Google’s explanation:
The lights dim. Cameras start to roll. A film crew silently watches. Suddenly! From behind a hand-built skyline, a towering beast appears! Shaking off a layer of dust, the massive foam-and-rubber monster leans back to act out an amazing roar (the sound effect will be added in later). Then, stomping towards the camera, the giant moves closer, and closer, until…”Cut!”
Seen this film before? This live action genre, known as “Tokusatsu” (特撮) in Japanese, is unmistakable in its style, and still evident in many modern beast-based thrillers. In today’s Doodle, we spotlight one of Tokusatsu’s kings, Eiji Tsuburaya, the quiet pioneer who created Ultraman, co-created Godzilla, and brought Tokusatsu to the global cinematic mainstream…
For whatever outdated-browser+user-incompetence reason, the clickies wouldn’t work for me at all. If you’re similarly afflicted, I found a ‘cheat’ video while looking for an embed.
Davebo
I LOVED Ultraman!
Tenar Darell
I have a short animated film. The Oceanmaker if you all haven’t seen it yet.
And five minute video of the trail from slavery to mass incarceration. From the Racial Justice League of Alabama. h/t Jezebel (Is it wrong that I wanted to argue with the term “racial bias,” because it felt like trying to soften/change terms to something easier for some to hear? I even wondered how long before that terminology becomes more of an insult than participating in the problem it is trying to describe. Huh, I sound so old and cynical).
NotMax
You’ve seen one Tokyo Tower destroyed by giant monster movie, you’ve seen ’em all.
The anime of Please Save My Earth had a somewhat different take involving Tokyo Tower. If you’ve never seen it, intriguingly outre and far removed from standard anime fare. Ignore that for the first part of the first episode it seems like nothing so much as a typical chick flick anime (it’s not), and one can forgive the rather hastily constructed ending (put together when the funding dried up – so only runs six episodes). Nice music, too.
English dubbed first episode.
PurpleGirl
One of the ‘recent’ Godzilla movies was filming in NYC around Madison Square Park. It was funny to see the flatbed trucks on which they stored these huge rubber mats shaped and painted to look like dead fish during the day. About 5 pm they would start pulling the mats off the trucks, sometime around dawn they’d roll them up again and hoist them onto the trucks. I don’t remember how long they were filming though. Scenes from Men in Black were filmed in and outside the Lexington Avenue Armory. I didn’t see any of the stars but I walked past the food tables and the generator trucks on my way to work.
Steeplejack
Somewhat infelicitous timing (but nobody’s fault), since El Rey had a tokusatsu festival all weekend, including multiple showings of Gojira. Bqhatevwr.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
There are apparently guys who dress up in giant monster costumes and wrestle each other in a miniature city set. Professionally, in front of a crowd. I can’t remember what it’s called because the book I saw it in is at work.
Steeplejack
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
There’s an organization in D.C. called Artomatic that sponsors art shows every year or so. I still think about one ink drawing that showed Godzilla tromping through Tokyo but holding a McDonald’s bag and with an expression like “Yum! I got takeout!” on his face. Totally oblivious to the destruction. It was such an unexpected, perfectly executed take on a classic image. Like a New Yorker cartoon that ends up sounding kind of lame when you describe it to someone. Sigh.
Anyway, the drawing was not expensive—lots of art students in the Artomatic shows—but I had no money in those days and couldn’t even pretend to afford it. But it haunts me.
Zinsky
I find nothing interesting or compelling about Japan or its so-called culture. Sorry. Derivative, uncreative, repetitive and boring – Japan is an ant colony society that has little or nothing going for it.