Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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Angilasman wrote: Sun Apr 25, 2021 7:00 am Often the little postcards that come in the cases of Arrow releases spoil titles that aren't announced yet. A new card with the original Daimajin poster is now showing up.
Just sold my Mill Creek Daimajin set last week in anticipation of this. If the Gamera set is any indication we are looking good for this one
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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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Unlike Gamera previous releases which were largely incomplete. The MC Daimajin BRD didn't have these issues. All 3 films had excellent presentation and subtitles. The first 2 films had their AIP English dub, and the 3rd film had a newly commissioned English Dub. I mean I love my Gamera Arrow set, but I'm not sure how they could improve upon what was already offered by MC Daimajin BRD set.
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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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o.supreme wrote: Mon Apr 26, 2021 1:47 pm Unlike Gamera previous releases which were largely incomplete. The MC Daimajin BRD didn't have these issues. All 3 films had excellent presentation and subtitles. The first 2 films had their AIP English dub, and the 3rd film had a newly commissioned English Dub. I mean I love my Gamera Arrow set, but I'm not sure how they could improve upon what was already offered by MC Daimajin BRD set.
My guess is we’ll get the AIP credits and any existing Japanese special features. Plus we’re definitely getting commentaries.
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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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goji1986 wrote: Mon Apr 26, 2021 6:38 pm My guess is we’ll get the AIP credits and any existing Japanese special features. Plus we’re definitely getting commentaries.
I would absolutely love it if they could subtitle the Riki Hashimoto and Akira Ifukube interviews that were on the Japanese DVDs (probably Blu-rays too).
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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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Interesting, thanks for the update. I may get it if it goes on discount, but it's not a must have like the Gamera collection was. I actually have a Retromedia (flipper dvd) that has both AIP presentations of the Majin films in tact, although I guess the same could be said for the *budget* dvds of the showa Gamera AIP films, although, those were in far more need of better quality presentation. Still, the commentaries might be nice. If it came with the Kanon TV series, that would make it much more desirable as I've never seen it before.
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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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Even if they don't do anything with the transfers (which are already pretty good in comparison to Showa Gamera IIRC), going from one of the worst labels in terms of encoding to one of the best is always a plus
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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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I imagine there's the possibility of a better-translated subtitle track from Arrow, too.
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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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o.supreme wrote: Tue Apr 27, 2021 7:06 am Interesting, thanks for the update. I may get it if it goes on discount, but it's not a must have like the Gamera collection was. I actually have a Retromedia (flipper dvd) that has both AIP presentations of the Majin films in tact, although I guess the same could be said for the *budget* dvds of the Showa Gamera AIP films, although, those were in far more need of better quality presentation. Still, the commentaries might be nice. If it came with the Kanon TV series, that would make it much more desirable as I've never seen it before.
I know what you're talking about in the first case. Retromedia released four double-feature DVDs of some of the Daiei films released on TV by AI-TV:

*Destroy All Planets/Attack of the Monsters,
*Gamera vs. Monster X/Monster from a Prehistoric Planet,
*Return of the Giant Monsters/The Magic Serpent,
*Majin the Monster of Terror/Return of Giant Majin.

I often wonder why they never released a double-feature DVD of Gammera the Invincible/War of the Monsters. That would've been perfect for these two films.

And I just thought of this one that they could've done: Warning from Space/The X from Outer Space. This way, they'd have released all the Daiei films that AI-TV got a hold of, plus three extra films - one from Nikkatsu, one from Shochiku and one from Toei.
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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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Gammera the Invincible wasn't released by AI-TV. From Wikipedia:
After acquiring World Enterprises and their catalogue, National Telefilm Associates released a 16mm pan and scan version to television. Gammera the Invincible usually aired alongside the English versions of the Gamera films released by American International Television.
It sounds like it was often booked along with the sequels released by AI-TV, and it's still often packaged with them on those unlicensed DVD packs, but it was distributed by a different company. Assuming Retromedia was actually dealing with whoever owned the AI-TV catalog at the time, they could only have gotten the sequels from them.
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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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Rando Yaguchi wrote: Thu Mar 11, 2021 9:17 pm How does everyone like the audio commentaries? They were a big selling point for me, especially seeing all the familiar names from the old Classic Media Godzilla...I'm a little disappointed, though. The Heisei/Brave commentaries are all solid (even if Matt Frank is a little too goofy at times), but most of the Showa commentaries are just so boring - it's that tendency to start rattling off every single actor's screen credits like a glorified IMDB page, why do people do this? Ragone is the worst of the bunch, and Stuart Gilbraith isn't much better. I usually love David Kalat's stuff, but his take on Guiron is pretty unfocused and off-topic. I thought Sean Rhoads and Brooke McCorkle did a nice job with Zigra - plus it's refreshing to hear a female voice in the mix for once.
With regard to other films or shows that the cast & crew worked on, I think it comes down to how the audio commentaries present that information. When they just rattle off a list of titles and their years of release, it really isn’t anything that the listener can’t get from reading an IMDB page. When it’s presented as part of a biographical summary of that person’s life and work, though, then it’s usually much more informative and relevant.

