Joe’s Pitch for Gamera vs Godzilla Transcript Version

 

By Joe Gibson

 

To celebrate Gamera’s 60th anniversary, I wanted to crosspollenate Gamera’s series with the other Japanese tokusatsu icons. You can read an article of “Gamera As An Ultraman Season” here, (https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2025/11/reimagining-gamera-as-ultraman-season.html). And what this is, well on our YouTube page, you can watch my pitch for Gamera vs Godzilla as a video (https://youtu.be/wsBjkE8akPE?si=h569KiP2yfZ2bvUD). But I wanted to also upload it as a blog post here to the effect of the delusion of consumer choice (whatever format you choose to consume this in, the essay itself will not change). This also represents a fun opportunity for a peek behind the curtain for how well I can follow a script as the only changes between this and the video will be whatever intentional or unintentional flourishes added during the recording. With that out of the way, let us begin.

 

Today, to roughly correspond with Gamera Day 2025, I would like to share my very rough pitch for what a Gamera vs Godzilla movie could look like if Kadokawa and Toho both decide to go against their better judgement and give me the keys to the kingdom. Godzilla and Gamera have always been rivals in pop culture, battling at the box office, but there has never been an official movie fight between them, really only a stage show bout, which would actually be debatably canon if this were the Ultra series, but I digress. The thing is Gamera has, somewhat fittingly, always struggled more at the box office, and, where things stand, a dozen movies compared to around 40 and one cartoon that might get a season 2 compared to 3 cartoons and a live action show with more on the way…at this rate, the real life Gamera IP will never be able to stand up to Godzilla. And that is precisely why they should fight in the movies.

 

The Monsterverse as well as the Shin Japan Heroes Universe marketing stint both prove that sticking Godzilla alongside another notable tokusatu icon attracts audience attention, and with both of the latest Godzilla movies setting records for domestic and international Godzilla films, it is clear that there is worldwide demand for giant monsters (or maybe just demand for a Godzilla and Guess Who kind of thing). Gamera vs Godzilla (or probably Godzilla vs Gamera for marquee value) would not only follow up on momentum by virtue of being a Godzilla film released in the 21st century but could also revive the Gamera series into a new Golden Era. I believe that the kaiju genre will be better off for Gamera and Godzilla facing off in the box office once more.

 

Obviously, I am not the first to have this idea. Each series has referenced the other through plot points and aesthetics but also subtle digs at the other creature (the unceremonious executions of turtles Kamoebas and Squirtle in the 2000s Godzilla films and the existence of Zedus as a villainous Not Godzilla in Gamera’s only 2000s film). In fact, in the 90s and again in 2002 there almost was a Godzilla vs Gamera film, but the difficulty came about in the logistics. Again, there was the aforementioned stage show that also involved Gorosaurus, Jiger and Space Gyaos, and I have no idea why Gorosaurus was there (Jiger’s film was contemporaneous, and Gyaos was in the process of becoming Gamera’s archenemy, but Gorosaurus, as a King Kong opponent, is such a weird pull). Anyways, Godzilla and Gamera have also crossed over in the mobile game Godzilla Battle Line for a season promoting Gamera Rebirth and now Godzilla and Gamera are fighting each other and Ultraman in Gigabash, so again there is already a market for this matchup, a guaranteed audience niche as it is. It would be very important to do both kaiju justice though because, as we have seen, turtles in Godzilla films meet mean-spirited ends, and drawing too little from either series will tip the scales or poison the well as to the outcome. 

 

 

This balancing act is important to me because of 2021’s Godzilla vs Kong, a movie that should have a lot more clout in these conversations than it does, because not only did it save movie theaters (at least temporarily) but it also seems to have heavily inspired a lot of the imagery of Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One. GvK balanced its respective series by involving Godzilla and Kong in separate classic subplots that uphold their franchise tropes and  reflect their history. Kong’s story involves humans kidnapping him for opportunistic reasons while he leads us through a new world of special effects, and he eventually winds up perched on a very tall tower, where he jumps down (in this case onto Godzilla) and dies (having his heart stopped by Godzilla), but the now dynamic and repentant Denham-style character risks his own life to revive Kong as foreshadowed by their evolving relationship throughout the movie. Conversely, Godzilla’s plotline is pretty much one of his 70s films: a shady new faction brings a sadistic monster to life that agitates Godzilla, and a ragtag crew of weirdos has to storm the proverbial castle, figure out what is going on, and foil the villains’ plan. However, the version of Mechagodzilla also blends some aspects of his later incarnations. The resulting movie is admittedly a little uneven and not a perfect template but still a notable influence to my approach here.

 

The core of the Gamera series, as I see it, is in how Gamera will fight to his last to protect the children of the Earth and only barely win, having sustained incredible damage every time. Every slash, geyser of blood, represents a fierce devotion and tenacity that sticks with you in that classic show don’t tell sense. The core of the Godzilla series, well that is substantially harder to diagnose since there have been dozens upon dozens of creatives each with their own different understandings of Godzilla, but every good incarnation is persistent to the point of unstoppability in his drive. This matchup would be that of the unstoppable force and immovable object.

 

 

I like the idea of playing up the vulnerability of Gamera to new heights, because truly the turtle suffers immensely in every film and show to a degree that warrants as much of an update as the effects do. Gamera has gotten frozen, been sliced repeatedly, been forcibly impregnated, been crucified, lost an arm multiple times and sacrificed himself even more times than that. Gamera is in an arms race with himself with how many arms he’ll lose.

