Somehow Dad let me have the magazine (strange, considering how much he hated me liking this stuff....my stepmother hissed "it's the work of the DEVIL!" shortly before I moved away from them permanently
)
It would be another 4 years (1975) before I finally saw the movie on afternoon tv in L.A. after school (same channel that introduced me to Gorath, Atragon, and other more obscure Showa Japanese movies), and man what a shock....growing up to the distinctive atmosphere of 60's Toho, I was expecting and envisioning that, and got....this.
I was still learning who was who in these movies at the time, (and the limited sources of information at the time definitely had a condescending bent towards Japanese sci-fi) how they were made, the concept of stock footage, waning budgets, but the jarring shift in atmosphere and tone was kind of short-circuiting; expecting to hear Ifukube's music, see Tsuburaya's effects (still too n00b to understand that he had passed away) and getting...this.
That music, I couldn't get that music out of my head.
It did help illustrate one thing, and that was the direction the movies seemed to take after 1970, and I realized then how much I loved the 60's movies.
Maybe it took the Heisei series to revisit this and have a new appreciation for the 70's G-movies, I dunno.... I still cannot sit through Megalon. But I look at the 70's G-movies these days as an offbeat guilty pleasure. Actually, I love GvsMG and ToMG, with this one close behind, and as much as I love the monster Hedorah itself, the movie takes some effort to get through.
