This post will be a little different from my previous few.
I haven’t watched my next movie yet, and that’s partially because I had some folks show interest in watching it with me, so you know, schedules and shit. Daigoro vs. Goliath is definitely next. Mainly because I’m 3 reviews in, and haven’t even touched the rich veins of camp and cheese that run through this genre. That’s okay though, because there’s a whole bunch of other giant monster shit to talk about! Come on and slam and welcome to the jam!
So they announced that Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah will be in the next two Godzilla movies! Yeah! YEEEEAAAAH!!
Yes, I am playing with meme generators for the first time. Just enjoy the thought of Doakes’ voice coming out of Mothra.
Turbo boners were popped by all (yes, even the ladies… especially the ladies), but after everybody shat bricks, Legendary was sure to chime in and clarify that they didn’t necessarily mean they’d all be in both sequels. Which I’m actually happy to hear, because jamming all three of those guys into Godzilla 2 would be a narrative nightmare. I’m hoping Godzilla 2 is mostly Mothra vs. Godzilla and then it teases Rodan and Ghidorah for part 3. The third one of course being when everybody teams up to run a train on Ghidorah’s scaly golden b-hole. Even with a three-on-one battle, it won’t be as upsetting as the gangbang Ghidorah suffers at the climax of Destroy All Monsters.
“Stop! Stop! He’s already dead!”
While I’m super-duper psyched to see Godzilla’s three best monster friends get the Legendary treatment, I’ll be a little sad to say goodbye to original monsters. The MUTOs were pretty cool! Maybe they’ll sneak new monsters into Godzilla 2 or 3? If Godzilla 2 and 3 make enough money maybe we’ll see more sequels, and maybe those sequels will mix rookie monsters with old pros? Whatever man, we got Mothra! MOTHRA!
The face of cataclysmic atomic death is fluffy and rainbow-colored.
It’s welcome news, but not a big shocker either. What is a big shocker is that King Kong has a new movie on the way! Well, sort of. It’s a “feature film based on the famed Skull Island, the cinematic origins of another classic beast King Kong.” So on one hand I’m glad it’s not just another remake, but on the other hand, a lot of prequels are real clunkers. Some rule though, so here’s hoping Kong’s will too. Legendary’s all gung-ho about it, with a release date (November 4, 2016) already set. Hopefully they have something great up their sleeves. It could be really fun to see Kong rise up and establish his dominance over the freakish denizens of Skull Island. Maybe he battles some bizarre creature we’ve never seen in previous Kong movies, because it’s already long dead by they time the protagonists step foot in Kong Country.
Maybe it’s this thing.
Perhaps even more importantly though… King Kong and Godzilla will both be under the Legendary banner. I’m not going to get my hopes up, because 2014’s Godzilla is a joint venture between Legendary and Warner Bros., and the Skull Island movie is undoubtedly a joint effort between Legendary and Universal, but maybe, just maybe, this could lead to a remake of one of my favorite monster mashes:
From Justin to Kelly.
YASSS. I love the old monster movies just the way they are, but this is the biggest, baddest match-up ever, and the movie came out before Toho had fully perfected their Godzilla formula. It almost feels like a dry run for the follow-up, Mothra vs Godzilla, which is widely regarded as one of the very best Godzilla movies. Toho tried to remake King Kong vs Godzilla in 1991, but Turner Entertainment (Kong’s owners at the time) supposedly wanted a million bucks for his likeness. Toho tried to weasel out of Turner’s crazy licensing fee by having Godzilla fight a revamped Mechanikong instead, but Turner called shenanigans on that. Apparently Turner loves money and hates awesome ideas.
Toho should have been more respectful to Teddy Jr., I guess.
To be fair though, I don’t think a modern audience would get onboard with King Kong inexplicably being:
A. Alive to fight Godzilla, since he, you know, died in 1933.
B. Actually being big enough to hold his own against Godzilla. Godzilla’s like 300 feet tall. Kong’s usually about 30.
You can get away with shit like that in a 60s goofball fantasy adventure, but probably not so much in a modern monster thriller. Which is a bummer.
Stick-in-the-mud internet logic police be damned, I want the 200 million dollar version of this!
Speaking of Godzilla, Namco Bandai announced a new Godzilla video game! It’s coming out this winter! For Playstation 3. And possibly only in Japan. It looks all right, here’s a trailer. I’m a big video game fan, and (surprise!) a big Godzilla fan, so my hype level might seem uncharacteristically low. And it’s because Godzilla games have been a… mixed bag in the past. For every one of these:
There’s like two or three of these:
This really is from a Godzilla game. Godzilla 2: War of the Monsters. This is what the majority of the game looks like. You play as the military. In a Godzilla game. That’s like being a police dispatcher in Grand Theft Auto.
Like a lot of video games based on licensed properties, Godzilla games generally range between unplayable garbage and pretty good. This new one looks to fall somewhere in that range. The trailer and promotional material focus on the early 90s version of Godzilla (one of my personal favorite suits), but ’14 Godzilla and the early 00s version of Mechagodzilla (nicknamed “Kiryu” for reasons unknown) have been revealed too, and they all look pretty slick. That trailer makes it seem like the game will focus on city destruction (kind of like the Godzilla Generations games for Dreamcast), but some of the Mechagodzilla screenshots show some lilke… bars and meters and numbers and shit that hint at some monster on monster brawling. Hopefully it makes more sense than Super Godzilla‘s inscrutable nonsense fighting:
The only way to win is to pull the cartridge out and play Earthworm Jim 2 instead.
In related news, the Kaijuland version of Kaiju Combat just hit Steam. Kaiju Combat is a Kickstarter project fronted by Simon Strange, one of the main brains behind three of the best and most recent Godzilla games. I threw some dough at it, mostly because I like the idea of more giant monster video games existing. Kaijuland Battles features four different colorful, cartoony creatures you can fight as. It’s definitely a modest project, but it’ll be interesting to see how well it plays. The full version of the game, with a less cartoony tone and a larger monster gallery is set to release in about a year.
It’s early, but it looks the Roman shower mechanics are spot-on.
Last but definitely not least, the Rifftrax guys (formerly Mystery Science Theater 3000) are going to shred the 1998 “Godzilla” live tomorrow night! Some friends and I checked out their last live show where they riffed Sharknado and it was a ton of fun. If you have a theater in your area broadcasting it, I super recommend it. Considering I’ll be watching it tomorrow, I might actually end up doing my review of 1998 Godzilla before I get to Daigoro vs Goliath.
According to Google image search, this Daigoro is more famous than the fat hippo monster Daigoro. Cool haircut kid, but what giant monsters have you ever fought?
That’s it for now, I leave you with this:
MONSTERS CONQUER THE WORLD 
