Outerman is Outta Sight

When Toku first launched in 2017, it seemed like a cruel joke: an obscure cable channel broadcasting Ultraman shows never before available in English. Each new season they acquired was accompanied by a triumphant press release... and each failed to turn up anywhere online. But 2018 brought the launch of a Toku streaming service, along with the acquisition of several older Ultra Series that Crunchyroll lost the rights to. I signed up in October during their $1.99-a-month-for-9-months sale, and promptly discovered a tokusatsu film they hadn't announced: Minoru Kawasaki's Outerman (2015).

Outerman passed the English-speaking tokusatsu fandom by; you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who talked about it besides the omnipotent Kevin Derendorf. Given Kawasaki's previous works in the genre and its lack of subtitles until now, this is not terribly surprising. Here's the real surprise: Outerman is a fine-tuned Ultraman parody, overcoming rickety production values with a clever premise that never loses steam.

Kaiju Legend Ishiro Honda Meets the Legends of Tomorrow

When TV shows about time travel bring in historical figures, they tend to pick names the average viewer will instantly recognize: your JFKs, your H.G. Wellses, your Rosa Parkses. So I was quite surprised to learn that an episode of Legends of Tomorrow, "Tagumo Attacks!!!", was going to feature Eijiro Ozaki as director Ishiro Honda, a legend to kaiju fans and few others. I figured a CW superhero show would favor dramatic storytelling over historical accuracy, and it certainly did. The curious thing is that the episode would have really been onto something if it had focused on one of Godzilla's other Founding Fathers.

The Oldest Godzilla is New Again

This weekend, Godzilla celebrated his 64^th birthday by looking towards the past and the future. Godzilla: The Planet Eater, his latest epic, premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival, while a replica of the suit from his first film stomped around Godzilla Fest 2018 in Hibiya. Normally, the former would be much bigger news than the latter, but the first two entries in Polygon Pictures’ animated trilogy have already turned off many a fan, and it turns out that suit wasn’t just for photo ops. A trailer screened at the Fest, already making the rounds on social media, shows it razing a modern tokusatsu set. The end product is a short film which will debut at the Eiji Tsuburaya Museum on its opening day, January 11^th. Godzilla’s target is Sukagawa, the famed special effects director’s hometown.

Kaiju Mono Can't Quite Make the Pin

The worst part of being an American kaiju fan is the waiting. With the exception of Crunchyroll’s Ultraman simulcasts (may they rest in peace), every new offering from Japan takes months or even years to wash up on our shores—and spoilers can strike at any moment. The latest, Kaiju Mono, took over two years to arrive in the States and saw its Blu-ray release by Section23 repeatedly delayed for two months. Fortunately, in this age of yearly Hollywood kaiju blockbusters, not many people cared, so I went into it virtually blind. (If you want the same experience, skip the fourth paragraph.) The trailer didn’t give away much, focusing on pro wrestlers Kota Ibushi and Minoru Suzuki fighting an ornate kaiju in briefs.

The last Minoru Kawasaki movie to get an English-friendly release, Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit, caught a lot of flack for its lack of action. Local kyodai hero Take-Majin didn’t wake up until the end, while Guilala’s rampage across Japan used a remarkable amount of stock footage from the decades-old The X from Outer Space. Weak political satire filled the void. This time, Mono (Hiroyuki Taniguchi) melts tanks, terrorizes Shibuya, and takes on Ibushi and Suzuki in no less than three bouts. Kaiju fights have long featured wrestling moves, but having experienced wrestlers actually execute them is another thing entirely. Mono, constrained by suitmation, mostly gets by with electrified strikes and poison fog. It’s great fun.

Does all this dynamic violence make for a better movie? Well, sort of. For the first forty minutes, Kaiju Mono is a fine throwback. Kawasaki packs in every stock character he can think of: the disgraced scientist (Ryu Manatsu), the scientist’s beautiful daughter (Miki Kawanishi), the naive lab assistant (Syuusuke Saito), the reporter (Kikurin), the military men (Bin Furuya and Eiichi Kikuchi), the mystic (Shinzo Hotta), the biologist (Takumi Tsutsui). There’s ominous pronouncements and nonsense science aplenty, plus composer Ryo Nakamura channeling Masaru Sato at his jazziest. Ibushi enters the picture when the scientist shanghais his lanky assistant into taking a dose of his greatest invention, Setupp X Cells. Forget making him a man in just seven days—this injection does it in seconds. With a blizzard of wrestling moves, he sends Mono packing and becomes an instant celebrity.

Redman: The Kaiju Hunter Will Steal/Carve Out Your Heart

Something weird happened in 2016. No, besides that. I meant on Tsuburaya Productions’ YouTube channel. Ultraman’s 50th anniversary was on its way, but all they seemed to post was this weirdo in a cheap-looking superhero costume fighting even cheaper-looking kaiju. After a few terrific pieces of fanart crossed my Tumblr dashboard, I decided to give it a watch.

