A Hippie in the House of Mouse (Jim Henson at Disney, 1980)
- Thread starter Geekhis Khan
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Looking ahead to next year - does anything happen to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids or Dead Poets Society?
You and me, both!
Just reading the outline for The Cheapest Muppet Movie... had me laughing. The touch where Gonzo is reduced to narrated storyboards before picking up his 'sponsorship' and finishing in lavish 70mm colour was a brilliant touch. And then Weird Al takes centre stage for the soundtrack? It might be hard to top this one as my ITTL favourite Muppet film.
Oh. I was thinking too literally about the "cow town puppet show" hint. Yeah, I'm as curious about the butterflies as you are.
That would be an interesting version of Dog City if it was all bovines instead...
That would be an interesting idea, combining The Cow-Boys of Moo Mesa with this version of Dog City:
Dog City (series)
Jim Henson's Dog City was a spin-off of the Jim Henson Hour special Dog City. The show included a combination of puppetry and cel animation, and was produced in collaboration between Jim Henson Productions and Canadian animation studio Nelvana, who handled all of the animated segments. In...
muppet.fandom.com
Yeah, that's probably where I would see a Gilgamesh film in terms of gore/violence, with a PG-13/T rating being the most likely, although it's possible that it could go to an R based on the sex involved in the film like with Enkidu and Shamhat or Gilgamesh and Ishtar. Really just depends on how the raters are going to perceive the sexual content as. It is the late 80s/early 90s after all.
No, both films still exist as Nothing Can Last and Recall ITTL, but they're obviously not the same films as their OTL counterparts thanks to differing casting choices and story (both ITTL films are closer to their novel source material, I believe).
Interesting set of films for 88, although I gotta give props to Cocktail, The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made, Willow, Nothing Can Last, and that Jim Thorpe biopic for being the standouts for me, with the latter being especially touching since it's Ron Miller's passion project.
Since Willow is a bit more successful here than in OTL, I hope that George Lucas has some plans into turning it into a franchise with a movie sequel or a TV series, as I said before in this thread, since it will probably give him an opportunity to distance himself from Star Wars. Maybe it can be part of a Fantasyland tie-in someday like in WDW/Disneyland?
The Christmas in LA Setting was a holdover from the original novel, IIRC, and yes, it was released in July in both TLs.
The original story was a Father-daughter story that got changed to an estranged wife after a very weird set of OTL circumstances that John McTiernan had involving an argument with his wife and an empty box on the highway.
He's "Part Native American". How much "part"? Not sure, but more so than Johnny Depp, but less than enough to avoid protests IOTL when he played a Navajo Sheriff in 1990. There will be some gripes about the casting ITTL too.
I wish I could take credit for that, but that's all the original plan. I just added Weird Al, Hand Jive, and Iggy's Itch-a-Way Spray as the sponsor.
Can't win 'em all, Bruh! 🤷♂️Although the two alternate versions would be interesting too, I think.
I love the idea of Weird Al doing the music for The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made, and it continues a phenomenon that I recently heard pointed out in the Movin' Right Along podcast; that all three of the original Muppet movies had a different songwriter (Paul Williams, Joe Raposo and Jeff Moss, respectively). It will be interesting to see if this carries on. (Although if they don't get Williams back for Christmas Carol, that's going to be weird.)
Question: were there any 1988 movies that Cruise was considered for but never got? Same goes for other actors mentioned in Movies 1988, because my mind thinks there's opportunity in there.
So basically, there are people who think Nothing Can Last exists in the same universe as Alien, and if butterflies don't prevent the crossovers, Predator. Meaning that at least one person has made fanfics about one of the Lelands or their descendants fighting xenomorphs and/or yautja.
Go Go Godzilla!
Interviews with UPA’s Henry Saperstein (HS) and Ricardo Delgado (RD)
Select Questions and Answers from “Looking Back at Godzilla: Lord of Fire”, San Diego Comic Con, 1997
A Guest Post by @GrahamB (with minor continuity modifications by me)
Rumor has it that the movie nearly didn’t happen; can you tell us what happened to get it made?