 

It is a tricky balance to land for this all to not come off as mean spirited, but I think a modern Gamera film should kind of push that limit, and that is where I think it is perfect to have him fight Godzilla, because the only core truth present in every incarnation of Godzilla is that he will keep moving forward and fight until he physically cannot anymore. In Gamera, we have the ultimate underdog to undergo vicious unrelenting attacks, and in Godzilla, we have the ultimate bastard to never cease inflicting that damage. The average Gamera villain is ferocious, but general audiences have never heard about them. Everyone knows Godzilla, and this being an event film, it has to be special and thus more brutal I think than the average Gamera film. It has to be something that celebrates both roles in a way that makes sense.

 

I have long had a really odd idea about how to make Gamera’s suffering integral to a movie that I do not think could work in this premise but want to share anyway to give a sort of indication for the kind of thing I am going for. I am far from an expert on ocean acidification, but I have heard that one of the things it can do is weaken turtle shells. Gamera becomes even more vulnerable to piercing attacks in that scenario, and, as the increasing ocean acidification that Gamera cannot cope with would be something the humans would either be causing or be able to try to prevent, the movie can incorporate themes of man’s relationship with nature as a throughline through every appearance of Gamera’s gummy malformed shell and every fight scene where it utterly fails to protect him. In that sense, the exposition, the action, the creature design, and any liberal characters in the story unite under a common theme. I do not want to get too political in the expression of this idea; it is more about the stakes for Gamera through a shorthand of common environmentalist themes. I am not signing off on vague projections that the Gameras will go extinct by 2053 unless we lower our carbon emissions by 3 percent, nor am I celebrating the increased cruise ship traffic and revenue that will occur once Gamera’s sea habitat melts, and if I did err on either of those sides, I wouldn’t say so on Plan9Crunch. What I want is a movie that explores the relationship between Gamera and humanity, specifically in a fresh new way because we’ve gotten that movie several times, and it has gotten better each time so we gotta keep that upward projection going with creativity and wild swings like they used to do in this series.

 

 

Hopefully, now you understand what I am going for, and I can begin laying out this concept. When Noriaki Yuasa directed 7 out of 8 of the Showa Gamera movies, he injected his own thoughts on the value of children and childlike ideals in contrast to adults and their ideals into those movies. It has become common to criticize his Gamera films for being child friendly and all that that entailed in this specific series. The darker and more serious Heisei series is where many Kaiju fans think any Gamera revival should begin, but I disagree. The most recent projects Gamera the Brave 2006 and Gamera Rebirth 2023 feature Showa (Yuasan) Kaiju and child focused sensibilities with the better effects and literary maturity of the Heisei trilogy. I detest the notion that fans of a series should either avoid resembling or fully ignore a large majority of the series for any reason.  And, in this case, for the “traditionalists” like Hiroyuki Seshita (Gamera Rebirth) or myself, it is impossible to fully divorce new from old.

 

The defining portrayal of Gyaos is what the Heisei series decided, that the ancient Atlanteans created Gyaos as a species that ultimately destroyed them. While I have the utmost respect for Shusuke Kaneko and his team, that concept originated with the Space Gyaos and Terans in Yuasa’s Gamera vs Guiron. Again, with Kaneko’s trilogy, each film is better than any of Yuasa's, but granting respect to the franchise as a whole is attributing and integrating what has worked before. (The tension between the self defense force and Gamera in Gamera: Revenge of Iris is subsequent to that subplot in Gamera vs Jiger, and Gamera Rebirth understood that, drawing from both Gamera vs Jiger and Revenge of Iris in the episode covering that conflict.) Even the goofy kids work in context because, done right, it magnifies the stakes and terror of a disaster to have children as the point of view. Godzilla vs Hedorah does that extraordinarily well, juxtaposing horrific pollution imagery with a goofy child, and with this in mind, there is no single excuse to exclude children from a Gamera movie at this point outside of every artist’s own discretion.

 

All that said, for my own part, not every child protagonist is going to be as good as Toru in Gamera the Brave, and I do not really want to stake such an important crossover movie solely on a goofy kid that might not be able to act and a goofy tone that might not resonate. I will have a traditional heroic adult leading man in the vein of Kojiro Hongo from Gamera vs Gyaos, but a prevalent motif in the Showa Gamera films as well as GtB and Rebirth is that adult humans are to be morally understood through their proximity to and acceptance of the ideas of the children. The childish scientists in Gamera vs Zigra are useful because they have become like the children, and Tazaki from Gamera Rebirth grows to care about the children as his arc in the show. 

 

The way to reach the Kaiju audience with an earnest and focused Gamera story would be to rehabilitate these concepts and put simply, have an adult fighting to save a group of children for the entire movie but crucially every major plot point where he saves them has to be because he learned from them, their distinct outlook especially in how the kids in these movies always know Gamera is looking out for them. We will juxtapose this human protagonist with Gamera because their goal is the same, both will be vulnerable, and the only way to achieve this goal of furthering the future generation will be to work together. That is a very simple story, but I have some ideas to make it resonate (keep in mind, fully untested ones, since I have not written fiction for any publication, nor been anything more than a paid extra in film).

 

People always criticize the human characters in kaiju movies, and Godzilla is the archetypal kaiju for most people, so the discourse always amounts to “Godzilla Minus One is the first movie to have good human characters, etc.” I think the human characters of the Godzilla series the vast majority of the time have had good writing with competent establishing scenes and little in the way of contradiction to the logic and thematic value of their progression through the story. Having watched the same movies as many commentators and yet feeling as differently as I do, I will hazard a guess that the solution to this problem isn’t that dozens of writers and directors in one of the longest running franchises ever have all made the same mistakes creating characters; instead the issue is more likely to be that the conventions of the genre including sympathetic expressive monsters splits the focus and that ultimately the reason for that knee jerk response is that the humans are seldom the best part of the movie and thus liable to be someone’s least favorite part. 