On the Gamera commentary, originally recorded for Shout! Factory’s 2010 DVD, August Ragone alternates between those two presentation styles when he focuses on a particular actor or crew member. It’s still a very enjoyable commentary, as the movie is only 78 minutes long and he shares a lot of fascinating anecdotes, including Noriaki Yuasa's experience as director, how several of the special effects were achieved, how the film was received by the public, Daiei's historical place in the Japanese film industry, and the contemporary geopolitical realities that Japanese moviegoers lived with. He goes into detail about Daiei's unmade Nezura film project, he dissects the rumors about how the idea of Gamera was conceived, and he reads several direct quotes from Yuasa and other crew members.


The coolest thing about the Gamera vs. Barugon commentary, another 2010 DVD port, is how August Ragone and Jason Varney make frequent comparisons to the original screenplay throughout the film. They offer details on scenes that were written but left out of the finished product, scenes and characters in the movie that weren’t in the script, and changes between the scripted dialogue and what was shot. They also offer explanations for a few conspicuous jump cuts that occur in the film.

The weakest thing about the Barugon commentary is how often Ragone and Varney resort to just reciting film titles and release years. When they do speak in detail about particular people it’s very insightful and I think it would have worked better if they had taken that same approach to particular movies that were worth mentioning. For instance, The Great Wall (1962) is a Daiei title that gets named at least half a dozen times amid various actors’ filmographies, and it’s late in the commentary when Ragone mentions that The Great Wall was directed by Shigeo Tanaka, the same man who directed Gamera vs. Barugon! Instead of listing filmographies for so many actors, it would have been more interesting to take a couple moments to just talk about The Great Wall and how Tanaka had already directed so many of these actors in that film before they all worked together again on Barugon. If the films that get named were narrowed down to just the ones with that kind of context, it would keep the information more relevant to the commentary.


David Kalat’s commentaries do tend to cover a wide range of topics but he does a great job of framing everything to shine more light on the movie itself, and his Gamera vs. Guiron commentary is no exception. His running theme through the commentary is that you’ll enjoy the movie best if you’re either a child or watching it from a child’s perspective. He explains how the characters repeatedly calling the alien planet a “star” is in the original Japanese script & dialogue, not a problem exclusive to the English dubs & subtitles. He talks about historical theories of a tenth planet and Akio’s repeated invocations of traffic accidents, and how talk of crazy scenarios repeatedly leads to those scenarios happening, all reflecting a child’s perspective on the world.

Kalat also provides a sort of running biography of Noriaki Yuasa throughout the film, frequently circling back to the director and offering direct quotes and biographical insight. He discusses how Yuasa’s perspective as a child during WWII contrasted with those of the men at Toho who experienced the war as adults and how that made Daiei’s Gamera movies different from Godzilla movies. He recounts Yuasa’s audacity in asking Toho to provide him with prints of their monster movies so he could study them.

As he did on his Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster commentary, Kalat makes an impassioned case for the importance of English dubbing and how subtitles exclude some audiences and limit the exposure of the films, especially for children. Recalling how Yuasa described Gamera vs. Guiron as “like a children’s storybook,” Kalat draws a link between the historic role of fairy tales in scaring kids straight and the niche that movies like this and All Monsters Attack filled in 1969 Japan. It’s a great commentary.


Regarding the Gamera vs. Zigra commentary by Sean Rhoads and Brooke McCorkle, it is nice to hear a pair of new voices on a kaiju commentary. They provide some great insight about the different ways that the Gamera theme song’s lyrics can be translated and unique aspects of Japanese culture that are on display in the film. Unfortunately, the whole commentary sounds like they just recorded it from start to finish in one sitting and without any rehearsal. They tend to talk over each other whenever they both have something to say, and they frequently offer incomplete and sometimes inaccurate information.

When the kids think they’ve traveled through time only for the old man to tell them it’s still 1971, Rhoads mentions how the English dub changed the present year to the year when the dub was recorded but he doesn’t remember the specific year (1985) and he suggests that there were two dubs recorded for this movie in the ‘80s even though there was only one. After sharing their mutual disdain for English dubbing and lamenting how so many viewers have judged this and other kaiju movies based on their dubbed versions, McCorkle praises this Gamera collection for “finally” giving these films the treatment they deserve, even though all of them have been available in their original language with subtitles since 2010-2011, some of them since the late ‘90s. Rhoads likens the dress worn by Ken’s mother to Yuriko Hishimi’s dress in Godzilla vs. Gigan, which he calls Gamera vs. Gigan. There are a lot of things like that throughout the commentary that could have been avoided or cleaned up with preparation and editing.

I don’t mean to rip on this commentary too much, because it certainly isn’t unpleasant and it’s nice to have a commentary for Gamera vs. Zigra at all. Still, the info they provide about the movie and the genre is really basic, and Rhoads at one point actually quotes William Tsutsui’s Godzilla On My Mind of all books. Suffice to say this commentary hasn’t sold me on Rhoads and McCorkle’s book.