HS: Well, you’re right, the whole thing nearly didn’t happen! We had a hell of a time trying to find an animation studio that we felt was up to the job. The whole reason for using animation was so that we didn’t need thirty-million dollars to make a live-action movie, but we didn’t want it to look cheap!
We always assumed [that] we’d use a Japanese [animation] studio, since they were making really impressive stuff without breaking the bank, but when I started asking around for availability I kept getting ‘sorry, we’re full with other work’! This lasted a couple of months actually, and then our friends over at Toho send us this little studio from Kyoto who they thought we’d like[1]. And we did like them but they were still too small to handle the whole movie themselves.
So, I’m struggling to find another studio who could handle what we were asking and then I get a phone call: [pantomimes picking up the phone] “Hey Henry, it’s Don Bluth. I heard you were looking for animators!”
Just how he found out about Godzilla I’ll never know, because I wasn’t even looking at that side of the planet! Now, I don’t know about you, but I still count Don as probably the greatest character animator of all time, and here he is swooping out of the blue with an offer I’d have been an idiot to turn down, so I said “yes”.
So now we’ve got two animation studios: Bluth and his crew in Dublin for character and creature animation, the Kyoto crew for backgrounds and effects, and us in the middle for preproduction, scripting, and storyboarding. As long as we could get that right, we’d have a movie.
Did you ever consider working with Disney?
HS: Never in a million years! (laughs)
RD: (laughs) Yea, I can hear Roy Disney now. “Ah, the UPA Commies come crawling back![2]”
HS: Yea, Disney at the time was the animation studio, and still is, and they were cranking out work at a rate nobody’d seen since the Forties, real top-of-the-industry stuff, mind you. They’d just released Where the Wild Things Are, which sent shockwaves through the animation world. The stuff they’d done with DIS stations and CHERNABOG were revolutionary, and paired with the failure of Richard Williams’s and Don Bluth’s visually breathtaking The Thief and the Cobbler, it was like that moment when we all knew that hand drawn animation’s days were numbered, even if we didn’t want to admit it to ourselves yet. But Disney animators work on Disney projects, they generally didn’t farm out work unless you were like Spielberg and had an “in”. That and they were just way outside of our price bracket, even if we’d actually had a way to get our foot in the door.
Similar to this Stan Winston 1994 design from Our Timeline (Image posted by Muto on “pinterest.com”)
You were involved in making Godzilla’s new look, can you tell us about the process behind it?
RD: One of the advantages of animation, obviously, is that you can do things that wouldn’t be possible with suitimation or puppetry or even CG at the time. We also had the freedom to make our own Godzilla, so we wanted to make something that looked less like a guy in a suit and more like a real animal. We couldn’t change things too much, it still needed to look like Godzilla, but his design came pretty naturally once we started working on it. He’s got a lot of crocodile and bear in his design and that shows in his body proportions and head shape, with the eyes and nostrils on top of the head and having his arms a little longer than his legs.
We especially agonized over the legs, which seems really silly now considering how fast the rest of him came together. Classic Godzilla’s got these really dumpy thighs ‘cause it’s a guy in a suit and the suit has to take some of its own weight. We didn’t have to worry about that, but we wanted to keep Godzilla's legs good and sturdy so it’d look like they’d take his weight, so they’re relatively short for his body but really well muscled. The whole effect is to make Godzilla look like he's equally comfortable on land as he is in the water, a truly amphibious monster.
HS: We figuratively gave him the world’s biggest Thigh Master! (laughter)
RD: We also have Godzilla lean forward more. He’s not upright like in the Japanese films; again, he’s not a guy in a suit, so we could have a more dynamic, aggressive pose for him. I think he’s got a pretty consistent 30–40-degree tilt for most of the film, but then in the finale when he’s really mad, he’s really leaning into it and the tail comes up and he starts looking like a T. rex at that point. We’re all very pleased with how well he turned out.
Your Godzilla’s smaller than the Toho Godzilla, was that intentional?