 

In the recent Monsterverse films, Aaron Taylor Johnson’s Ford Brody has a complicated background shown in the film that informs his choice to join the military as well as the distance he keeps from his family, Kyle Chandler’s Mark Russell has an arc of forgiving Godzilla for collateral damage that serves the themes of coexistence in the movie while contrasting other key characters that fail to learn his lesson, and Alexander Skarsgard’s Nathan Lind has a textbook but very effective arc where he slowly and visibly takes responsibility for Kong. To toss all of that aside without even addressing it and say “the humans were bad, but I really liked when Godzilla started wrestling” is reductive but ultimately very human. Godzilla Minus One grounds Godzilla within Shikishima’s perspective to the point that the finer aspects of Godzilla’s characterization go unstated in the film’s exposition, only existing in the background of the scene (such as how Godzilla only kills the people on Odo Island who shot at him and seems to understand that Tachibana and Shikishima did not).

 

 

So here is where I want to take a swing in this hypothetical movie no one will ever give me free reign on. Many have stated that Minus One is the only film where they did not root for Godzilla, instead just wanting to see the humans succeed. I understand it would be very difficult to recapture that, but there are more options here than have been considered. I want the ultimate underdog Gamera, the ultimate vicious force in Godzilla, and I want people to not only care about the characters but prefer watching them to watching Godzilla. I think, pending proper experimentation, the way to solve this is to have the kaiju fight be so brutal, it is actually hard to watch. Then, by default, not only do you want to watch the humans, but you are fully on their side. 

 

Specifically, I think that the structure of this movie should be that Godzilla is attacking a city that the lead and the kids cannot escape from almost the entire time, and, when Gamera comes in to defend them, Godzilla just beats him up and resumes meticulously dismantling the city intermittently. Rather than give Godzilla an absurd amount of screentime, I think we let him do something very brutal, make it look like we will cut away but linger just a little bit longer every time to build up that sense of dread. In that sense, Godzilla here will be essentially a slasher villain, scoring gory finishers on the turtle and whatever human characters are expendable for this pitch. Godzilla has his fans of course, and this characterization will still be a logical offshoot of his previous behaviors, but I do not want the audience to root for him here.

 

And that is for an additional reason. I can’t write this pitch to where Godzilla wins, but having him dominate every round in the hardest fight Gamera has ever had, should satiate Toho. There is such a thing as too much, and I would be very curious to find out where that limit is because Gamera usually suffers a lot more than Godzilla does in his movies. But, if done correctly, the sense of catharsis in a Gamera win would be palpable.

 

The Godzilla rampages wherein he relies on his atomic breath to slice the buildings are a good show of force for his best weapon, but they are less personal than when he relies on his teeth and claws with some blasts of the atomic breath for emphasis. At the same time, this Godzilla is fighting Gamera who also has limbs and a ranged attack in the form of fire breath. I think, in order to make these beasts complimentary, that not only would we reduce Godzilla’s atomic breath usage considerably, but we make it like the puffs of atomic mist that it was in the first film. It would resemble Gamera’s fire breath, and so, in their first showdown, you would expect their attacks to work equally well and cancel each other out, but a wisp of nuclear energy is going to negatively affect Gamera more than a blast of fire would Godzilla, so it still means Gamera has to rely on his intellect to counteract Godzilla’s atomic breath. We get to include and then subvert a beam lock scenario almost immediately.

 

 

I would want a ferocious look for Godzilla (the Minus One design would frankly be perfect, but the proximity to Minus One could be deceptive, so otherwise, a sharper melee oriented design inspired from the 1955 Godzilla Raids Again suit would work). Gamera can be as cute or as fierce looking as necessary; the only notes I have for that would be that he should have the shell but also tusks and either notable use of his tail or else very sharp turtle claws and actually probably both. And, because this is the motif I want to reinforce, yes Godzilla will tear off those claws and perforate the shell, because it is Gamera’s heart, not his vital and defensive organs that will earn him a victory. That said, it would be nice to see Gamera use his tusks for something this time, so maybe we can have him slash one of Godzilla’s eyes at one point late in the battle. 

 

I have kind of been all over the place building up my vision for this film, and I apologize for that, but I think I have made clear what I am aiming for and can now go more into specifics. Within the destruction of a Godzilla attack, a sympathetic and open-minded adult man tries to bring himself and a few children to safety, having to rely on his wits and ultimately the insights of children to survive. The next step is naturally to put this into a structure to best emphasize the characters, motifs and themes. 

 

Some permutation of the three act hero’s journey is usually ideal for the type of story this is, except that in a strict survival scenario with a small cast of mostly children and only two major monster combatants, finding threshold guardians and mentor characters will be difficult. If there are any other major human characters, I would prefer them to be part of the group from the beginning and die for either acting against the children or failing to integrate their outlook (rather than the “adding allies and enemies in the middle of act 2” that usually happens). The simplest way to play this would be to have Gamera as the mentor make psychic contact with the leads in act one. 

 

We could use the franchise shorthand of a magatama bead or, playing into a horror movie aesthetic, Gamera could appear to the children in a dream as a warm presence that Godzilla then invades to foreshadow the fear his rampage will bring. (Such a scene would also be similar to one from Yuasa’s Gothic Shojo horror movie The Snake Girl And The Silver Haired Witch.) Casting Godzilla in Michael Myers esque shadow until a full reveal at the start of act two could also allow us to include a scene of the children drawing Godzilla, fearful of his arrival, such as the Heisei series notably had.

 

We would also have to set up some Chekov’s artifacts and locations to enable later payoffs as early as possible. The boys in Gamera vs Guiron have a cap gun that they later use, and it was important to see them use it on Earth before they pull it out on Tera. That was a cheesy relic of its time there, so I would be very curious to find out how far we could push a plot point like this in a more serious film; is there a chance that the right amount of desperation and film trickery could make an audience take a toy gun shooting at a real monster seriously? I need to emphasize that the point of it would be the adult assimilating and growing from the way children see the world, grasping to that childlike innocence in the depths of despair.