That was all it took. From April to October, Redman had me -- and many other tokusatsu fans -- in his grip. Like the kaiju who kept coming back no matter how many times he stabbed them, his show had found new life 44 years after it ended. We gifed, drew, theorized, roleplayed, cosplayed, filmed. Though the whole series had been released on LaserDisc in 1996, it felt like it had been discovered in someone’s attic after they mysteriously vanished. There was no context for anything that was happening, just endless brawls in the middle of nowhere, set to music that oscillated between chipper and eerie and approximately five sound effects. The idea that this originally aired as part of a “children’s variety show” was as unbelievable as Tsuburaya’s claims that Redman was a hero. To any clear-eyed viewer, he was nothing less than a kaiju slasher… except he always won.

Tsuburaya has yet to launch any live-action projects with Redman in the wake of his unexpected resurgence, despite having a new suit ready to go. Fortunately, they’ve joined with Phase Six and Night Shining to publish something even better: a graphic novel written and illustrated by Matt Frank and colored by Goncalo Lopes. With Volume 1 of Redman: The Kaiju Hunter, they’ve unlocked the character’s hidden potential, while teasing even stranger stories to come.

Such Terrible Destruction: Destroy All Monsters in America

Fifty years ago, Toho tried to end the Godzilla series on a high note. Destroy All Monsters brought the King of the Monsters and ten kaiju co-stars to the brink of the 21st century, threw alien invaders and gun-toting astronauts into the mix, and invited viewers around the world to enjoy the ensuing mayhem. Director Ishiro Honda, special effects supervisor Eiji Tsuburaya, and composer Akira Ifukube reunited for one last adventure, with a straightforward, action-packed script by Honda and Takeshi Kimura. Though the film failed to turn a profit, at least in Japan, Godzilla soldiered on, enduring ever-dwindling budgets for six more entries until going on hiatus.

Today, its shoot-for-the-moon approach has earned it a sterling reputation in the Western fandom; the most recent G-Fan readers’ poll in 2014 ranked it third in the series, behind the original Godzilla and Mothra vs. Godzilla. Even factoring in non-Godzilla movies, its 8.3 rating was only equaled or surpassed by the Heisei Gamera trilogy, the original King Kong, and Rodan.

G-Fan didn’t provide demographic breakdowns for its respondents, but I’d wager the best ratings for Destroy All Monsters came from the people fortunate enough to catch it in theaters. For a Monster Kid in 1969, chasing TV airings and Famous Monster of Filmland issues for more exposure to those beasts from the East, few thrills could be greater than seeing so many of them on the screen at once, tearing the world apart. It was the Avengers: Infinity War of its day, requiring thorough knowledge of the Toho oeuvre to recognize all the returning kaiju. The rare fan who didn’t discover at least one new kaiju watching the film would had to have seen Gigantis the Fire Monster (1959), Varan the Unbelievable (1962), Atragon (1965), Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster (1965), Frankenstein Conquers the World (1966), King Kong Escapes (1968), and Son of Godzilla (1969) first, or have the aforementioned Famous Monsters of Filmland fill in the gaps. Small wonder that G-Fan’s Destroy All Monsters issue (July/August 1999, natch) dedicated five pages to first-viewing memories.

I’m about half the film’s age, and while I still haven’t seen it in theaters yet, I remember my first viewing too. A bootleg tape loomed large in my Easter basket of either 2003 or 2004, and I immediately raced downstairs to watch the whole thing. I don’t know why Dad didn’t opt for one of A.D.Vision’s official releases, but years later I would find myself glad that he did. That a fullscreen, faded bootleg could provide a better experience than a licensed product is a microcosm of how bizarre and unfortunate Destroy All Monsters’ treatment in the U.S. has been since it left theaters. Only King Kong vs. Godzilla (Japanese version still unreleased) and The Return of Godzilla (American version banished indefinitely to VHS and LaserDisc, Japanese version unreleased until 2016) have suffered more.

Ultraman and (More) Godzilla Coming to Netflix

No, I didn't forget about this blog! A few factors are responsible for the month-long drought: preparing for my G-Fest panel, working on a massive Miki Saegusa article... and the general lack of news. G-Fest is still a week away and I don't know exactly when I'll be done with Miki, but Netflix has taken care of the third problem.

Five Things We Know About Godzilla vs. Kong, and One Thing We Don't

With the first round of casting announcements for Godzilla vs. Kong finally here, I figured it’s time to recap the morsels of information we’ve been provided so far and speculate on what they might mean. In listicle form!

So You Want to Make a Godzilla Cinematic Universe, Again

Last week, Nikkei Style interviewed Toho’s Chief Godzilla Officer, Keiji Ota, about the future of the franchise. Ota, who surely has the coolest job title in the world, revealed a few of the company’s plans; by the far the biggest was a new cinematic universe to begin after 2021. Godzilla will be at its center, of course, but spinoff movies for other monsters are on the table as well.

The Godzilla '98 Production Reports

I don't really have anything fresh to say about Godzilla (1998), the TriStar anomaly celebrating its 20th birthday today. As a Godzilla movie, I think it's the worst in the series; as a monster movie, it's still pretty bad. What I do have is a promotional CD for Godzilla: Online, released as a collaboration between EON Magazine and Taco Bell. The game demo is inaccessible, but there's more to see on this ancient disc.