RD: That was an accident, actually! Toho sent us a bunch of info about Godzilla, stuff we’d make good use of during the planning stages. One of the points in that package is that Godzilla is one hundred meters tall; more than three hundred feet. Somewhere along the way that got mixed up and “one hundred meters tall” became “one hundred meters long”. Now, that’s still a big boy, a whole football field plus end zones, but he’s much smaller than Toho’s design. That actually worked to our advantage; the smaller Godzilla scaled really well with the buildings in Honolulu, something I don’t think would have worked so well if we’d set the movie in New York or LA.
Actually, now that I think about it, our Godzilla is about the same size as the original 1954 Godzilla, isn’t he? [Confirmation from off-stage] Oh he is! I’m happy to hear that, no wonder that size felt so right!
HS: Um, yes, always my plan the entire time! (coughs suspiciously, eliciting laughter)
Lavapentis is similar in shape to this (Lagiacrus from Monster Hunter), but replace the legs with smaller “flippers” and wrap it in lava rock (Image source “pinterest.com”)
Where did the design of Lavapentis come from?
RD: Believe it or not, Lavapentis was the backup plan! The original idea we had for the movie was for some damn fool to try and kill Godzilla with a nuke but not only would it not work, but it would supercharge the big guy, so now he’s even more aggressive and dangerous but he’s also overheating and in danger of having a meltdown[3]. Of course, right when we were starting production Chernobyl happened... [knowing sounds from the audience] …yea, so we thought “maybe a movie about a nuclear meltdown would be in bad taste right now”.
Fortunately, with Godzilla you can always just fight another monster, so we started brainstorming ideas. We threw everything at the wall: space octopuses, rock monsters, slime monsters, giant alien space bats, you name it. Eventually we settled on a sea serpent sort of creature, which wasn’t something you could do very well with suitimation and look convincing, and then we combined it with some of the ideas for the rock monsters to make a lava snake that lives in volcanoes. We really wanted to have that connection to volcanoes now that we’d settled on Hawaii for the movie’s setting.
Why Hawaii?
HS: Excuse for a research trip. [crowd laughs] With all seriousness, when we first started working on the project, we very quickly decided that it would be tacky to have Godzilla plough through Manhattan just because it’s an “American Godzilla”[4] so we were looking for something on the Pacific coast, probably LA or San Francisco. Some of the crew suggested Portland because then “nobody would care if it got leveled” [audience laughter, a couple of groans]. Then someone, I can’t remember who, brought up Honolulu and everyone immediately agreed. It just felt right, you know? It’s a decently-sized city with a good mix of tall and low buildings we can use for scale, there’s a great mix of landscapes to play with, Pearl Harbor is right there so we could play with both the Army and Navy in the picture, and finally Hawaii has volcanoes. Plus, it’s a place popular with the Japanese too, so it would be a good place for an “east meets west” crossover.
RD: The idea of a volcano monster was an early concept from the West Coast time, but there aren’t any volcanos of the right type on the West Coast, if you know what I mean. Mount St. Helens blew up in 1980, still very much in recent memory, so we first thought about having a monster burrow its way out of there. But [the volcano] was all drab smoke and ash and not much in the way of glowing fountains and rivers of lava. We hemmed and hawed about it, but once Hawaii was on the table, we went for it. Hawaii’s got volcanoes that are erupting all the time, and with great lava geysers that look spectacular, and that pretty much set the rest of the film. Best of all, it’s in the middle of the Pacific, Godzilla’s stomping grounds. It was perfect.
Did the T rating trouble you at all?
HS: Not at all! We wore it like a badge of honor, like “this is a real Godzilla movie!” We were pleased that despite the jump to animation, people still took it as seriously as the live-action films, which when I think about it, was actually a pretty low bar. [laughter]
What’s your favorite scene?
