#hanuman and the seven ultramen

[astoundingbeyondbelief]

Kaiju Week in Review (October 9-15, 2022)

Supreme shock sensation of our times: a Godzilla comic released on schedule! Godzilla: Monsters & Protectors - All Hail the King! #1 dropped on Wednesday. I'll confess I forgot about it for a couple of days; your priorities get scrambled when you're recovering from knee surgery. This is a direct sequel to last year's Monsters & Protectors; I don't recommend going in blind. Two big reasons to pick it up: Gabara's debut in American comics (in a dream, natch) and a professional Xilien troll who muses over which reaction .gif he should deploy. Yeah, me too.

Toho released a teaser and this very cool still for the upcoming short Fest Godzilla 3: Gigan's Attack, showing off the Showa Gigan replica suit Shinichi Wakasa built. It's strange to see it opposite FinalGoji (presumably the same stunt suit from last year's Godzilla vs. Hedorah short). I guess it's just his destiny to face Godzilla suits that are barely holding themselves together.

I cannot hope to comprehensively cover the deluge of Godzilla merchandise forever threatening my bank account in this column, but I would like to spotlight this enamel Baragon pin, designed by Christian Gonzalez for Ghost X Ghost. When I saw it my hands simply moved to order of their own volition.

The Dino De Laurentiis King Kong films are getting format upgrades. StudioCanal has a 4K restoration of the 1976 remake slated for November 28, while Umbrella Entertainment is bringing King Kong Lives, long out of print in the States, to Blu-ray on January 18. Neither company is American, but 4Ks don't have region codes and I hear Umbrella Blu-rays are typically region-free.

Probably neither will be a buy for me. The color grading on the 4K King Kong doesn't look great, and the special features don't measure up to the Blu-ray Shout! released last year. I will grant that the King Kong Lives Blu looks like a winner, with great packaging and new special features including a Ray Morton audio commentary. (They had to be new; the old DVD didn't have a thing to mine.) But it's not exactly one of my favorites, and since Shout! recently picked up the rights to it, I'd rather hold out for a version I don't have to import.

Just over a year after it premiered at Fantastic Fest, Iké Boys is out on digital courtesy of (they just keep coming up) Shout! Factory. Hopefully a physical release will follow, because this heartfelt American tribute to tokusatsu doesn't deserve to be buried in the Google Play Store. Set in the last month of 1999, it concerns a pair of Oklahoma tokusatsu geeks and a Japanese exchange student trying to prevent the apocalypse, empowered by the obscure 1969 anime film that predicted it. It's very low-budget and hits a lot of predictable coming-of-age beats, but it's got a good heart and Yumiko Shaku (yes, Akane in Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla) classes it up. Also... it's not often I'm pandered to so directly. The director's one of us, to put it mildly.

Big thing are happening on the bootleg circuit... a couple of them last week, but I never posted about them on Tumblr and this is the first installment of this column. Yesterday, Skeweds Translations posted fansubs for What to Do with the Dead Kaiju?, Toei and Shochiku's kaiju comedy with no U.S. release outside of film festivals in sight. The film is catastrophically bad, I'm sorry to say, failing as a satire and as a genre exercise; Day of the Kaiju handled the same premise far better in a quarter of the time. But if you're so inclined, you can find a copy of the movie itself on the cat site... along with a higher-quality copy of Shin Ultraman than was uploaded there previously. I don't know where these things are coming from (Zarab?), but I'm not complaining.

And in the how-can-this-be-real category, a treat for your ears: the recently unearthed Hong Kong dub of Hanuman and the Seven Ultramen. As in Godzilla vs. Megalon, Ted Thomas, Chris Hilton, and Warren Rooke voice many of the characters. You won't believe the words coming out of their mouths—I don't think they did either. Between the child murder, checkmated atheist, and Hanuman's unquenchable thirst for carnage, this was always one of the kaiju movies with the most jaw drops per minute, and it just got better. A VHS containing the dub turned up in Lebanon; @Redcome40977685, @PrissMegaforce, Omayyad, and Elie Al Hajj got it digitized and @spacehunter-m synced the audio up to a fine-looking widescreen version.

#kaiju week in review #godzilla #godzilla monsters and protectors all hail the king #fest godzilla 3 gigan's attack #gigan #gabara #baragon #king kong #king kong 1976 #king kong lives #home video #ike boys #what to do with the dead kaiju? #hanuman and the seven ultramen #kaiju