The Son of Godzilla reconstruction is available now!
The 1080p HD reconstruction of Son of Godzilla's dubbed US TV version is completed and available to download! Send a private message for details.
Notes on this release:
- The Toho transfer had its contrast and saturation boosted to alleviate its flat appearance; other sources were color-corrected to roughly match this source.
- The original US version has only ever existed in 4:3 pan-and-scan, so no widescreen sources for the US title card or textless opening/ending exist. A capture of the 1997 Anchor Bay VHS was used for these portions of the film.
- Numerous other shots throughout the film have frames missing, with reel changes suffering the worst. Some shots were replaced entirely using the 2004 TriStar DVD, others with the Blu-ray of All Monsters Attack, which reused some of the affected shots, and others had the missing frames reinstated using a roughly 16:9 copy of the French version of the film.
- The original Walter Reade Organization logo is reinstated at the end, using the recreation featured in the Ghidrah reconstruction.
Hello everyone, if you haven't been following what's going on on my blog, you've missed a good deal of flip-flopping on my schedule and planned releases. Basically, I've switched things up so that my current project, which I'm hoping to have out by Christmas, is going to be the HD reconstruction of Son of Godzilla's US version, dubbed by Titra/Titan and released to TV by Walter Reade-Sterling. I've got a really good VHS capture that I snatched ages ago for exactly this purpose, and I'm excited to finally be getting to work on it.
This won't be a 100% faithful reconstruction - the US version only exists in pan-and-scan, while this reconstruction will mostly be in full widescreen - but otherwise it'll be as accurate as I can make it. How to approach the opening is something I've given a great deal of thought to in the past; the US version features a unique title card, then plays the footage over which the Japanese title card and credits appeared, but without any text. There is no textless widescreen source, and it most likely isn't possible to stitch together a recreation of the textless widescreen shots from different sources (to say nothing of how awful it would probably look), so the opening will be presented in windowboxed 4:3 using the VHS capture, transitioning to the HD Japanese source and a widescreen aspect ratio as soon as the credits end. (The textless final shot, though, should be doable in widescreen - I'll most likely cover up the Japanese "owari" character using the VHS capture, and the copyright icon with the TriStar DVD.)
I've gotten most of the work done on the transition between sources/aspect ratios:
I'll probably perform a bit of color correction on the VHS capture to make the transition less conspicuous, but you get the idea.