 

For the primary environment in this film, I am picturing an apartment high rise or at least some building with multiple levels. As such, it will be important later on in the movie to understand the primary and secondary methods of travel throughout the setting and also how the kids (and thus the audience) should feel about them before and after they are relevant. Again, I am completely untested when it comes to this type of artistic expression, but I think it is important to give the audience a chance to be scared before they have to be for how much more effective the suspense can make the actual scare. If for instance, I want a big kill set piece to occur on a staircase, to properly prime the audience for that scene, I should cast the staircase in a negative tone beforehand and have nothing happen the first time.

 

By this point, it is probably sounding like a horror movie, specifically I will draw a bit from slasher movies, and, yes I am aware that the human characters in those films are often also criticized very strongly in the film discourse. But, within the genre, the characters that are written to matter, mean something and say something like Sidney Prescott or Laurie Strode, those characters are celebrated. So this is a worthy pulpy swing to try on a project like this.

 

Because a pitch really cannot get across themes in the same subtlety as a film, this might come across stilted. Please, leave your impressions and constructive notes of criticisms as comments below. In any case, the film would begin with the kids in some paracosm playtime through a vent or crawlspace that exists within their apartment or high rise or multi level building or whatever the setting is that fits these specifications. Notably, they consider using the staircase in their game but regard it with a sick dread that the film’s cinematography will reciprocate, motivating them to go to that aforementioned crawlspace. Specifically, this scene needs to get across a shortcut between locations, and, if it would work, we can work some esoteric spiritual foreshadowing of the danger into their game, whether Gamera’s warm presence reaches in or they are imagining they are running from a Beast that will soon show up. If not for that, it would be difficult to organically introduce much foreshadowing in the way of Godzilla appearing to this location, but I really like the idea of a scene where the adults are arguing and only a child has the clarity of mind to look at the television screen reporting on Godzilla’s approaching rampage.

 

When Godzilla does arrive, he will destroy a building, as we are accustomed to seeing, but we will immediately juxtapose that image with Gamera as a benevolent figure, possibly reaching out to the children in a dream. Gamera’s full arrival would come after Godzilla’s and be a turning of the tide…until Godzilla almost immediately gets the upper hand over Gamera, spraying blood with deep claw gashes and knocking the turtle out to resume destroying everything. We can figure out the details later.

 

The main character of this film should have something to learn from these kids, and so, for the sake of time, we will just say that at a base level we will show this by him being unhappy and unimaginative but the kids being happy and imaginative. The kids’ innocence will fuel Gamera and also redeem this man, but for redemption to be necessary, so is culpability as we mentioned, and the simplest way to get this across is to have his job somehow be of the same kind of nuclear testing that created Godzilla. That way, he brings knowledge, understanding and also a tense karmic suffering.

 

One important aspect of slashers that often goes overlooked is that the rampage has to be related to events in the backstory of the characters. This is intrinsic to every sequel, but also original films: Michael Myers starts his story 15 years before the main plot of  Halloween, much of the first Nightmare On Elm Street is about uncovering what happened to Fred Krueger that motivates his spree, and Pamela Voorhees would have no reason to kill if her son Jason had not drowned before Friday the 13th’s present day. Godzilla lends himself to this trope exceptionally well because there almost always is that unspoken tension of how we as humans hurt or displaced him with nuclear tests long before the story begins and his revenge is inevitable. Godzilla Final Wars shows us how easily we can include that as a subplot just from expository innuendo, so we do not have to waste much precious screentime to introduce this plot point except to have an adult character mention it.

 

This also plays into the practical concern in most slashers of “how can a bloodthirsty serial killer be the arbiter of morality” that plagues Friday the 13th, Halloween and even Universal’s Kharis tetralogy in a way that marries Yuasan Gamera to this slasher format. The new generation of children has no culpability for crimes against nature and humanity, and it is the corruption of children into adults that extends this cycle, with the inverse, adults humbling themselves to be more like children the only possible way out of it. Yuasa grew up witnessing the change of adults around him responding to World War 2, a younger generation than figures like Ishiro Honda who themselves had to grapple with their own role in the propaganda of the time. Yuasa’s contribution to the genre was a wholesome hero who will always save and uplift the children, but in this new film, the adults that refuse to save the children or learn from them and Gamera will be destroyed by Godzilla. And as I already said, Gamera will eventually prevail over Godzilla, but he needs the help of our adult main character to do so, however esoterically that will actually play out.

 

 

The adult male lead will have to choose to step up for these kids, and the other adults around them have to be examples of not taking responsibility for the kids and their own collective culpability for Godzilla. It would be tricky to adjust the blame and sympathy the film can fairly cast on the lead whether or not he has any responsibility for Godzilla’s appearance in this continuity and who the kids are to him. The audience is not going to like a guy who considers leaving behind his own children in a tragedy but should become endeared to a man who cannot bring himself to leave behind children who have nothing to do with him. The children could be related to the expendable side characters or just random kids the man comes across.

 

He should initially look down on the children’s use of the crawlspace/vents to get around, but, once Godzilla destroys the staircase and an unlucky adult victim there, he has to crawl around with the kids and takes to it surprisingly well by adapting to their movements to the point that he successfully gets them out of Godzilla danger. As we know, their shortcut leads to some other point in the building where they will feel safe enough to advance the story with some dialogue where the adult hero is unable to explain Godzilla to the children but they are able to begin to explain Gamera to him.

