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.