When I was a kid, I didn't really get sucked into the online world until late 2005/early 2006. I'd have been about eleven years old at the time. Before then, I just used the computer for bad point-and-click CD games like Tonka.
Naturally, one of the first things I did was start looking up Godzilla movies: namely the many that I had never seen before. Because I lived in Canada, Godzilla films were a lot harder to come by, not helped by the fact that I was (and still am) the only Godzilla fan in my family. I owned the Simitar VHS box set with
King of the Monsters,
Mothra vs Godzilla,
Monster Zero,
Godzilla's Revenge, and
Terror of Mechagodzilla; as well as VHS tapes for GINO and
Godzilla 2000. I had also rented over the course of my life
Godzilla Raids Again,
Ebirah,
vs Hedorah,
vs Gigan,
Tokyo SOS, and
Final Wars; but I only retained any real memory of the latter three.
Truthfully, what clued me into the fact that I was missing out on a whole wealth of Godzilla movies out there were the Atari/Pipeworks games coming out at the time. I knew there just
had to be a Godzilla vs Megalon movie out there. A Godzilla vs Mecha-King Ghidorah movie. A Godzilla vs Destoroyah movie. A Godzilla vs Jet Jaguar movie.
And that curiosity was what ultimately brought me online, alongside a desire to learn the names of monsters seen in
Final Wars that I had never seen before.
And so I began my research, with help from the many Godzilla fan sites that were up during the day – I remember my favorite was Kaiju Headquarters. I found and memorized the names of all the movies in the franchise; I discovered new monsters I had never heard of before, such as Biollante and Battra; I found sound effects of their roars (thank you, Rodan's Roost!) and when I was very lucky, music from their films. During that exciting time of discovery I also, naturally, came across Gamera.
Gamera? Oh, dear, I
hated Gamera. Not that I had ever seen a Gamera film, of course, but this eleven-year-old child reasoned that Gamera was nothing more than a bad ripoff of Godzilla, and boy did I resent him and his rogue gallery for that.
Still, though, that innate curiosity had me poking around the profiles for Gamera and foes in Rodan's Roost and Kaiju HQ anyway, just to see what they looked like and what they were capable of. I read about their movies and saw a lot of reviews praising the Heisei trilogy; which, of course, I hated.
So I continued to hold a quiet resentment for Gamera up until my high school years, when I discovered the power of online shopping. During this time I had began to slowly collect all the Godzilla and Toho kaiju films I didn't have, relying heavily on Christmas gifts and birthday presents. I had become a more frequent user of Youtube, and it was while looking at Godzilla music videos that I stumbled across a similar music video for Gamera, featuring scenes from
Gamera 3.
Curiosity getting the better of me, I watched it. The special effects absolutely
blew me away.
"Okay," I reasoned. "Maybe Gamera isn't so bad after all."
And wouldn't you know? Youtube at the time currently had the full movie of Gamera 3. So, with nothing to lose, I decided to give it a try.
Well, let me tell you, if that music video had blown me away, then this movie was on a whole 'nother level. "Holy shit!" I thought, only fifteen or sixteen years old at the time. "That was one of the best kaiju movies I've ever seen!" With only one movie, I was hooked. I had gone from hating to loving the character of Gamera, and I wanted
more.
The very next DVDs I got where AVD's releases of the Gamera trilogy. I watched them in reverse order (because of course I did
) and
loved the latter two films; I liked GotU well enough at the time, but it took a few more years to really grow on me. I found the Showa series on youtube later on, watched them, and predictably hated them (save for Gamera vs Barugon.) I bought
Gamera: The Brave and fell in love with that one too. By age seventeen I had seen every Gamera film and had (mostly) completed my Godzilla/Toho collection; and wouldn't you know it, that was the very same year I joined TK.
Gamera 3: Whether it's overrated or underrated, I owe that movie a lot for broadening my horizons.