 

It should be worth mentioning that while horror wants to shock and surprise an audience, morality tales will be simple and predictable, so the direction should delineate scenes for user accessibility. Gamera especially is a children's fantasy, and I do not want to scare them too much, so I will not try to hide the scary moments. The suspenseful scenes that do not end in kills will be shot from low angles to emphasize children’s perspective and how small humans are compared to Godzilla, but the kill or incapacitation scenes will take a higher more full screen camera view that should get predictable enough in the flow of this structure. I feel like this would be a fun challenge for a director, especially in scenes where Gamera is in the role of the underdog and then turns the tide on Godzilla.

 

In any case, the rampage reaches their building, and Godzilla swipes through the window and incidentally looks at the leads. Gamera wakes up, we have the subverted beam lock where Gamera looks to be boiled alive by the end of it, and Godzilla can use his tail to lasso Gamera’s head into another knockout. I think a cool kill to inflict on one of the human characters would be to have one get sucked out of the building into the beam while Godzilla is charging it up. By that same token, the next major “kill” scene would be on that rickety staircase the kids are scared of, with Godzilla’s hands reaching out to crush someone. Finally, when they reach the lowest level of the building, Godzilla’s toe can menace the lead characters; I think Godzilla’s toes can be well utilized in action scenes to destroy people, places or things. Throughout all of this, there will be moments where we can see Godzilla attacking, Gamera defending and their fight throughout all of this. During the staircase setpiece, Gamera will look at the human lead and the children, and he can think about that moment for the rest of the film until the end, where they witness Gamera losing the arm and falling over. The adult lead, while holding the children close to him in the rubble, will reach out to Gamera, hoping and praying on his name, believing that the encroaching glow through the dusty fog is Gamera and not Godzilla.

 

At this point you may be wondering how literal we rational adults can really afford to take this story of the kids who already know of Gamera before he arrives trying to survive a natural disaster especially because it all leads up to that image of the protagonist facing the formerly Godzilla filled cloud and reaching out to Gamera. The ambiguity is not essential to this pitch, but it was an inevitable unintended deconstruction of those original films that the kids’ omniscient perception of Gamera could be warped or otherwise unreliable. It was also an intentional aspect of the Heisei Gamera films’ ending; do you believe in Gamera’s victory?

 

I like the idea of letting the film end on that image and relying on the audience to have faith Gamera won; that way the audience can experience some part of the protagonist’s journey. This could also be a loophole to allow Toho to make a film where Godzilla loses (if the film does not confirm it). However, it would be pretty jarring for a Gamera film to end with the possible implication that Gamera failed and Godzilla will kill the children, so after the credits featuring a new recording of “Song of Gamera,” we will have the actual last scene of the movie, confirming Gamera won through a conversation of the remaining characters that confirms the main character did learn the lesson his arc revolves around. In practice, this is actually a reference to 2002’s Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla where the actual movie did not complete the story, and the denouement, given through a post credits scene, actually finishes the movie and the lead character’s arc resolution. It has always been neat to me to have a movie that is not really over until the entire runtime (counting credits) has come and gone.

 

I will make no claims that this is the best story to tell with or about these two characters or even that this is a good story. The interesting facet about this exercise are the constraints I put on myself for being a fan of both franchises and how that manifested as an esoteric examination of childlike faith in a savior. I can cite where those themes come from in the original run of Gamera films and even some Godzilla films where Godzilla fills that role or the antagonistic role in that kind of story, but it still does feel weird to go there. Godzilla vs Reptilicus or Godzilla vs Yongary would be much easier to write; yet at the same time, there is still also a lot less to make those match-ups special. Every devoted fan such as myself would have a different idea how to make this work, and I wonder if perhaps the best way to get the best movie even at the expense of the franchise references and themes would be to contract someone for this who is not a dogmatic fan and has less restraints to do whatever they want. Still, this is my pitch, and I would like to hear your thoughts on it and your own opinions on how to write this fight.

Reimagining Gamera As An Ultraman Season?? Gamera’s 60th Anniversary Celebration

 

By Joe Gibson

 

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the original Gamera film, I am doing a couple “What-If” scenarios for Gamera corresponding to other notable Tokusatsu franchises. In this essay, I will be crosspollenating the Gamera characters and tropes with the Ultraman formula as a template for where the franchise could go from here (as unfortunately Rebirth seems to keep the tradition of being very good and yet killing the Gamera franchise indefinitely that previously happened with Gamera 3 Revenge of Iris and then Gamera The Brave). Along those same lines, you can look forward to a video in the coming days where I throw my hat into the ring with my idea for how a Gamera vs Godzilla film could function.

 

Gamera Rebirth actually is a pretty good template for how to adapt the series into this premise, but it is a very short show dealing with a small monster cast (but also more focused on being season one of Hiroyuki Seshita’s unique Gamera vision). Still, the bond between Boco and Gamera, as derived from Asagi’s metaphysical connection to Gamera in the Heisei movies, would be the analog to the merging of Ultra with human, and the sinister Eustace Foundation that teams up with the kids but also has ill intentions toward them would take the role of the attack team pretty much as is. Other important tropes for this exercise would include the increasingly powerful enemies and unlocking abilities of the hero. Rebirth was a little arbitrary about when Gamera could use his higher level abilities, so the status quo here will pertain to the increasing knowledge of Gamera’s child priest/priestess and willpower contrasted against increasingly strong kaiju. In place of a color timer, the concept of this child taking on the same damage that Gamera does will serve as a time limit for each fight (notable in Rebirth as well as the Heisei series).

