G-Fest XXII (July 10-12, 2015)

[klen7]

[klen7]

[klen7]

Anyone else planning on attending this year?

[XvGojira]

[DannyBeane]

I'll be going this year. I am gonna be staying at a friend in Chicago's place to save up more money for kaiju merchandise goodness! I'll be heading up from Ohio on Wednesday.

[klen7]

During Tezuka's panel he mentioned he was given 5 scripts for different concepts as a follow up to Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla, but he wasn't crazy about them so he wrote Tokyo SOS. Toho said they were fine with whatever concept as long as it included Mothra. What is also interesting is that one of the 5 pitched scripts featured Space Godzilla. I thought that was pretty wild that there could have been a millennium SG

[DannyBeane]

And I missed that panel because of a stupid headache

[klen7]

Aww man, that's a shame. He told a couple stories that aren't supposed to leave the room. The best of which included an on set fist fight between a couple of well known players in G history.

[mr.negativity]

[klen7]

He said he didn't like the stories that were pitched. Unfortunately we didn't get more insight into the rejected concepts... I personally could have listened to that for the full panel.

I wish there had been more time for fan questions. I really wasn't fan of about 2/3 of JD's questions

[mr.negativity]

KaijuCast X G-Fest XXII:

[Godzilla21]

So what was the consensus on G Fest this year? Guests seemed light.

[klen7]

I had a blast. The guests were a little light considering Yukijiro Hotaru canceled and the replacement was an actor mostly known for Sentai work and Tokyo SOS. Last year had too many guests, so somewhere in between is the magic spot. I actually was able to hit 90% of the panels i wanted to this year since the guests weren't overlapping them.


They "fixed" the fiasco with signatures this year, but i felt a little bad for the guests having to man signature tables for so much of the convention, and signatures were $20 a piece, so i only got one item signed by Tezuka.


The Tezuka panels were great. lots of interesting stories i hadn't heard before, and plenty of dirt. There were a couple awkward interview questions from JD. It felt like the two hours weren't enough. Would loved to heard more about some of the things he touched on.

Symphonic Fury was pretty solid. There was something off in the percussion of the Gamera 3 suite that i found distracting, but the Ifukube portion was wonderful... one mini rant though [rant] the wankery at the end really needs to be toned down. When you bring the guest of honor up and he receives a standing ovation, it diminishes that honor when you ride the ovation to have the audience clap for your girlfriend and your "boys in the goon squad".. it came across as tacky in an otherwise classy production [/rant]



The costume parade was a lot lighter than last year with 4 or 5 kids wearing store bought costumes and G-Pardy finals were pretty solid as well.





The sculpture room was really at a top notch level this year. Lots of impressive kits and original compositions





I didn't get to see the films at the festival portion that i wanted to see due to scheduling overlap, so i hope to see them eventually. I did pick up too much stuff from the dealers room, but only missed out on one figure i wanted because i hesitated.




The Pickwick was business as usual, and i did go to both Biollante and Megaguirus. The one thing i found odd was that people were laughing throughout Biollante, but rarely during Megaguirus.. i suspect it was because Biollante was dubbed and Megaguirus was subbed(?) but i hadn't seen either of the films on the big screen before, so i enjoyed it.




Next year should be interesting with the G'16 hype and premieres of Wolfman vs Godzilla & the new Raiga film. I'm already pretty psyched.

[XvGojira]

I actually got to sit in the VIP section at Symphony. Not that my group and I meant to. We were looking for a spot with 4 seats, found a choice spot and sat down. A couple in the row in front of us sat down but was told by a helper (goon squad?) that that was a reserved row. Said nothing about the four of us. More people fill in and I look down and two seats away was Robert Scott Field and across the isle from him was Kow Otani. I was expecting to get shoo'd out of the seats at any moment. But then the lights went down, many of the helpers sat in the row in front of us, and the show started.

So yeah, that was fun and totally unintentional.

I didn't think I was going to spend all the money brought and I oddly enough didn't get a t-shirt like usual, but lo and behold; a book here, a CD there, and a meal or two and poof goes $300.

As hyped as I was for the G85 panel, it was a tad underwhelming. The only new thing I really learned from it was that Raymond Burr wrote the ending monologue himself. Half the questions in the Q&A were already answered in the panel, so I'm not sure if some people came in part way through (kind of hard when the little room was packed so tight) or were just so excited to ask something they've been wondering about for so long that they totally missed that in the panel.

Kaiju Gaiden was a blast and a half! Can't wait to see more of Godzilla vs Wolfman and hopefully there'll be more from Jet Jagua/M-11 short next year too.

[DannyBeane]

I loved G Fest this year. Its been 10 years since I last went to G-fest and its a shame. I'm definitely going to start making this an annual pilgrimage. I had a blast meeting people from here and the facebook groups.