If you grew up in the late 70’s and early 80’s… like a certain wee Catgirl did… then there’s a real chance you too got to spend your Saturday Afternoons glued to the TV watching the plethora of Japanese “Kaiju” films that played endlessly here in the US for the entertainment of children (and more than a few adults, no doubt…. 😉 ) with a day off from school and faaaar too much free time on their hands. Godzilla… Gamera… Rodan… Mothra… King Ghidora…. a seemingly endless horde of giant “rubber suited” monsters whose main mission in life seemed to be to pop out of someplace, be it the depths of the ocean, some arctic deep freeze, or the cold endless void of outer space to find a city and kick the living crap out of it while smashing the mightiest of human armies who were powerless to do much more than even slow them down. Ahhhh… the memories… 😉
Well now…. it’s been… **ahem**… a “few” years since wee lil’ Miyuki gleefully squealed with joy at the apocalyptic antics of all those rubber suited monsters as they stomped and kicked the freaking beejeebits out of Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama and all points east, but thankfully it seems, this wee Catgirl wasn’t the only one enjoying the guilty pleasure of watching that mayhem all those years ago. Our blogging friend Stephen aka Elpeevio of “Things Fall Apart” remembers those old films fondly as well… and when the new Blockbuster Sci-Fi film “Pacific Rim” promised to give all us nostalgic monster movie fans a heapin’ helping of Kaiju fun, it wasn’t hard to convince a crazy Kitten like me that Carolyn and I needed a “Movie Night” out for a change so that we might do another “Dual Review” on this one.
Actually my relationship with such movies and ideas is a little more distanced. As you know, in the UK during my **ahem** formative years, we only had 3 TV channels (and one of them was very part time, the others only broadcast 15 hours a day at best), and so we really didn’t get much imported Children’s programming, and a Godzilla movie would have been incredibly unusual to be shown (yes, believe it or not people, there was a time before downloads, before DVD, before VHS). I do remember really loving “Battle of the Planets” (The Americanised version of “Science Ninja Team Gatchaman”), which had a little bit of Mecha going on. However, whilst I did not know the whole world behind them, I did get a bunch of Macross model kits as a present (other kids got Airfix Aeroplane kits, I got giant Robots… I think a formative parenting choice there), which I adored and played with until I was far too old to admit. The Monster movies was actually more likely to have been rooted in my childhood obsession with Dinosaurs (what young nerd isn’t?), which led to me finding a big picture book about these films in the local library. So my younger experiences was about Movie Stills, Posters and ideas.
I always forget just how saturated the American people are by media compared to the rest of the world. Even before the advent of Cable TV we still received about a dozen broadcast channels just in our area when I was little. Probably why this girl turned into such a movie geek… 😉
Anyways, Gentle Visitors… if the idea of “Giant Robots going all MMA wrasslin’ on gnarly alien mega-monsters to decide the fate of all Humanity” also sounds like your idea of fun family entertainment, then maybe you’ll wanna let Stephen and I tell you all about it. So then…. Watcha waitin’ for? “Let’s get ready to Rrrruumble!!” 😉
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