 

One of the challenges behind any Gamera revival is balancing Gyaos with the other monsters because, as the Heisei series codified, Gyaos is not only the main villain of this franchise but also very easy to tie into Gamera’s own origin for peak efficiency. Rebirth introduced the idea that the same faction created Gamera and Gyaos but also Jiger, Zigra, Guiron, Viras, etc, but adding back in Ultraman means that the original alien origins for at least Zigra, Viras and Guiron should be important again even if a faction like the Eustace Foundation can still be controlling most of the Monsters of The Week.  To start, Gamera’s origins will be an overarching mystery but akin to the Heisei series setup of being created to destroy Gyaos and also existing alongside Iris, who is either a failsafe for him or an evolved Gyaos.

 

Ultraman Omega episode 1 features the Vagsect horde that (presumably) reappears later with a separate monster as the primary antagonist MOTW, so that would be the ideal situation. Gamera rises to deal with the Gyaos swarm in a cold open, and the ensuing battle leads the child to a weakened Gamera and the magatama bead to connect them. As they bond, the other characters in the Research Attack team can track the real MOTW released by the villains (that will end up to be this research team as a plot twist later on), and I would suggest Barugon as a weak(er) episode one kaiju that can very easily be released from an egg within the same episode it rampages. The child will start a friendship with one of the agents in the attack team here when the plotlines converge, and the following episode can have the actual recruitment occur. (As much as this premise relies on Ultraman tropes, being a child-led toku show means Johnny Sokko’s structure is also necessary to think about.)

 

Though Toru is the best child character in the entire franchise, and Asagi and Ayana are the runner ups, I think this star should go in a different direction from those and also probably be a girl. There are fewer well developed female child characters than male, but that is not actually why I would want the lead character to be female. Gamera vs Guiron features a sort of Cassandra archetype in Akio’s younger sister Tomoko who gets left out of their adventure and tells the adults what happened (but no one believes her). A lonely left out character like this would justify how the allure of the attack team overpowers her finer sensibilities. Also, Tomoko’s only real friend in the movie is Officer Kondo, a very goofy incompetent police officer played by a notable comic actor, and replicating that dynamic in the confines of this attack team could lend one sympathetic Special Agent character left after the reveal of the organization’s ill intentions (casting a comic actor in this role would also help). There are a few Ultraman shows that do something like this.

 

Naomi’s uncle in Ultraman Orb was a VTOL agent but also very comedic slapstick character, and, in Ultraman Geed, Riku’s older sister figure is essentially an ICE agent but very selectively competent at her job (and it’s that last part that keeps her entertaining). Adding back in analogs to Akio and his friend Tom as side characters to get kidnapped and eventually grow to respect the Tomoko stand-in could round out this cast (it is not unprecedented to abruptly kill off the entire attack team midway through an Ultraman show, so it is important to have other characters exist).

 

Most of Gamera’s enemies get a film to themselves to prove them a great threat to Gamera so powerscaling is difficult to establish. Of the Showa era kaiju, Viras was actually pretty definitively the weakest, only lasting one fight, but Rebirth positioned him as a boss kaiju. In a 25 episode season, we could easily do both especially because Viras is just the larger form of notable Virians. The Virians would shape up as larger villains, but, unlike the Gamera films, Ultraman television shows usually feature multiple alien invaders at the same time, and it would be cool to see disparate alien campaigns fail and the survivors unify against Gamera (basically we see the Planetary Invasion Syndicate from Ultraman Orb form but with Virians, Zigrans, Terans, etc). So as part of this storytelling, Zigra and his ilk would be deliberately compared to the Virians and then exist alongside them so Zigra himself will be more powerful than the weak Viras but less powerful than the strongest Virian.

 

If episode one covers Barugon, episode two can be the Virian’s first attempt at conquering Earth (through kidnapping and replacing humans with Virians and then, when discovered, converging into one being Viras and fighting Gamera). I think it is somewhat important to include a scene where the lead character knows some people are Virians in disguise but no one believes her. Then we can adapt Nezura if some rats feast on tissue samples of the fallen Gyaos (eventually revealed to be intentional by the attack team), with episode four being the Zigran’s first effort, contrasting the previous Viras episode (instead of disguising themselves as humans, they just brainwash a human that the attack team mistakenly kills and waging a more overt offensive to lure Gamera out). These would be increasing in threat level, but the main advancements for Gamera would be agility and endurance. Barugon froze Gamera but was tanky while Viras was a very slick opponent, Nezura would have strong rat teeth but each be as wriggly as Viras, and Zigra, with his ocean aesthetic, paralysis beam, strength and speed, would wrap most of these attributes together, necessitating more abilities from Gamera than just fire breath. With Zigra dead, I would have it that no other Zigran can grow to giant size but the invasion force still needs to colonize Earth so they approach the Virian delegation.

 

Ideally, there would be hints within the show at the attack team's true intentions, maybe as simple as literally showing something very damning before the context of that is clear. But the thing is uh Gamera Rebirth did a great job of crafting its Eustace Foundation twist, but it seems no one else paid attention to Emiko’s clear manipulation in episode 3 of that show, so it has to be even more blatant for it to register in this fandom I guess. Garasharp can be the fifth episode's MOTW, and the main thing of note for this is that we can just adapt the short film’s ending where Gamera wants to save and protect Garasharp’s young this time against the attack team. If Garasharp has two children, they can both come back in a later episode post reveal, the attack team having gotten to one of them.

 

Six episodes feels like enough time for other monsters to shine consecutively, so one Gyaos will have grown to giant Super-size in the meantime, and I suppose if you want to play up the inorganic body horror angle some incarnations apply to Gyaos, you can have it be that Super Gyaos is actively mutating to better combat Gamera. After a hard fought battle codifying whatever new power also defeated Zigra (let us say the heated Plasma Fist), Gamera dispatches Gyaos into several pieces scattered about the countryside, and the episode can leave off on a lizard chewing on some pieces.

