Pages

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Godzilla Heisei and Millenium Era Double Features DVDs to be Released

Original theatrical poster for GODZILLA VS. KING GHIDORAH (1991)

August Ragone, author of the must-have book "Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters" (available on Amazon) has some great news. On his blog, "The Good, The Bad, and Godzilla," Mr. Ragone confirmed the release of double feature DVD sets coming May 6th 2014.

The titles have already been listed on Amazon.com by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Below is the list of the four double features with links to Amazon.

GODZILLA FINAL WARS (2004) & GODZILLA: TOKYO SOS (2003)

August Ragone notes, "Conspicuously missing are GODZILLA 2000 (1999), GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK (2001), and GODZILLA AGAINST MECHAGODZILLA (2002). It's unknown at this time if these will follow — I'll keep checking on sources..."

Thanks for the heads-up August Ragone!

MORE ABOUT AUGUST RAGONE

August Ragone was born in San Francisco and is the Rondo Award winning author of the highly regarded "Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters" (Chronicle Books, 2007). August has commented on Japanese film and popular culture on radio, television, in print, online, and at events for more than three decades. While still a teen, he served as "Japanese Film" & "Godzilla Expert" for legendary horror host Bob Wilkins at KTVU TV-2.

From his experience living in Tokyo and meeting Japanese filmmakers, August has written liner notes for numerous DVD releases, edited and authored over 100 subtitle scripts (so far), and has also contributed to periodicals such as the Japanese Fantasy Film Journal, Filmfax, Video Watchdog, Asian Cult Cinema, Henshin! Online, Oriental Cinema, G-Fan, Super7, Otaku USA, Monster Attack Team, and Famous Monsters of Filmland.

The Baghdad-by-the-Bay native has also been an event promoter, starting with the "Japanese Fantasy Film Faire" (1979), the first Anime event held outside of Japan, as well as producing live music and multi-media events including The Sleazefest, Incredibly Strange Wrestling, The Greaseball, Godzillafest, and Shock It To Me!.

Saturday, March 1, 2014

Godzilla 2014 Confirmed to be the Biggest Yet

Godzilla 2014 Director, Gareth Edwards confirms 350ft Godzilla
Yesterday we revealed that Gareth Edwards has confirmed that Godzilla will be 350ft tall in the new Legendary release of Godzilla 2014. Read the quote from "Empire Magazine" below.

He also revealed that it's the biggest Godzilla to hit the big screen. "Technically he's 350ft in our film."

He also noted that they experimented with different sizes, making him small, huge, and dinosaur size. But then they realized that 350ft made him the biggest of all the Godzillas "So we said, 'let's do that.'"
Full version of the Godzilla Size Chart


The larger Godzilla actually follows a 30-year trend among the 27+ Godzilla movies. In fact, "Wired Magazine" actually figured out what the mathematical formula is for this trend.

Graph Plotting Godzilla's Height Over Time

Read an excerpt from this "Wired Magazine" article:

These are mostly guesses for the years.  I could have looked up the actual movie dates, but I’m too lazy.  So, this is just an approximation of Godzilla’s size not the size of the actual and REAL Godzilla.
Actually, I plotted the natural log of height as a function of time. Why? Well, this is a more generic plot that I can then add a linear function to. Otherwise, I am assuming that Godzilla grows linearly with time. Why would anyone think that? And yes, I cheated. You can’t take the natural log of “50 meters”. Really this is the natural log of the height per meter (so that the stuff inside has no units).
Now, when I fit a linear function to this data I get the following (where a and b are the fit parameters from plotly).
La te xi t 1
That’s it. I have a, I have b so I get use this function to get the Godzilla height for any year. Now, let’s just plug in the year of t = 2025 (yes, t is in years). This gives:
La te xi t 1
That is 121.6 meters but I left off the meters because of my mathematical cheat above. Yes, that’s not so big. The reason is that although the 2014 Godzilla is 140 meters, this is bigger than the other trend. Really, it’s too big. A better value would be around 100 meters (this is based on the fit that includes the 140 m height though).
SRC: Wired Magazine, "Godzilla Gets Bigger Each Year"