In-depth Gamera history by August Ragone (video series)

[Benjamin Haines]

On Saturday, October 17, 2015, August Ragone hosted The Kaiju Movie Marathon: Gamera's Revenge, presented by Shout! Factory TV and Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.

For this all-day event, Shout! Factory TV streamed the English-subtitled Japanese versions of the first eleven Gamera films on their YouTube channel with a live chatbox embedded next to the video. Each movie was preceded by a different interstitial video of August expounding behind-the-scenes information and historical context for the flick that was about to play. With English-language resources on Gamera's history being relatively scarce in the West compared to Godzilla, these videos provide a lot of eye-opening insight into the making of each film.


Edit 05-28-2017
The individual videos are no longer publically viewable on the Shout! Factory TV YouTube channel, but they have been compiled into one long video that is viewable on their website:

http://www.shoutfactorytv.com/backlot/g ... 0805364a00


Original video links (now private):

[Legion]

My favorite thing about this is how the earlier films sometimes have intros of up to 9-10 minutes, while only one of the intros for the three Kaneko films break the four minute mark.

[DannyBeane]

[lhb412]

[Benjamin Haines]

[lhb412]

So much makes sense now: the extended flashback in Viras, the insane padding of Zigra which frequently made me wonder 'why is this being filmed?', and the marketing tie-in stuff of Super Monster.

I'd like to know more about the resurgence in popularity of kaiju around '80, which was big enough to warrant attention, but not strong enough to revive the genre. They re-released some early Toho films, right?

[Benjamin Haines]

It's interesting to know that Daiei had no intention of making Gamera vs. Viras until AIP approached them. It makes sense that the end credits of Gyaos play over a montage of scenes from the first three movies, similar to what Toho would eventually do for Godzilla vs. Destroyer. When Yuasa and the Daiei crew made Gyaos, they didn't think they would get to make another one after it so that ending montage really was meant as a capper on the saga of Gamera.

[Rodanex]

Anyone else hear those weird sounds in the background of these videos?

[DannyBeane]

[king_ghidorah]

As others have said, the newer films have been covered pretty extensively via western fanzines and commentaries so I am glad August focused on the Showa era stuff for this stuff primarily.

Good, stuff though. As a pretty big Gamera fan, this type of behind the scenes coverage in English is the type of new information that I have been salivating for.

[O.Supreme]

[Benjamin Haines]

[Specium Ray]

Aaauuugh why didn't I save these when I had the chance!?

[lhb412]

It's all compiled here as an episode of 'Backlot' on ShoutFactoryTV!


http://www.shoutfactorytv.com/backlot/g ... 0805364a00

[Specium Ray]

[lhb412]

I went through the same deal a couple of months ago when I realized the clips had vanished from YouTube!

[Benjamin Haines]

Shout! Factory back in 2015 that their home video rights to the Gamera films have lapsed, which is why all of their Gamera DVDs are out of print, including the MST3K set.



The streaming rights to the Gamera films must have been separate from the home video rights since Shout! Factory did this whole Gamera marathon with August Ragone in October 2015. Plus, they were able to stream the Heisei trilogy even though they never had the home video rights for those films. I wonder why S!F removed the individual August host segments from their YouTube channel. I would have thought it was because their streaming rights to the Gamera films have lapsed as well and those segments are full of Gamera clips, yet they still have that compilation of all of August's videos hosted on their own website. That's odd. I do have all of the individual host videos saved as 720p MP4 files since I figured S!F would remove them eventually, so they'll never be lost to time!

[lhb412]

^Seems Mill Creek's license was similarly short: their Blu-Rays (at least for the trilogy, their first license) seems to have gone out of print, though because they flooded the market with 'em it's still easy to come by.

[Alpha OTS]

[Specium Ray]

When I have time, I'm going to transcribe these. There's very little info on Gamera in English, and this series is full of gems.

[GFan]

I learned a lot from these, great stuff! That Godzilla vs. Gamera show must have been SO cool to see!

[lhb412]

Dunno if there'd be a market for it, but I'd love for a Gamera book to compliment the half dozen decent Godzilla books published in North America in the past two decades or so.

Preferably if August did it and could format it in a similar style as his Tsuburaya book (which had so many photos it was just as much an art book).

[Russzilla]

Different monster, but I noticed that the Godzilla movies that were on Shout Factory TV are no longer available, but the Showa Gameras still are.