RD: Honestly, it’s probably the very first one, before the title card. You’ve got the sun filtering down through the water and a school of tuna swimming past you, quite serene. Then Godzilla himself comes out of the murk and swims up and over you, like a reverse of the opening of Star Wars, blotting out the sun with his shadow. Then the title card appears with the classic Godzilla three-note “bum bum buuum, bum bum buuuummm”. [cheers, laughter, and applause] To me that totally summed up the feel of the movie right from the get go. I don’t think any other movie in the franchise has been able to outdo that shot of Godzilla swimming above you, it’s really something.
HS: Like most people, mine’s the final Mauna Loa battle. Just everything about it was spectacular, I’ve never seen such rage on screen like that before. I think there’s only like a dozen hits [between the monsters] in the whole fight, but each one hits like a plane crash, just so much power in every one of them. I can’t praise Bluth and his team enough for giving the monsters so much mass and power, especially when they’re moving quickly like they do there, just really charging at each other in the middle of an erupting volcano!
[addressing the audience] Now, you’ll like this, this is the dirty little secret of that scene: it was probably half the cost of the Honolulu battle. The lava was mostly rotoscoped from real footage of Mauna Loa eruptions and then having the monsters in silhouette for large portions of the fight meant we didn’t have to animate a lot of the details, so we could put all the focus on getting the motion right.
RD: There's a great moment related to that fight I'll never forget: I was at one of the premier events and right after the climax, when Godzilla delivers the death-blow and the whole mountain explodes, there's that moment of quiet when all the human characters are just stood in shock as Mauna Loa collapses in on itself and this one guy, way at the back of the theatre goes “Oh my God, did they kill him!?” Right on cue Godzilla walks out of the crater with Lavapentis in his jaws to the classic theme song and the whole theatre starts cheering. That's when I knew we really had a winner.
HS: Yea, winner indeed; thirty-nine million against a ten-million-dollar budget was pretty darn good for ’88. Maybe we would have broken $50 mill if we’d been PG, who knows? Still, it was a win for UPA, Universal, and Toho, of course, but also a big win for Bluth, who was desperate for work following the failure of The Thief and the Cobbler. Between that film’s impact on his reputation and Godzilla: Lord of Fire’s success, I like to think that we helped pave the way for his later films.
It also marked the triumphant return of UPA to our animation roots after decades away. We even entered into discussions for an animated TV series based on Godzilla and King Kong for Universal, who was looking to boost interest in King Kong in particular ahead of their expansion into theme park animatronics. This eventually became 1992’s Monster Mayhem with Kong and Godzilla, of course. By then, Kyoto Studios was up to the task of animating it all by themselves and became our go-to partners.
RD: They called it “…with Gojira and Kongu”, of course. [audience laughs]
[1] Yes, this would be the Kyoto Animation, who in the ‘80s is still a new, small company that did work for other studios. Even then they were known for quality, but they were simply not big enough to handle the whole movie themselves unless you extended the production a couple of years.
[2] The original UPA was formed in 1941 in the wake of the ’41 Strike by ex-Disney animators who were openly rebelling against Walt’s increasingly anti-Union sentiments. Disney referred to them as “the Commies down the river”.
[3] Toho themselves would use the meltdown idea in our timeline’s Godzilla vs. Destoroyah in 1995.
[4] Here’s looking at you, Tri-Star!
And thanks again to @GrahamB for the guest-post!
Select Questions and Answers from “Looking Back at Godzilla: Lord of Fire”, San Diego Comic Con, 1997
A Guest Post by @GrahamB (with minor continuity modifications by me)
Rumor has it that the movie nearly didn’t happen; can you tell us what happened to get it made?
HS: Well, you’re right, the whole thing nearly didn’t happen! We had a hell of a time trying to find an animation studio that we felt was up to the job. The whole reason for using animation was so that we didn’t need thirty-million dollars to make a live-action movie, but we didn’t want it to look cheap!
We always assumed [that] we’d use a Japanese [animation] studio, since they were making really impressive stuff without breaking the bank, but when I started asking around for availability I kept getting ‘sorry, we’re full with other work’! This lasted a couple of months actually, and then our friends over at Toho send us this little studio from Kyoto who they thought we’d like[1]. And we did like them but they were still too small to handle the whole movie themselves.