For me, the highlight is eight "G-Mails" -- newsletters about the production of the film that you could subscribe to through the film's official website. Since they didn't seem to be anywhere online, I took the liberty of retyping them for your entertainment, with a huge assist from an OCR program. They're very conversational, very cheesy, and very in-depth about what goes into movie-making while concealing this particular movie's plot. It seems that the emails continued after this CD was released; if you somehow held onto those, let me know.

Season 2 of Kong: King of the Apes Gets Stranger, Remains Dull

Arad Animation and 41 Entertainment announced Kong: King of the Apes in 2014, with a premise that seemed tailor-made to geek site headlines. The Eighth Wonder of the World would be fighting robot dinosaurs in San Francisco circa 2050, a fugitive from justice thanks to the machinations of the scientist who created them. The 13-episode first season premiered on Netflix in early 2016, but I doubt most fans of the character made it through episode one. The CG animation was mediocre, the dialogue seemed to have been written by a predictive text generator for action-adventure cartoons, and its tame, jetpack-wearing Kong was unrecognizable. I watched all of it for two reasons: because, as previously established, I am a masochistic, completionist dolt, and because of Botila.

I envision a scenario in which a brave, principled screenwriter hacked into the computer responsible for cranking out this show’s scripts, but only had time to change one character. Botila is out of sync with Kong: King of the Apes in the best ways possible. She’s an android created by the human villain who barely tolerates him, heckling his schemes and always on the brink of declaring herself the leader of the Decepticons. (In the last episode, she finally shoves him off a cliff.) It’s not an exaggeration to say she gets all the best lines either. So my interest was piqued when the Season 2 trailer suggested she would be the main antagonist.

Mako Mori's Death by Committee

Before Legendary Pictures released Pacific Rim Uprising, I joked to my friends that I would walk out of the theater if Mako Mori died. Well, I wussed out when that horrible moment came, but know this: I walked out in spirit. When Mako’s helicopter went down, my hopes of enjoying the long-gestating sequel to one of my favorite movies fell with it. Even in a story full of baffling decisions, it was conspicuous.

Here was one of the breakout characters of Pacific Rim (and arguably its central protagonist), a fiery but filial mechanic and co-pilot of a giant, sword-swinging mech. In the increasingly crowded field of 2010s action heroines, she still stands tall. You’d have to be possessed by a Precursor to kill her off in the first act just for a lead-in to the next action scene and a fleeting moment of sadness for her brother. Who among the movie’s higher-ups was so afflicted? And did she get booted out of Scrapper’s cockpit at the end so Jing Tian could steal the spotlight?

Designing Ready Player One's Mechagodzilla

Most of the licensed characters in Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One are computer-generated extras, showing up in a shot or two without comment. One of the biggest exceptions, both literally and figuratively, is Mechagodzilla, who corporate baddie Nolan Sorrento pilots in the final battle. It takes on the Iron Giant and a RX-78-2 Gundam in grand fashion, spewing blue flames and launching finger missiles as Alan Silvestri’s fantastic Ifukube cover blares.

Mechagodzilla also stands out because it has an all-new appearance, in contrast to every other licensed character in the film. If you guessed notoriously-fickle Toho had something to do with that, you’d be right. After a piece of concept art bearing his signature started making the rounds online, Toho Kingdom staff member Joshua Sudomerski contacted Jared Krichevsky to ask about the process of creating the latest version of the magnificent machine. Read what he learned after the jump.

King Ghidorah to be a Mo-Cap Triple Threat?

Godzilla: King of the Monsters director Michael Dougherty loves practical effects. Look no further than Krampus, which eschewed CGI for nearly all its holiday horrors, for a display of his devotion to the old ways. Godzilla is a different beast, however, and it remains unclear how much Dougherty has been able to do in-camera while making his first blockbuster film. So here’s some promising news from TheWrap: King Ghidorah will be portrayed by a motion-capture team including Jason Liles, last seen as the albino gorilla George in Rampage.

J.J. Abrams Drags Us Back Inside the Cloverfield Mystery Box

10 Cloverfield Lane was a “blood relative.” The Cloverfield Paradox promised we would finally “find out why.” Now J.J. Abrams, Hollywood’s resident trickster god, is claiming that his company Bad Robot is “developing a true, dedicated Cloverfield sequel,” to be released in theaters “very soon.” The old saying doesn’t get as far as “fool me thrice,” but maybe this time there’s reason to believe him.

Dai-Kaiju Mono on Blu-Ray from Sentai Filmworks

With Crunchyroll simulcasting Ultraman, Funimation and Netflix bringing Toho’s latest Godzilla films to America a few months after they hit Japanese theaters, and Hollywood cranking out its own kaiju nearly every year, it can be easy to forget how long it used to take to see most of this stuff. Unless, of course, you’re one of those depraved, standardless people willing to devour anything that has a big monster in it. Then you’re probably joining me in celebrating Sentai Filmworks’ August 14^th release of Dai-Kaiju Mono, Minoru Kawasaki’s 2016 epic starring New Japan Pro-Wrestling stars Kota Ibushi and Minoru Suzuki.