 

In a pre-existing video ranking all the Gamera Kaiju, I declared Guiron my number one Gamera kaiju (All 30 Gamera Kaiju Ranked, Except Iris Who Joe Forgot). As such, he is the most important kaiju for me to get right in this show, and I want to take a big swing with him that you will see unfold over the rest of this pitch. In the original Gamera vs Guiron, two young boys travel to an alien planet where there are two sole survivors that want to eat their brains and assimilate Earth culture. There is a sort of shadow relationship between Tera and Earth down to every notable aspect, the people, the guardian monster and even the monsters that attack that planet. Adjusting that slightly, the dark mirror of Tomoko and special agent Kondo would be an abusive mentorship (which will expedite the plot point of one Teran shooting the other midway through the adventure). As I am still recycling Akio and Tom into this premise, we can still have the Terans kidnap Akio to feast on his brain and have Tom get captured trying to save him. Up until this point, they would be minor characters in this show, only interacting with Tomoko, but the attack team rescuing them would lead to further importance and heightened stakes when the attack team can also kidnap them post villain reveal.

 

For the actual kaiju matters, Guiron is too cool to go down this episode, so, even after trying every new power he has, Gamera is unable to destroy the knifeheaded monster. Still, there is a pretty clear thematic point of comparison in this battle to clarify why Guiron cannot win either; Guiron is being controlled dispassionately by two evil beings in conflict with each other. The warm partnership of Tomoko and Gamera with their mutual respect for agent Kondo will be able to survive longer than the partnership of the Terans with Guiron. The last Teran dies in an explosion, Guiron is left on his own for a later episode to explore him, and the Zigran and Virian coalition moves into the Teran base to begin construction on a new monster to defeat Gamera once and for all.

 

Two episodes after Super Gyaos’ debut and dismemberment is enough time for that lizard to eat the carcass and mutate into Zedus. Though this monster is one of my favorites, I cannot contrive a scenario for him to reappear, so not only will this be a definitive battle, it will probably be a very quick one since, by design, Zedus is only really a challenge for a Baby Gamera. Because every Ultra series show has around 20 episodes, not every monster fight is an increase in challenge, but the hero still does progress the whole time, so you will pretty immediately run into an overkill scenario where the hero uses one of their special forms or kaiju helpers in a fight against an admittedly pretty weak villain. Zedus’ tongue will pose little challenge to Gamera, but he will still use the Plasma Fist to show that the bond between the Tomoko character and Gamera has more energy than before to where it is less draining to use this move.

 

I wanted to save Jiger for later, but, as I am now realizing, it is very difficult to pace these monsters over the course of 25 episodes in a way that does not feel arbitrary, and every creative currently doing so on the Ultra series has been doing so far longer than I have been. In any case, episode 9 is far enough separated from Barugon so as to not feel redundant of including another overpowered quadruped. One of the areas Rebirth fell short was adapting Jiger; she came off as more or less a dinosaur version of Nezura with none of her old powers, so this episode would take roughly Rebirth’s perfectly updated design but stick all of the powers back on. She will shoot barbs of hardened snot, be able to fly and all of her various powers, but notably, she will also impregnate Gamera again. Gamera will have to use his Burning Fist on himself to abort the child, and, while this happens, on the human end of this relationship, the child character will have appendicitis. This feels like clever mirroring for that.

 

Now, with all of the main Showa foes out of the way, Powered Gyaos can show up, and, as you may not know, the conceit behind Powered Gyaos is that it is a Voltron of these Showa era foes. (To round this monster cast out, I have to bring in some obscure ones that you hear about in my ranking: All 30 Gamera Kaiju Ranked, Except Iris Who Joe Forgot) Now obviously, I have plans for the Virians, Zigrans and Guiron outside of this Voltron later, so it will just be a composite of cells left behind in their fights against Gamera. Specifically, the show will imply it is the Zigran and Virian coalition’s doing, but, post heel turn reveal, the Earthbound attack team takes credit for it in the back half of the season. Even so, the Ultra series does not need as rigid of an explanation for how a fusion of kaiju can appear between appearances of the kaiju within; Ultraman Orb has two different forms of Zetton, one of which comes back after Zeppandon, who is a separate fusion of a classic Zetton and Pandon, who also appears in a new form in that show before that point. I have less to say about the actual fight.

 

For the midseason two parter, the Zigrans and Virians with Teran materials will have created W, the two headed Wyvern kaiju and scrapped archenemy to Gamera. This feels like a natural place in the season for such a concept and also for another powerup for Gamera. The only problem is he seldom powers up too much, so we are only left with a few moves from previous shows (even Gamera the Brave had to make flight one of the powers Gamera has to grow into). If handled with the proper gravitas, “bigger concentrated fireball” can be the powerup; otherwise, it can be a new armored form akin to Rebirth’s design or maybe eye lasers because Godzilla also got those once for some reason. All we know about the original Gamera vs W movie pitch is that they would have fought within flames, so a more durable form would make a certain kind of sense.

 

Episode 13 seems to generally be the obligatory Recap episode, showing stock footage of all of the previous fights as we go into the next half of the season. In the past, I have skipped Recap episodes for some shows; other shows have a built in reason not to skip the Recap episode, be it unpacking a major plot development/reveal and actually including a monster suit as in Ultraman Omega. For this fictional season of television I am envisioning, this is the best place to have the main characters figure out that the attack team is up to something and even behind some of the monsters’ attacks. What adds to the tension building between our leads and the faction though is that the next conflict, in a two parter, will be the invasion of the Legion horde that forces a teamup. Legion is far too big of a concept with far too many forms to fit into one episode, and, frankly, they could be 4 episodes easily, but the basic idea is to put Legion into the Galactron role in Ultraman Orb. Legion will be the strongest monster up to this point in the show and probably one of the three most powerful in this show in general.