So, I’m struggling to find another studio who could handle what we were asking and then I get a phone call: [pantomimes picking up the phone] “Hey Henry, it’s Don Bluth. I heard you were looking for animators!”
Just how he found out about Godzilla I’ll never know, because I wasn’t even looking at that side of the planet! Now, I don’t know about you, but I still count Don as probably the greatest character animator of all time, and here he is swooping out of the blue with an offer I’d have been an idiot to turn down, so I said “yes”.
So now we’ve got two animation studios: Bluth and his crew in Dublin for character and creature animation, the Kyoto crew for backgrounds and effects, and us in the middle for preproduction, scripting, and storyboarding. As long as we could get that right, we’d have a movie.
Did you ever consider working with Disney?
HS: Never in a million years! (laughs)
RD: (laughs) Yea, I can hear Roy Disney now. “Ah, the UPA Commies come crawling back![2]”
HS: Yea, Disney at the time was the animation studio, and still is, and they were cranking out work at a rate nobody’d seen since the Forties, real top-of-the-industry stuff, mind you. They’d just released Where the Wild Things Are, which sent shockwaves through the animation world. The stuff they’d done with DIS stations and CHERNABOG were revolutionary, and paired with the failure of Richard Williams’s and Don Bluth’s visually breathtaking The Thief and the Cobbler, it was like that moment when we all knew that hand drawn animation’s days were numbered, even if we didn’t want to admit it to ourselves yet. But Disney animators work on Disney projects, they generally didn’t farm out work unless you were like Spielberg and had an “in”. That and they were just way outside of our price bracket, even if we’d actually had a way to get our foot in the door.
Similar to this Stan Winston 1994 design from Our Timeline (Image posted by Muto on “pinterest.com”)
You were involved in making Godzilla’s new look, can you tell us about the process behind it?
RD: One of the advantages of animation, obviously, is that you can do things that wouldn’t be possible with suitimation or puppetry or even CG at the time. We also had the freedom to make our own Godzilla, so we wanted to make something that looked less like a guy in a suit and more like a real animal. We couldn’t change things too much, it still needed to look like Godzilla, but his design came pretty naturally once we started working on it. He’s got a lot of crocodile and bear in his design and that shows in his body proportions and head shape, with the eyes and nostrils on top of the head and having his arms a little longer than his legs.
We especially agonized over the legs, which seems really silly now considering how fast the rest of him came together. Classic Godzilla’s got these really dumpy thighs ‘cause it’s a guy in a suit and the suit has to take some of its own weight. We didn’t have to worry about that, but we wanted to keep Godzilla's legs good and sturdy so it’d look like they’d take his weight, so they’re relatively short for his body but really well muscled. The whole effect is to make Godzilla look like he's equally comfortable on land as he is in the water, a truly amphibious monster.
HS: We figuratively gave him the world’s biggest Thigh Master! (laughter)
RD: We also have Godzilla lean forward more. He’s not upright like in the Japanese films; again, he’s not a guy in a suit, so we could have a more dynamic, aggressive pose for him. I think he’s got a pretty consistent 30–40-degree tilt for most of the film, but then in the finale when he’s really mad, he’s really leaning into it and the tail comes up and he starts looking like a T. rex at that point. We’re all very pleased with how well he turned out.
Your Godzilla’s smaller than the Toho Godzilla, was that intentional?
RD: That was an accident, actually! Toho sent us a bunch of info about Godzilla, stuff we’d make good use of during the planning stages. One of the points in that package is that Godzilla is one hundred meters tall; more than three hundred feet. Somewhere along the way that got mixed up and “one hundred meters tall” became “one hundred meters long”. Now, that’s still a big boy, a whole football field plus end zones, but he’s much smaller than Toho’s design. That actually worked to our advantage; the smaller Godzilla scaled really well with the buildings in Honolulu, something I don’t think would have worked so well if we’d set the movie in New York or LA.
