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.

Who Are The Big Five Kaiju In Gamera?

 

By Joe Gibson

 

Introduction

 

There is a specific category designation of certain kaiju in the Godzilla series: the Big Five. I guess it measures the fact that only these five have appeared in every era (though that is not exactly true and rendered irrelevant by the increasing amount of one-shot film continuities per era that only partially adapt that list of five) or maybe the marquee value compounded over a long time of these specific monsters topping the box office. In any case, many of the conversations and speculation surrounding the early Monsterverse was when and how Legendary would adapt these monsters, those being Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah, Rodan and Mechagodzilla. Only after Godzilla King of the Monsters had four of those in a film together did fancasts include secondary Godzilla kaiju like Gigan or Anguirus.

 

In my anecdotal experience, in terms of the influence on pop culture, Godzilla and Mechagodzilla have been the most common specific parody monster formats, but King Ghidorah has appeared as is in a surprising amount of cartoons, and the concept of insect and pteranodon monsters are disproportionately common for how many types of monsters one could make. (As the research I carried out for this article reveals though, Gamera as a turtle kaiju has also had a great deal of references and outright appearances in pop culture.) However, the concept of the Big Five goes back as long established fan knowledge, so any argument I make to reinforce it will necessarily be assuming the conclusion already and thus circular. 

 

For instance, the concept or specific character of a son of Godzilla appears as often as the 4 other costars, and King Kong technically should qualify for having a film contemporary to every Godzilla era. The utility of a “Big Five” is in comparison to the Godzilla series, for marquee value and a more focused vision for the franchise’s future based on which wild dart shots landed on the board for the public. Rather than justifying the Big Five, we will presuppose it in our replication, which will start very easy but end up a bit more difficult.

 

Gamera and Gyaos: The First Two Draft Picks

 

 

Unlike the Godzilla series, there are really only two kaiju that have appeared in every era of the franchise, that being Gamera himself and Gyaos. Gamera is an upright turtle with tusks (think the icon that appears on the Mountain Dew Code Red logo) that breathes fire and can fly like a UFO, while Gyaos is a batlike bird with a yellow beam called the sonic scalpel. Gyaos has actually gotten less humanoid as the technology for puppetry or CGI have improved in the series, and he largely exists as a horde monster though in most circumstances of a Gyaos horde, there will also exist one large specimen to fight Gamera one on one.

 

In case you doubt the obviousness of these picks, in the 12 Gamera films, Gamera has been in all of them, and Gyaos has had a major role in 6 of them. More than just “he’s here half the time,” Gyaos’ role often informs the themes of a particular film or contextualizes the kind of threat in the film. Space Gyaos represents the destruction via technological innovation of the Terans and establishes Guiron as a threat when he preys on them. Similarly, the Heisei Gyaos was a created species that destroyed their creators, and the reemergence of them alongside Iris in that film raises the stakes considerably. Four Gyaos star in the opening of Gamera The Brave, and apparently the authorial intent was to have Zedus, the villain of that film mutate by eating their carcass (though that is not only not shown in the film but high improbable given the timeskip the film does show), so this is a similar mid film torch-passing to the Guiron example.

 

Every other kaiju, at least in the movies, is locked into their specific era. Design cues from some monsters transcend the eras, but Iris was its own monster instead of an updated Viras, and S Gyaos was inspired from Super Gyaos and Zedus but is not either of those characters. 

 

The Third Slot

 

I am trying to be somewhat objective here without just relying on boosting my favorites. Gamera and Gyaos would be in the Big Five no matter what, but, from here on out, we probably need to consider the other reappearances. In the Showa series (counting the stock footage of Gamera Super Monster), Gamera had 8 films and Gyaos appeared in 3 but Barugon, Viras, Guiron Jiger and Zigra had their first film as well as Super Monster. Of these 7, all but Barugon also have now appeared in Gamera Rebirth, so there is the first exclusion. (Barugon, while Gamera’s first opponent, can fairly be excluded from a Big Five because Anguirus, Godzilla’s first foe, is not part of the original Big Five.) But how do we narrow it down from Viras, Guiron, Jiger or Zigra?

