed by a lady! But more importantly, the show has more kaiju kid characters! Joining the Godzilland team are Gigan, Moguera, and Mechagodzilla! Mechagodzilla looks like 1970s Mechagodzilla, not the 90s Mechagodzilla, which is a weird aesthetic choice but maybe they didn’t like the new monster being cartoonified so much. Let’s not forget the wholly original character – a female Godzilla! This one is pink with hearts for the spinal ridges, and her name is Gojirin! Gojirin is just adding a female suffix to Gojira, and is equivalent to calling her Godzilly in English, thus that has become her unofficial English name. And the show now has live-action segments where Godzilla tells stories to a human lady, both of them being the same size! We’re really tripping balls here for this new series and it is amazing!

The best part is all of this is canon now, baby! You can’t uncanon this, it exists, Godzilla had a girlfriend and has a human lady friend and couldn’t do math or read due to having no real parents, which is why he’s a good dad to all his adopted kids he’s picked up over the years. This is the truest of truths. Be sure to check out the cast list page for Godzilland!

Godzilla is making pancakes for his lady friend, who is impressed that he can use the power of addition to tell how many pancakes he has made. Godzilla enjoys regaling her with tales of his youth, so today he’s gonna tell her (and us!) about how he learned addition. It is not entirely clear what the nature of their relationship is, so I just call her his lady friend while he seems to call her something like “Big Sister”, so I guess she is a friend that is like family? A nanny? A nurse caretaker due to a chronic medical condition that we are not aware of due to the short length of the series? Could it have to due with Godzilla’s propensity to eat all sorts of terrible food? Is Godzilla going to die of a heart attack at an early age because he won’t eat a salad? Damn it, Godzilla, pull yourself together, man! But I digress…

A long long time ago on Godzilland…

Mechagodzilla’s peaceful flight around Godzilland is spoiled when he spies Godzilla and Anguirus having an argument that turns into a physical altercation. These boys do nothing but cause problems! Mechagodzilla marvels that such good friends are good enough friends to fight each other, which sounds like a very mature view until the episode continues and we see it is a very immature view that just lucked into sounding more philosophical than it is.

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