Actually, now that I think about it, our Godzilla is about the same size as the original 1954 Godzilla, isn’t he? [Confirmation from off-stage] Oh he is! I’m happy to hear that, no wonder that size felt so right!
HS: Um, yes, always my plan the entire time! (coughs suspiciously, eliciting laughter)
Lavapentis is similar in shape to this (Lagiacrus from Monster Hunter), but replace the legs with smaller “flippers” and wrap it in lava rock (Image source “pinterest.com”)
Where did the design of Lavapentis come from?
RD: Believe it or not, Lavapentis was the backup plan! The original idea we had for the movie was for some damn fool to try and kill Godzilla with a nuke but not only would it not work, but it would supercharge the big guy, so now he’s even more aggressive and dangerous but he’s also overheating and in danger of having a meltdown[3]. Of course, right when we were starting production Chernobyl happened... [knowing sounds from the audience] …yea, so we thought “maybe a movie about a nuclear meltdown would be in bad taste right now”.
Fortunately, with Godzilla you can always just fight another monster, so we started brainstorming ideas. We threw everything at the wall: space octopuses, rock monsters, slime monsters, giant alien space bats, you name it. Eventually we settled on a sea serpent sort of creature, which wasn’t something you could do very well with suitimation and look convincing, and then we combined it with some of the ideas for the rock monsters to make a lava snake that lives in volcanoes. We really wanted to have that connection to volcanoes now that we’d settled on Hawaii for the movie’s setting.
Why Hawaii?
HS: Excuse for a research trip. [crowd laughs] With all seriousness, when we first started working on the project, we very quickly decided that it would be tacky to have Godzilla plough through Manhattan just because it’s an “American Godzilla”[4] so we were looking for something on the Pacific coast, probably LA or San Francisco. Some of the crew suggested Portland because then “nobody would care if it got leveled” [audience laughter, a couple of groans]. Then someone, I can’t remember who, brought up Honolulu and everyone immediately agreed. It just felt right, you know? It’s a decently-sized city with a good mix of tall and low buildings we can use for scale, there’s a great mix of landscapes to play with, Pearl Harbor is right there so we could play with both the Army and Navy in the picture, and finally Hawaii has volcanoes. Plus, it’s a place popular with the Japanese too, so it would be a good place for an “east meets west” crossover.
RD: The idea of a volcano monster was an early concept from the West Coast time, but there aren’t any volcanos of the right type on the West Coast, if you know what I mean. Mount St. Helens blew up in 1980, still very much in recent memory, so we first thought about having a monster burrow its way out of there. But [the volcano] was all drab smoke and ash and not much in the way of glowing fountains and rivers of lava. We hemmed and hawed about it, but once Hawaii was on the table, we went for it. Hawaii’s got volcanoes that are erupting all the time, and with great lava geysers that look spectacular, and that pretty much set the rest of the film. Best of all, it’s in the middle of the Pacific, Godzilla’s stomping grounds. It was perfect.
Did the T rating trouble you at all?
HS: Not at all! We wore it like a badge of honor, like “this is a real Godzilla movie!” We were pleased that despite the jump to animation, people still took it as seriously as the live-action films, which when I think about it, was actually a pretty low bar. [laughter]
What’s your favorite scene?
RD: Honestly, it’s probably the very first one, before the title card. You’ve got the sun filtering down through the water and a school of tuna swimming past you, quite serene. Then Godzilla himself comes out of the murk and swims up and over you, like a reverse of the opening of Star Wars, blotting out the sun with his shadow. Then the title card appears with the classic Godzilla three-note “bum bum buuum, bum bum buuuummm”. [cheers, laughter, and applause] To me that totally summed up the feel of the movie right from the get go. I don’t think any other movie in the franchise has been able to outdo that shot of Godzilla swimming above you, it’s really something.
HS: Like most people, mine’s the final Mauna Loa battle. Just everything about it was spectacular, I’ve never seen such rage on screen like that before. I think there’s only like a dozen hits [between the monsters] in the whole fight, but each one hits like a plane crash, just so much power in every one of them. I can’t praise Bluth and his team enough for giving the monsters so much mass and power, especially when they’re moving quickly like they do there, just really charging at each other in the middle of an erupting volcano!