As for Richard Pusateri’s Super Monster Gamera commentary, now that is a treasure. He makes it clear from the outset that he never had any love for Gamera before, that he’s been a Godzilla fan since 1960 and he’s always looked down on Gamera as a low-quality knockoff, but that he enjoys Gamera more now after having studied Super Monster for this commentary. That immediately adds extra layers of hilarity to the fact that this was the second time Pusateri provided the commentary for a classic kaiju movie in a high-profile collection and in both cases it was the stock footage clip-show entry aimed at the youngest children, first Godzilla’s Revenge and then Super Monster Gamera.

Early on, Pusateri defends classic Japanese special effects techniques from traditional Western criticisms of lacking realism, then he spends the movie calling out the effects (both original and stock footage) for looking so unconvincing. He even admits “you may detect a Toho bias in my spoken words here” but he doesn’t let that stop him from providing as much info as he can about this production, and he acknowledges the things that Daiei did with their Gamera movies that Toho either wasn’t doing with Godzilla or later ended up emulating themselves. He doesn’t spend much time naming other films that these actors have appeared in, although he repeatedly affirms that the reason he’s not is because most of the main cast have no other credits listed on IMDB.

Pusateri has fun with this commentary and does little to hide his dismay with the film, all while maintaining a completely monotone delivery. He identifies the boy character as Keiichi and then decides to call him Kenny for the rest of the movie. When Keiichi picks out a turtle at the pet shop, Pusateri plays a beeping sound effect and announces that he’s “receiving an urgent health alert from the Center for Communicable Giant Monster Diseases” to warn about the danger of contracting salmonella from touching turtles, a gag that he repeats several times. He jokes about the plot’s ludicrous elements and the questionable circumstances of Keiichi’s association with the space women, and he concludes the commentary during the end credits with two minutes of runtime remaining. Whenever I rewatch Super Monster Gamera in the future, I’m likely to watch it with this commentary again because it makes the movie a lot more enjoyable.


I still need to listen to the rest of the Showa Era commentaries and all of the Heisei Era commentaries. Those and the six-hour trilogy retrospective documentary are the things I haven’t yet consumed from Arrow’s Gamera set.
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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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omgitsgodzilla wrote: Wed Apr 28, 2021 4:50 am Assuming Retromedia was actually dealing with whoever owned the AI-TV catalog at the time, they could only have gotten the sequels from them.
Retromedia's releases were unlicensed, although unlike Alpha and other fly-by-nights, Retromedia at least did its own transfers of Destroy All Planets and possibly Attack of the Monsters.

But, on the other hand, they made "special editions" of some other films (added sound effects and minimal computer graphics) to discourage Alpha and others from using transfers they ripped off of Sinister Cinema (or, in the case of RotGM, from Sandy Frank).
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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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Yeah that annoyed me about retromedias return of the giant monsters was all frankensteined like that. But i have a copy of the upn airing now thru a private tracker.

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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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I compared Arrow's blu ray with the japanese kadokawa blu of the Showa gamera serie and the japanese have a greenish tone to them which has been removed from the Arrow versions thankfully but the picture is a lot darker on the Arrow version.... loosing a bit of details.

I don't know which is better between the two honestly.

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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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I picked up the Showa set the other day. The cover art is awesome, as are the titles on the spines. That's one thing I'm already loving about Arrow, is how nice the spines of their cases look. Nice big titles and appealing colors. They look great on the shelf.
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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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According to the tracking dealie online, my copy of the Showa era set should be arriving tomorrow. Already got the Heisei set a while back.
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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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JAGzilla wrote: Mon May 17, 2021 5:45 am I picked up the Showa set the other day. The cover art is awesome, as are the titles on the spines. That's one thing I'm already loving about Arrow, is how nice the spines of their cases look. Nice big titles and appealing colors. They look great on the shelf.
Agreed. My only other Arrow disc asides from the Gamera collection is Deep Red and I keep it right next to my Criterion discs for some counter-flavor.
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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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My Showa set did indeed arrive today, gonna give the original movie a rewatch today and check out the commentary!
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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

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Huh, completely slipped by me that Arrow put all the Gamera movies up on Prime!

Gotta recommend them to folks now!

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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

Post by StreamOfKaijuness »

Arrow’s 4-disc Showa Gamera set is now on sale for $50 on Amazon.

The Heisei set is still $72 but hopefully that will be reduced soon. Considering that the complete collection was available for $130 upon release and these separate Showa and Heisei sets don’t include any of the books or other printed extras, selling these sets for a combined price of $145 really isn’t a better deal, but a combined price of $100 would make sense.

EDIT:
The Heisei set is on sale now too!
Last edited by StreamOfKaijuness on Sun Jul 04, 2021 5:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Gamera Arrow Limited Edition set

Post by StreamOfKaijuness »

For anyone who hasn't gotten Arrow's limited-edition Gamera complete collection box set with the books, Amazon US appears to currently have one single copy of the UK edition that's being offered by the Amazon Global Store UK third-party seller. The price is $128.83 + $12.58 shipping for $141.41 in total.

All of the UK edition's box, book & disc contents are identical to the US edition except for the UK rating logo on the packaging, and users on blu-ray.com have confirmed that the UK box's discs can play on North American blu-ray players.

Get it while you can!
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