AH HE'S DONE! Absolutely loved this lil comfort project! I haven't drawn Gamera in YEARS, so this was refreshing! Hoping we get more of our big turtle! He's super stylized and I wanted him to be old Japanese yokai inspired! SO SILENCE KAIJU COMMUNITY. Also I listened to sooo much Wagakki Band while drawing this guy and I forgot how much I loveeee them 💚

⚠️DO NOT REPOST, OR TRACE MY WORK.⚠️

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Happy 58th Anniversary to the Guardian of the Universe and friend of all children Gamera! 🐢

On this day...

- November 27, 1965 -

Happy Gamera Day to our Earth Defender, the Guardian and Friend to All Children!

Gamera bubblegum wrappers, 1970s

GAMERA IS BACK, BABY!

Netflix has really been serving the kaiju content, first with Godzilla Singular Point and then Kong: Skull Island and now this. It's great to see the big turtle boy finally getting his much deserved revival after Gamera The Brave kind of fell flat (which was a shame, since I personally loved the idea of him being a child's pet that grew into a giant, which would explain his benevolence and affection to humans much in the way that Zilla Jr. from Godzilla: The Series became a heroic kaiju after imprinting on Nick Tatoupolos as a human surrogate parent.) He does seem to retain his two defining traits in Rebirth, his gentleness to humans--and his sheer merciless brutality to the evil monsters who would seek them harm.

The villains here too are back! They all look like faithful yet more-serious reimaginings of the entire Showa roster. Though one in particular kinda bothers me...Zigra.

He looks like an aquatic Gyaos now.

So I tried experimenting on a concept for a more Showa-faithful Zigra, going for the more goblin shark-esque look. Rebirth's sort of pterosaur-like appearance was kind of interesting so I tried preserving some of those features, along with legs inspired by early tetrapods and lobefin fish as a reference to his randomly growing legs in the original Gamera vs. Zigra and gave him an upright, somewhat penguin-like stance since he was quite cumbersome on land in the original, though not helplessly so.

And of course, Rebirth's rogues gallery is conspicuously missing one particular kaiju...

None other than Gamera's first-ever foe, Barugon!

He seems to be based on a Jackson's chameleon (or perhaps a horned agama), so giving him more explicitly chameleon-like traits is a pretty obvious choice, most notably the eyes (Showa Barugon had weird eyes that blink sideways) and giving him the fixed skin-covered telescope-like eyes of a chameleon fits him quite well. Then of course are his dorsal spines: here I've made them glassy and transparent to act as prisms, with each row of spines producing a different color that then is focused into a single point that then explodes into a firework-like meteor shower of destruction.

Gamera playing Zigra like a xylophone is actually so funny, he's already won he's just rubbing salt in the wound.

The Cinema Film Of The Week - Gamera vs Zigra

Directed By Noriaki Yuasa

Story By Niisan Takahashi

Starring Eiko Yanami, Reiko Kasahara, and Mikiko Tsubouchi

Music By Shunsuke Kikuchi

Distributed By Dainichi Eihai

Release Date July 17, 1971

Country Japan

(Art By Matt Frank)

Gamera Movie Marathon

Gamera the Giant Monster / The Invincible

Gamera vs Barugon

Gamera vs Jiger

Gamera vs Guiron

Gamera vs Zigra

Gamera vs Gyaos

Gamera vs Viras

Gamera Super Monster

Gamera Guardian of the Universe

Gamera 2 Attack of Legion

Gamera 3 Revenge of Iris

Gamera the Brave

Zigra is a goblin shark, not a ray. That is all. There has got to be a standard where a character has been changed so radically that it is no longer that character anymore and should not be accepted as such.

Film Ranking and Retrospective

So, after evaluating all twelve Gamera films based on purely objective metrics like turtle spin velocity, character development, how much I cried, number of potential sapphic relationships, and least amount of tapeworm, here they are from favorite to least favorite:

Gamera the Brave

Gamera: Guardian of the Universe

Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris

Gamera 2: Advent of Legion

Gamera: Super Monster

Gamera vs. Zigra

Gamera vs. Guiron

Gamera vs. Barugon

Giant Monster Gamera

Gamera vs. Gyaos

Gamera vs. Viras

Gamera vs. Jiger

Gamera the Brave takes the top spot for being so much more than it needed to be, perhaps taking a few steps outside what makes a typically good monster movie to just be an all-around great film. Of course, the Heisei trilogy still aren’t far behind, balancing the two a lot better than the Brave does and building an excellent cast of characters to the point that the hardest decision on this entire list, and the one I’m most likely to go back on at any moment, is ranking these three films against each other. Super Monster reaches for the stars just like the Brave does, daring to be something wholly unique despite its objective flaws, and is held back only by a gut punch ending after the likes of which I can’t actually make myself put it higher than the Heisei films. And of course, the rest of the Showa films are still going to end up ranked lower by being products of their time and having a relatively limited approach to in-depth storytelling, but there are still some I find exceptional for more unique reasons than I once thought I would. I even genuinely like most of Jiger, it’s just so much sensory hell it can be tricky to watch.