[addressing the audience] Now, you’ll like this, this is the dirty little secret of that scene: it was probably half the cost of the Honolulu battle. The lava was mostly rotoscoped from real footage of Mauna Loa eruptions and then having the monsters in silhouette for large portions of the fight meant we didn’t have to animate a lot of the details, so we could put all the focus on getting the motion right.
RD: There's a great moment related to that fight I'll never forget: I was at one of the premier events and right after the climax, when Godzilla delivers the death-blow and the whole mountain explodes, there's that moment of quiet when all the human characters are just stood in shock as Mauna Loa collapses in on itself and this one guy, way at the back of the theatre goes “Oh my God, did they kill him!?” Right on cue Godzilla walks out of the crater with Lavapentis in his jaws to the classic theme song and the whole theatre starts cheering. That's when I knew we really had a winner.
HS: Yea, winner indeed; thirty-nine million against a ten-million-dollar budget was pretty darn good for ’88. Maybe we would have broken $50 mill if we’d been PG, who knows? Still, it was a win for UPA, Universal, and Toho, of course, but also a big win for Bluth, who was desperate for work following the failure of The Thief and the Cobbler. Between that film’s impact on his reputation and Godzilla: Lord of Fire’s success, I like to think that we helped pave the way for his later films.
It also marked the triumphant return of UPA to our animation roots after decades away. We even entered into discussions for an animated TV series based on Godzilla and King Kong for Universal, who was looking to boost interest in King Kong in particular ahead of their expansion into theme park animatronics. This eventually became 1992’s Monster Mayhem with Kong and Godzilla, of course. By then, Kyoto Studios was up to the task of animating it all by themselves and became our go-to partners.
RD: They called it “…with Gojira and Kongu”, of course. [audience laughs]
[1] Yes, this would be the Kyoto Animation, who in the ‘80s is still a new, small company that did work for other studios. Even then they were known for quality, but they were simply not big enough to handle the whole movie themselves unless you extended the production a couple of years.
[2] The original UPA was formed in 1941 in the wake of the ’41 Strike by ex-Disney animators who were openly rebelling against Walt’s increasingly anti-Union sentiments. Disney referred to them as “the Commies down the river”.
[3] Toho themselves would use the meltdown idea in our timeline’s Godzilla vs. Destoroyah in 1995.
[4] Here’s looking at you, Tri-Star!
And thanks again to @GrahamB for the guest-post!
Godzilla: Lord of Fire- this sounds Awesome!
Animated, proper proportions, thought about movement, volcanos- it’s got everything!
Also great success for Bluth and Kyoto Studios.
Wonder if Jim Henson enjoyed watching it?
Great chapter @Geekhis Khan and @GrahamB
Animated, proper proportions, thought about movement, volcanos- it’s got everything!
Also great success for Bluth and Kyoto Studios.
Wonder if Jim Henson enjoyed watching it?
Great chapter @Geekhis Khan and @GrahamB
This is some impressive stuff. Quite the dream team, and just (re)elevated a new challenger to Disney.
Also, back when Graham, Geekhis and I were tossing around ideas, I had some ideas of my own for this. Primarily, my idea was the film's main human characters would be a japanese family, with its patriarch being voiced by George Takei. And there's this kid who loves nature and Godzilla, but things his family doesn't appreciate them and hates them, so the film's about that too and his character development. Given no mention of it here, I can't say it didn't happen, so that's my headcanon.
Also, back when Graham, Geekhis and I were tossing around ideas, I had some ideas of my own for this. Primarily, my idea was the film's main human characters would be a japanese family, with its patriarch being voiced by George Takei. And there's this kid who loves nature and Godzilla, but things his family doesn't appreciate them and hates them, so the film's about that too and his character development. Given no mention of it here, I can't say it didn't happen, so that's my headcanon.
Bit early to think about that, huh?
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