Godzilla's 70th Anniversary

[lhb412]

Well, here we are at 70 years, and the big guy is more popular than ever. Pretty wild, huh? I feel pretty lucky to have chosen such a cool (and relatively chill) thing to become a fan of when I was 4 years old!

I've had on the Tokushoutsu Godzilla stream this morning, I'm gonna hit the Minus One theatrical re-release in a few hours, and I've saved the new Godzilla Fest short for this evening! Is anyone else celebrating?

[Benjamin Haines]

It was fun skimming through the recording of this year's Godzilla Fest livestream on Toho's YouTube channel this morning. They announced the fourth volume of the Tokyo art exhibition Godzilla The Art by Parco that will be running next summer. They spent a while commemorating Mechagodzilla's 50th anniversary and they even brought Masaaki Tezuka and Eichi Asada onstage to interview them together. They focused a lot on upcoming toy releases (Toho has really learned how to tap into that international collectors market) and the Giant Condor appeared to win a poll for an upcoming toy release, which made the announcer proclaim "Unbelievable!" in English. They showed the new live-action short, which is awesome, and they even showed a lot of behind-the-scenes footage. They announced an upcoming blu-ray release of all five live-action shorts as well as that 4K UHD box set of six classic Godzilla movies coming next year. It was cool seeing ads throughout the livestream for Godzilla The Ride, that skyscraper projection, that zipline attraction, the art exhibition and an upcoming Godzilla manga. They closed the show by interviewing Takashi Yamazaki.

It is surreal to look back at the state of the Godzilla series as of the 50th anniversary and see how far things have progressed now. The 50th anniversary and everything that came with it were a huge deal to us fans but the Godzilla series was completely niche and ignored by general audiences at that point. Now, though, as of the 70th anniversary there's an ongoing series of Hollywood-produced Godzilla movies spanning four films with a fifth in the works, while Toho's latest Godzilla movie just won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, the entire Showa Series has been released on home video together as part of the Criterion Collection, there's been a steady flow of new Godzilla films and shows for the past ten years including anime adaptations, and the number of new fans just keeps rising. Godzilla really has made a huge comeback in cultural relevance.

[Kailem]

I somehow only just saw this thread! Oh well, better (a month) late than never!

Even though I knew there wasn't going to be anything *crazy* announced or shown that we didn't already know about, I still forced myself to stay up all night watching the stream anyway (my sleeping schedule was already basically ruined anyway, so I figured I'd make it official). After all, it's Godzilla! Plus I really wanted to watch the new short live and as soon as it was aired; so of course once they finally showed it my laptop and/or connection ground to a half midway through after being fine for all the hours preceding it. But at least the short itself was great! I do wish Toho would get out of the habit of scrubbing these things once they've aired (both the streams *and* the shorts), because they're really not doing anyone any favours. Once something's hit the internet anyone who wants to find it can still find it, regardless of whether or not it's still posted "officially".

Actually I take that back about nothing "crazy" being announced; Giant Condor getting some recognition was definitely unexpected! I thought it was a joke at first until realising they were actually serious! It's a shame we didn't get a new Gemstone short after all, but I kinda figured we wouldn't since we hadn't heard anything at all about one. Oh well, fingers crossed for next year!

It's a shame there's no English-friendly way to watch these, but given the live nature of them it's understandable. Though it *is* a bit a a pity they couldn't have at least provided subs for the pre-recorded video segments, since they literally had *Japanese* subtitles for them! But hey, at least we didn't need any for Dave Filoni's one! If anything I'd say that only made it even more obvious they've been trying to get Takashi Yamazaki to direct a Star Wars film, and that was one of the things he turned down in those comments of his a few weeks back where he said he'd gotten many offers to direct American films that he had to turn down in order to do the next Godzilla.

It seems like they were probably hoping to announce Yamazaki's helming of that at the end of this stream, but were forced to confirm it early when it started to leak, since I can't see any other reason to announce it a day or two prior to this. Either way it was cool to see him there, even if I don't speak Japanese.

And just as I'd rewatched Godzilla vs Megalon last year and Godzilla vs Hedorah the year before that to tie in with their respective anniversaries, I'd been saving my rewatch of Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla until after this year's 70th, so that was a great way to cap things off.

And yeah, it's crazy how Godzilla's global profile has arguably never been bigger. The 50th anniversary and the build-up to Final Wars was awesome, as that movie really did feel like one big celebration of Godzilla history and Toho tokusatsu in general (I know it's divisive, but I've always loved it). But with Minus One last year and GxK this year, anniversary short films having become the norm along with livestreams, a new film announced from the critically-acclaimed director of the last one, a live-action Godzilla TV show currently filming its second season and more, Godzilla is just absolutely on top of the world right now, not just with us fans but with general audiences too; and that's awesome! Just like at the end of movies like GMK, Minus One etc., it just goes to show that even though sometimes he might be down, he's never, ever out.