 

 

Ultimately, Viras is my first pick of these because, taking the Gamera series as a multimedia franchise, the television show Gamera Rebirth played him up as a Big Bad over the other kaiju, and the Dark Horse comics set in the Heisei timeline use him as a main villain. In the Nintendo Game Gamera the Guardian of the Universe, Viras is the second opponent after Gyaos. From the angle of suit construction and design, director Yuasa was the most proud of Viras (the costume had multiple tentacles hanging that disguised the actor's legs as the two central tentacles). Also, as I'll touch on in an upcoming video on our YouTube channel, Viras is the connecting thread that inspired many of the lesser kaiju in the series and thus is important even beyond his own contributions.

 

Though this claim conflicts with previous reporting, Hiroyuki Seshita (the man behind Gamera Rebirth) recently stated that the 2015 proof of concept anniversary short’s unidentified tentacled monster was actually meant to be Viras and was a great inspiration on his own version of Viras. That short features Gyaos as a horde beast in the backstory but Viras as the main overarching villain, and we may be reaching a point where Viras as the big bad in a movie still featuring Gyaos is possible.

 

The Fourth Slot

 

Okay, this is where it gets substantially harder and a bit more…mathematical. The Big Five is essentially a metric of the pop culture impact, and Gamera kaiju more so than even his films exist in the pop culture through cameos and references. Some of these are very subtle and obligatory; Pacific Rim Uprising shows icons for and lists Gamera, Gyaos, Guiron, Jiger and Zigra as existing kaiju in the universe. While it does nothing to advance these characters, that is fairly a feat under the names of Guiron, Jiger and possibly Zigra for consideration in this fourth slot.

 

Thankfully, Wikizilla has a page devoted to Gamera references in popular culture, so we can very easily measure the footprint of each of these kaiju. An episode of the cartoon series Franklin uses the likenesses of Gyaos, Jiger, Viras and Barugon, and an episode of Pani Poni Dash has Gyaos and Viras. It is actually more common for Gamera to appear alongside other series’ monsters than his own, grouped with Godzilla, Mothra and once even Alien Baltan from Ultraman (but Godzilla was still also there). It makes sense that Gamera’s most adapted costar would be Godzilla (everyone has their own idea for how that crossover should eventually be done including me), but we actually have enough data without considering him to select the Big Fourth.

 

Comparing the cameo line-ups, Jiger would be the remaining commonality, and I was a little disappointed I would not get to include Guiron (for reasons I will get to, the fifth and final pick has to be a Heisei kaiju). However, then I started to notice that despite not being in the crowd of adapted kaiju as often as one like Jiger, it turned out that Guiron had a lot of references by himself or set apart in some way, as I noted, something also true of King Ghidorah.

 

 

Badaxtra, from Dexter’s Laboratory, by virtue of being derived from a bladed weapon is as much a Guiron reference as he is a Godzilla one, and the kaiju toy from Turbo Fast (pictured above) is equal parts Godzilla, Gigan and Guiron. (Guiron does not even need Gamera present to appear or inspire pop culture.) Finally, the monster in issue 69 of The Powerpuff Girls comic is literally just Guiron in their artstyle with extra eyes and limbs; he has the same knife shape of the head, same green color, tusks for all that is holy and even the pattern of triangles down its back that are easy to forget if you are not just directly copying the film’s design. (Also, when it came time for Gamera to come to the game Gigabash, it was Guiron specifically that came with him.)

 

Okay so Guiron is a knifeheaded quadruped but previous concepts for the design included fish, and he can swim as well as he can walk and leap, so he is a triphibian monster that shoots shurikens and is second only to Gamera for acrobatics (Gamera Rebirth reinvisioned his more chunky body type into essentially a slinky with a knife on the end to really emphasize the agility of his leaps and precision of his cuts). People do not forget a demented fish knife lizard guard dog, because, as creature designer Akira Inoue put it, “Only Guiron is like this.” Guiron had his own movie (that featured him chopping up Gyaos, a helpful point of fact to his presence in a Big Five) and also reappeared in Gamera Super Monster same as the rest but may have partially inspired Legion’s design in Gamera’s Heisei trilogy. Kaiju fans’ common sense tells them he inspired the Pacific Rim kaiju Knifehead, but there are official statements to the contrary. Still, Guiron casts a long shadow and is a worthy pick here.