But my goals during this extended fixation weren’t really centered on pitting the films against each other - there was a lot of discovery, too. About halfway through March I did something I hadn’t expected I’d want to at the beginning, and bought myself the Arrow Video complete Showa era collection, mainly to get a physical copy of Super Monster but also with the bonus of getting to see Japanese versions of all eight films. In fact, I’ve now seen the Showa films probably just about any way one can see them, be that the subtitled original Japanese version, the AIP dub or first import English version, the Daiei pre-international dub (which I’ve learned is a more accurate term than “Sandy Frank”), the MST3K edition, the MST3K KTMA edition, the MST3K Fanmade edition, or specifically in Gamera: Super Monster’s case, the Elvira’s Movie Macabre edition or the Cinema Insomnia edition that’s missing a whole third of the movie.

That’s quite a lot of watching the Showa movies, and I think really a big theme for all of this was gaining a better appreciation of those films, specifically Noriaki Yuasa and his vision. He imagined Gamera as a hero for children, specifically because, as a child himself, living through the second World War and its aftermath, he came to believe adults were untrustworthy and too easily swayed by propaganda, and if that doesn’t make him the most relatable kaiju film directer of all time I don’t know what could possibly top it. Screw Gamera: Rebirth, the next one should be Gamera vs. Fox News.

Oh, right, speaking of which, I haven’t talked about that, either. And that’s because most of the major reasons I like the existing Gamera films so much tend to be more happenstance, and have little to do with how well they’ve followed the franchise formula. So far, nothing about Gamera: Rebirth has told me anything about how well it will handle its human characters, whether any of their stories will be relatable to me personally, whether it’ll have a strong environmental stance like Zigra, and actually with what we’ve seen of the cast, it seems like there aren’t going to be too many women in this series at all. Of course, that could always change, and there’s always a chance the one lady we’ve seen in the trailers could be compelling enough on her own to still make it a favorite, like with Mai in Gamera the Brave, but we won’t know anything for sure until release. But if, as seems most likely, Rebirth really is just a throwback to the early Showa era, I think now I can be a little more okay with that.

(I do actually quite like the monster designs revealed thus far. If I ever go back and write that possible Gamera vs. the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sequel, there’s a good chance of that magenta Neo-Jiger showing up in the Triceraton arena).

I think, if I were to put into words what makes Gamera unique among kaiju cinema, it’s that Gamera is most consistently a story about a giant monster interacting with humans, in most cases one or more specific humans. When I write for Toho kaiju (and by that I mean Battra), I’ll admit I’m basically just using yet another combination of the 37853590434 creative ways people have come up with to tell a story that’s still really about humans but using the monsters as the characters - and we do this because the monsters do have character. Unlike most giant creatures in the west, Japanese daikaiju represent things, they have emotions and personal values and life purposes, and often unique dynamics in interacting with one another. But you can’t really do much with just this side of things for the Gamera franchise, since there’s not a single monster in any of the full-length films whose relationship with Gamera is anything but antagonistic. But Gamera is already about the relationship between humans and monsters, and that was what I wanted to specifically take these couple of months to explore here, as it’s very similar to the stories I've already been straying farther from canon in order to tell with the friends and enemies of the other Big G.

As far as most of the western kaiju fandom is concerned, having such a focus on humans might appear to be the biggest risk the Gamera movies ever took, given how many fans I often see dismissing the human characters as unimportant at best, annoying at worst. Personally, I beg to differ, and the more I rewatch these films, the more I’ve begun to appreciate how remarkable it is that this one subset of historical foreign cinema, with the characters it portrays and the values it represents, became embedded in western culture all because there happened to be a market for imported special effects films. There are actually quite a lot of kaiju movies whose stories inspire me to want to write about the humans as well as the monsters. But the top of that list, if I wrote it out, would probably be stacked with more Gamera movies than anything else.

Zigra

Altura: 90 metros (sin contar las aletas)

Longitud: 540 metros

Primer Avistamiento: Oceano Pacifico [Tierra: Teratoverso]

Guarida: Oceano Pacifico [Tierra:Teratoverso] Mares aledaños a la Isla Ember [Avatarverso]

Aspecto: Zigra (Era Showa)

Controles: Agua Control [Nado, Salto Acuatico, Torbellino Marino]

Aliados: King Ghidorah, Orga

Kaijus y otras bestias:

Enemigos:

Humanos: Aang, Katara, Soka, Iroh, Zuko, Ozai y Azula

Kaijus y otras bestias: Godzilla, Anguirus, King Kong, Mothra, Rodan, Baragon, Litra, Gorosaurus

You can tell from Gamera vs Zigra that they wanted to go all out and had Tokyo destroyed utterly…but lacked the budget so Tokyo is ruined offscreen

Honestly a slight remaster with minature effects of the city falling to fire and Earthquakes could be cute… or finding the right stock footage

Gamera Vs Zigra 1971 Movie Review Finale Part Four

What?!? Not Even Zigra Can Keep The Audience From Fleeing?!? Quick! End The Movie!!Ugh. The movie is finally over. Thank nature. Let’s go into it, as tomorrow we have one final Golden Age Gamera movie to begin… Ugh. Yes. If the Chinese have bootlegged horribly cringey Live Action Drama Komi Can’t Communicate from 2021? I promise to review it… But hey! Good news! At long last Live Action Bill &…

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I was gonna write a caption, but this photo disturbs me on too many levels.