 

For episode 16, I would want to have the return of Guiron, and, like in Gamera Rebirth, I want Guiron to chop one of Gamera’s arms off (the specific scenario would be Gamera trying to use the Plasma fist attack but Guiron being able to parry and riposte). This would again force the idea of potentially teaming up with the attack team, but their full heel turn would come about here, raising the stakes by kidnapping one of the characters. Now I have written myself into a corner entailing the divorce of a little girl’s arm from her body since it happened to Gamera, but I want to pull some shenanigans. The magatama bead or whatever plot macguffin links the girl to Gamera would be the beta capsule here, and Ultraman often loses his transformation device, so in an Ultraman 1966 Gomora scenario, Guiron wins and leaves, and the hero drops the magatama bead, resulting in her not suffering the damage but also being unable to move Gamera until she finds it.

 

In episode 17, our heroes will try to rescue the kidnapped friend (let us say it is Kondo to tap into that Johnny Sokko rescuing Jerry Mano homage) without the use of Gamera and the magatama bead. The attack team will unveil the Monster Of The Week, Iris, an alternative hero to Gamera with another magatama bead link from the same civilization. Ideally, up to this point, the mystery of Gamera and his origins has been sufficiently teased. This episode would fill in those answers about the prehistoric civilization creating Gamera and some of these monsters, but we would deviate from Rebirth’s reveal that some of the people in charge of the villainous faction seemingly are from those days; this attack team is just interested in control. 

 

We can juxtapose that with the genuine friendship Gamera has with the kids, and so, while one notable attack team member uses the Iris magatama bead to control it, Gamera will ultimately step up to protect Tomoko and her friends without her needing to control him. I want this to be a notable subversion in the show where the audience expects that the traditional “losing the transformation device and finding it in the right moment” trope will start happening in the show, but instead, it just exits the show. I also kind of want to include this as this is more similar to Johnny Sokko in that I have separated the lead character from the fighting force, and that show was a little bit hard to read in terms of when Giant Robo gained sentience and independence from Johnny. The kids successfully rescue Kondo, and the attack team gets to work on other alternative monsters to Gamera, but we can leave that plotline for an episode.

 

Next would be the reappearance of Viras, and the vision I have for Viras II is that a different notable Virian that survived the events of the W two parter slinks around the ship assimilating the other Virians and Zigrans there to become a horrifying giant mutation of a Viras. It would be a different kind of cold open than Gamera vs Viras proper had but with a similar doom aboard the spaceship. The actual battle would be fiercer and grosser than the first Gamera vs Viras fight in this show, and this can be when Gamera unveils a new special move. In order to fully disintegrate this writhing mass, Gamera’s plastron opens and a greater beam comes out as you have seen before in the Heisei films. Naturally, that would be very physically taxing, and Gamera will be very weak for the next episode, which will entail that other Garasharp that the attack team will have modified into a weapon in a tragic turn of events.

 

It is very difficult to find enough content to spread over a 25 episode season. The ideal solution would be that the creative team makes new monsters, but, just stretching what we do have, the mushroom headed long armed absurdly named Marukobukarappa that has been planned for several projects but never appeared could work here. And since the comedy has been lacking up to this point, make the episode a comedic farce. That’s all I’ve got for that. Then, I think Bodera from Gamera Rebirth Code Thrysos was a really cool design for a prototype created kaiju so the attack team can send that out, and then for episode 22, Guiron will get his third episode. Since Gamera is currently down to just one arm due to the knife headed monster, there will be a ferocious rivalry, but I want their fight to resolve peacefully. As the horde of giant mutated Hyper Gyaos roll in, Guiron decides to fight on the side of Gamera, becoming the obligatory helper kaiju, the sword and shield fighting together to save the Earth. Maybe it is obvious that I like Guiron a lot, possibly too much, but that is the big swing I would want to take with his character since he is anomalous for being a mirror to Gamera in that original film and still being treated as one of the evilest villains despite killing the most Gyaos of anyone. This will also be the end of Gyaos as a villain in this show.

 

One thing I find very poignant about serialized television is that it ends, and I have really come around to the idea of that ending, at least in tokusatsu seasons, denoting the death of the giant hero. Ultraman and Giant Robo both die in their series, and it is an early lesson to a child audience of the fragility of life and nobility of sacrifice. Gamera also dies at the conclusion of his Showa film series (and Gamera Rebirth), ambiguously dies at the conclusion of the Heisei series and dies at the start of Gamera the Brave, so he takes to this. Gamera’s Showa series death was against Zanon, a metal ship that could send out his previous monsters, and I talked about a way to rehabilitate that concept with a different monster in my kaiju ranking video. 

 

The final two episodes of this show, marketed as the Death of Gamera, will be about fighting Morphos, the artificial shapeshifting kaiju made of metal the attack team creates that destroys them before taking on the form of every other monster Gamera has fought in this show. Whether in stock footage or new battles, it is the opportunity to do something really interesting here and exhausting for Gamera, but the final form of Morphos will be a metallic Gamera, and Gamera will have to use his Plasma Glow across his entire body alongside the plastron beam to recreate his self destruction move from Gamera the Brave to take out Morphos.

 

I will discuss this in the Gamera vs Godzilla video, but this exercise is interesting in that I am not fully satisfied with the pitches I make as a fan of these franchises for them. The urge, and in this case obligation, to pull from all corners of the franchises I am referencing constrains me into very odd and specific writing decisions. But of course, I wanted to do something special to celebrate Gamera’s 60th anniversary, and I will now turn it over to you to share your thoughts in the comments. Let us know your thoughts on this pitch and if you would like to see Gamera and Ultraman crossover, even how you think it could go.