 

Ultimately, if you would prefer Jiger for this pick, that is your prerogative. Pop culture has codified Jiger as one of the members of Gamera’s supporting cast if you go far enough down the list, while Guiron has taken on his own genre of parody kaiju. However, this is because there is something undeniably captivating about the acrobatic knife-headed Guiron, and it is an easier sell getting people to care about Guiron any time Gamera gets rebooted than it is for Jiger. That is especially true after Rebirth Guiron stole the show by being Gamera’s toughest fight, and Rebirth Jiger got half of its absurd powers removed.

 

The Fifth Slot

 

 

When designing a Mount Rushmore, you need to consider not only founding and growth but also preservation and development, so, given that the Showa kaiju have been largely interchangeable in pop culture with Guiron only having an edge because of how bizarre he is, we need to pick a Heisei kaiju for this last slot. The only issue is there is really only one choice, and that is Legion, but we’ll get there in a second. 

 

Gyaos is the first villain of the Heisei series and is obviously already firmly in our second slot on this list. Iris, the final villain of the Heisei trilogy, was actually designed after Viras, which makes me think that if Kadokawa were to put out a version of Viras like Rebirth’s that actually resonates, Iris would be a redundancy. (A purist might say that Viras as the boss of an alien invasion is incompatible with the spiritual red herring of Iris, but I would counter that for the majority of Viras’ first film, a similar moral ambiguity exists thematically where you think Viras is not actually the villain, as well as the fact that both of these final fights involve the villain monster impaling Gamera.) As I have already put Viras on the list, there is no room for Iris. (They even rhyme if you say Viras correctly and Iris incorrectly.) 

 

I love Zedus from Gamera the Brave a lot, but not only has his pop culture impact been small, but he has neither preserved nor developed the franchise; his movie killed the franchise. Legion, as the most creative of the Heisei monsters, an invading alien army realized through a truly alien sense of biology and creature design, developed the trilogy’s themes through Gamera’s dependence on Mana to defeat it. A middle chapter kaiju also necessarily keeps a series’ momentum going, and, with the variety of forms, Legion could easily be its own season of Gamera Rebirth.

 

Optional Sixth and Seventh Rangers

 

At the beginning of this article, I identified that technically Godzilla’s Son and King Kong as icons technically should map onto the Big Five given the specific criteria, and we can extend that analogy here. A “Son Of” character appears for Gamera in Gamera the Brave and Gamera Rebirth, and Jiger’s offspring is important to its story in the debut film to the point that Rebirth’s portrayal opted out of an adult Jiger to include a horde of infants (that ate each other to become one massive survivor). The lifecycle of Gyaos is also significant in many adaptations of the character, as well as in the development of Iris.  Though the inherent contradiction of Gamera fighting newborn Barugon or a horde of baby Gyaos is never addressed, it is less common for there not to be child kaiju in some form at some point in the story. (We can also consider the Garasharp short where Gamera is scripted to kill the adult snake but then rescue and rehabilitate its young.)

 

As far as the King Kong IP’s proximity to the Godzilla franchise (where revivals tend to align with each other, and there are times where the same company makes the films for each), Gamera also has an analog: Daimaijin. To my knowledge, Daimaijin and Gamera have not crossed over to the same extent, but Daimajin has a trilogy of films from the 60s with attempts at revivals almost as often as Kong (originally envisioned as the design of Gamera’s first opponent, later planned for an Ishiro Honda led film in the 80s, two projects in the 90s, one in the early 2000s, etc). Daimajin did get a television show in 2010 and a cameo appearance in a Great Yokai War movie recently. Unlike Kong, nothing has come of these characters’ proximity to each other, but, assuming Kadokawa can find their audience this time, a Monsterverse type series crossing Daimajin with Gamera (and maybe even the Whale God or Pairan Seijin) is a natural franchise step.

 

With that, our line-up would be Gamera, Gyaos, Viras, Guiron and Legion (with the “Son of” trope and Daimaijin also important to the conversation). Because this project involved research into not only the pop culture appearances of the mainline kaiju but into other sources indicating the presence of more obscure kaiju, stay tuned for a more complete subjective ranking of all the Gamera kaiju, probably in video form (All 30 Gamera Kaiju Ranked, Except Iris Who Joe Forgot).