I cannot find the original thread....if the mods can find it and want to merge this with that thread that would be cool. Anyway...here is the new face of Godzilla!! Notice he has gills!!
Looks like he also that that "knot" one sees upon the jaws of iguanas. (I have no idea what that thing is called, sorry.) But like the gills, it works. It gives him "character" without being distracting. Years from now, when someone posts an image of Goji, we'll know instantly if he's the Legendary Pictures version. Sincerely, Bill
Now all we need is the trailer for this movie! There is a rumor, and only a rumor, that there will be a trailer attached to the next Hobbit movie.
Ah, the "gorilla-whale" etymology. I wondered if that might've been what you were going for, but it's obscure enough that I wasn't sure.
On the off chance that those things on his neck are actually gills, then maybe they have another use besides just allowing him to breathe underwater; could they be a part of a system to do with his radioactive breath, like cooling vents for instance? I always wondered why Godzilla spends most of his time underwater when he's generally considered to be a mutated from a land based dinosaur; does he dwell in the sea for biological reasons to do with his radioactive nature?
Maybe he just likes to swim. Bit more seriously, I suspect the sea provides a more readily attainable food source, and in the quantity he needs. Yeah, that's very weak "fridge logic". H3ll, I don't know, but he sure looks intimidating rising from the sea to attack. Plus, it's about the only way he can reach Japan unless he flew (like Rodan, Mothra or Ghidrah) or burrowed (like Baragon). Sincerely, Bill
Well, we have to remember there have been at least a couple of different origins for Godzilla over the decades. The original films treated Godzilla as a member of a "living fossil" dinosaur species that had survived undiscovered in the ocean depths for the 2 million years [sic] since the dinosaurs had died out. We know that this was the natural form of that species because there was more than one of them; the original Godzilla was killed at the end of the first film, and the Godzilla who debuted in Godzilla Raids Again and continued through the rest of the Showa Era was explicitly described by Dr. Yamane as dai-ni no Gojira, "a second Godzilla." Plus we later met a third, juvenile member of the species, Minya. So the original idea wasn't so much that the Marshall Islands atomic tests had mutated the Godzillae as that it had displaced them from their natural aquatic habitat, causing them to storm onto land in search of new food sources, and had also contaminated them with radioactivity, which they were somehow able to direct through their breath and focus into a weapon. (Compare the 1955 Harryhausen film It Came from Beneath the Sea. The giant octopus in that film was also treated as a naturally occurring giant that had been radioactively contaminated by the exact same Marshall Islands tests, enabling the fish it preyed on to sense its radioactivity and flee, and thus requiring it to leave its feeding grounds in search of new, less radiosensitive food sources like human beings. See also the 1954 Them!, the first movie about giant mutant animals created by radiation; in that film, radiation didn't make individual ants grow larger, but had gradually mutated an ant species into progressively larger forms over many generations since the earliest nuclear tests in 1945.) It wasn't until the 1984 reboot that Godzilla was reinterpreted as a creature that fed on and was powered by radioactivity (shifting the allegorical focus from atomic weapons testing to the nuclear power plants which Godzilla now targeted and fed upon), and it wasn't until the 1991 installment of the reboot (Heisei) continuity, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, that we got the revised origin wherein Godzilla was originally a surviving, land-dwelling carnosaur that was only about twice the size of a T. rex until he was exposed to radioactivity and transformed into a giant. The Heisei series assumed that exposure to radiation would consistently transform surviving dinosaurs into giant forms; the same thing happened with Rodan and with Baby Godzilla/Godzilla Junior. But the Heisei films were also quite inconsistent on the question of whether the post-1954 Godzilla was the original somehow returned from the dead or a second member of the same species (in which case having them both undergo the same mutation would be rather implausible). The first couple of Heisei films were ambiguous, the third assumed it was the original, but the concluding film of the series explicitly indicated that it was a second, distinct Godzilla. (My best rationalization is that they originally believed it to be the original but later figured out it was a separate one.)
Yeah, but that's exactly the film that creates the problem. It assumes there was only one Godzilla who survived the original film, that his mutation was a unique event. That's why they go back in time and try to prevent it. Yet several years later, G vs. Destoroyah explicitly says that the Oxygen Destroyer killed the first Godzilla. Of course, the temporal logic in GvKG is totally incoherent. Even though they go back in time and alter history so that Godzilla has disappeared when they return to the present (only to re-emerge in a more powerful form soon thereafter), everyone remembers that he was there just before the time travel. Which is not the way changing history works. But that's where my theory allows reconciling that mess of a movie, if you squint a little. We can pretend that what they're actually remembering is the 1954 attack by the original Godzilla, who was killed. And the time travel would've then undone the events of The Return of Godzilla and Godzilla vs. Biollante as well as the first act of GvKG, since it was actually the second Godzilla whose origin they altered; they just didn't realize at the time that there had been more than one. Except that doesn't work either, because in Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla, Biollante's battle with Godzilla is remembered. Then again, GvSG is a totally horrible, stupid movie, and Destoroyah pretty much ignores it anyway, so it's easy enough to dismiss it as never having happened. And then the Heisei chronology can almost, approximately make sense.
One of the premium channels, maybe SonyHD, aired Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah earlier this week. I'd almost suspect they took some inspiration from Terminator 2: Judgement Day with the subplot, particularly the M11 android getting reprogrammed to serve as a protector, but both films were released in 1991. How much about Arnie's "redemption" for Judgement Day was "leaked" before its release and could it have leaked early enough for GvKG to be "inspired"? Or was it just good ol' coincidence? Sincerely, Bill
It was no secret that Schwarzenegger's Terminator would be the good guy in T2. I found a Starlog article published several months before the film's release that talked about his good-guy turn as if it were already common knowledge. So the makers of GvKG (which came out five months after T2 premiered, or four months after its Japanese premiere) would've most likely been aware of it in time to be influenced by it. Normally I'm quick to point out that different works coincidentally resemble each other all the time; but there's a long history of kaiju movies and other Japanese productions being influenced by American movies. G vs. Destoroyah owes a lot to Aliens, Final Wars copies X-Men and The Matrix, etc. So it certainly seems plausible that the similarity was intentional.