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« Godzilla: February 2012 | Main | Godzilla: June 2012 »

Godzilla

Anguirus Ball (tm)

Inspired by our latest Godzilla marathon, i started poking around looking at Godzilla video games again. The most recent one to come out for the Wii (it's several years old now, and out of print) seems to have a huge cast of playable characters, which is interesting at least in theory. In practice, i have no desire to play a fighting game with the Wii remote, nor do i wish to spend hours unlocking all those characters only to eventually face up to the fact that no one else wants to play the game with me (especially after i mastered the game by playing it for hours to unlock all the characters).

But in my "research" i did find a blog from one of the developers of the game, who has a really interesting story about how the game wound up influencing the last Godzilla movie, Final Wars.


By fnord12 | May 29, 2012, 3:54 PM | Godzilla & Video Games | Link



If only i had some radioactive clay

Cranium leads to Godzilla.  In fact, all roads lead to Godzilla.

By fnord12 | May 28, 2012, 2:54 PM | Godzilla & My stupid life | Link



I would have called it "Manda". But then, i also would have put Manda in the movie for more than 3 minutes.

As part of our seemingly annual Godzillathon, we're delving into some of the non-Godzilla movies in the Toho universe. Atragon features the sea dragon Manda, who later appears in Destroy All Monsters, and the submarine is also featured in Final Wars. But it's funny seeing how many titles the submarine/story has. Not entirely uncommon for Godzilla-ish movies, but this one's especially convoluted.

From Wikipedia. All emphasis mine.

Atragon, released in Japan as Undersea Warship... is a 1963 Toho tokusatsu film based on a series of juvenile adventure novels under the banner Kaitei Gunkan by Shunro Oshikawa (heavily influenced by Jules Verne) and the illustrated story Kaitei Okoku ("The Undersea Kingdom") by illustrator Shigeru Komatsuzaki, serialized in a monthly magazine for boys.

...It features ... the super submarine, Gotengo (or Roaring Heaven). While the name of the ship is recited as "Gotengo" in Japanese, it should be rendered as "Goten" in English; as the suffix, (go), simply denotes the object as a ship. For the English-language U.S. version, released in 1965 by American International Pictures, the supersub itself was dubbed Atragon, which had been shortened from Toho's own foreign sales title, Atoragon. Confusion over the actual Japanese title of the film by non-Japanese speakers, has led many to assume the original title...to be "Undersea Battleship"; unfortunately, the Japanese term for "Battleship"...is nowhere to be found in the title. Since ...(Gunkan) should be correctly rendered as "Warship", therefore, the film should be correctly transliterated as Undersea Warship.

On reading further, it seems "Atragon" is a contraction of Atomic Dragon, so i guess it does refer to Manda? If so, you'd think you'd give your titular character more screen time.

Update: I wrote this post after letting a little time pass and i had forgotten that the name Atragon, short for Atomic Dragon, actually does refer to the Goten-Go, not Manda. Regardless, Manda still should have gotten more screen time.


By fnord12 | May 25, 2012, 3:48 PM | Godzilla | Link



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