How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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Terasawa
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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_JNavs_ wrote:I give Godzilla's Revenge a hard time because of the Minya suit, but i'd be lying if i said that set wasn't my favorite line up of Showa films due to nostalgia alone. Same reason i love ToMG, Rodan, GvM and of course the original.
That's basically the same group of films that had been the premier Godzilla package through the '80s and '90s. Angilasman mentioned them above as "the Saperstein package". Saperstein had the rights to those (plus MZ, FCTW, WOTG, and a few other non-kaiju Toho movies) and pimped them to all interested TV networks and home video labels. The five Godzillas were mainstays on TNT and later AMC but filtered down to local stations, too. They were also released on video by Paramount ('80s and 1992-94), Simitar (1998), and finally Classic Media (2002, although they dropped MZ for Rodan).

In other words, if you were a North American Godzilla fan from 1980 to the mid 2000s, these should probably be among the most familiar Godzilla movies to you. :P

Classic Media's 2006-2008 releases constituted basically the same library of films (plus GRA and Ghidrah from the Golden Books package) but obviously those weren't the same pan and scan video transfers that had been around since the early 1980s.
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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^ Precisely! Those were all films Saperstein had a hand in releasing or had acquired the TV and home video rights to later and bundled them all together as a package for interested parties. It's like the movies traveled in one big pack and when you saw one it probably meant the others weren't far behind.

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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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Simply watched them on DVD and sometimes in theatre when time considered me lucky. :lol:

I watched most of the Showa era growing up, and after a while i got a hold of the Heisei and Millennium eras as well.
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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Angilasman wrote:It's like the movies traveled in one big pack and when you saw one it probably meant the others weren't far behind.
Similarly, if you saw Sea Monster or SOG you knew Ghidrah might be coming up later. That's essentially how I saw the latter for the first time (on the Disney Channel).
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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CrimsonBloodX wrote:I remember being bored on the 4th of July in 2007 and then my mom called me. She found a Godzilla movie playing on TV. It was Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla and I started watching it when SpaceGodzilla was flying over the city. It turns out that one channel was doing a Godzilla marathon on Independence Day. The other films were Godzilla vs King Ghidorah, Mechagodzilla II and Destoroyah. It was the first time I saw any of those films. I watched them all while eating lots of Popsicle and while a BBQ party was going on in my backyard before going to watch the fireworks. That was a good day from my childhood.
Similar memories, but a bit earlier, I might have been 4 at the time, but I watched Monster Zero with my dad in our tiny apartment in the Bronx. It just so happened to be playing and I really liked it. Similar to what is being mentioned, I'm pretty sure I saw a bunch fo the "Saperstien pack" in that era. I then saw Godzilla 2000 in theaters when I was 4 or 5 (in retrospect it's pretty cool that my parents saw I liked this and went out of their way). After that I pretty much got lots of VHS and other things as gifts.

I remember going to Kims Video and Music in Manhattan with my dad and he bought me the Godzilla vs. Biollante HBO VHS, Rebirth of Mothra, and Godzilla vs. Megalon on VHS at different times. Then there was the local video store where I definitely rented films like Godzilla vs. The Seamonster and some other stuff during that time. I think then the Heisei series had a few entries on VHS, like Godzilla vs. KG and Godzilla vs. Destroyed. Those boxes were pretty cool.

I remember when I started getting into DVD'S and they became a more common thing. The Sony DVD's were great as they were my first exposure to Hedorah and pretty much ll the millennium era films.

Around 2007 was when I got tech savvy and started using online resources like TK to find out and seek out films pretty easily. That's also around the time when movies beyond just Godzilla like some of the previously more Kaiju films became available.
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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We rented VHS's at local video stores. Most of the time, i would like them so much my dad would buy the VHS and keep it.

I saw Godzilla 98 and Godzilla 2000 in theaters
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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Terasawa wrote:
Angilasman wrote:It's like the movies traveled in one big pack and when you saw one it probably meant the others weren't far behind.
Similarly, if you saw Sea Monster or SOG you knew Ghidrah might be coming up later. That's essentially how I saw the latter for the first time (on the Disney Channel).
I only saw Sea Monster on the Disney Channel, and I was lucky to even see that! Back then, Disney was a premium service like HBO that you had to subscribe to and occasionally they'd give it to you for free for a week or two to get kids hooked. It played during one of those periods!

Looking back, it's weird how alternate titles continue to proliferate in the 90s. Even though the VHS tapes Godzilla vs. Gigan the film was still running on TV under the title Godzilla on Monster Island. Likewise, the 80s VHS of Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla was called Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, while the 90s release from Goodtmes went back to the Godzilla vs. The Cosmic Monster title!

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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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Angilasman wrote:Looking back, it's weird how alternate titles continue to proliferate in the 90s. Even though the VHS tapes Godzilla vs. Gigan the film was still running on TV under the title Godzilla on Monster Island. Likewise, the 80s VHS of Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla was called Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, while the 90s release from Goodtmes went back to the Godzilla vs. The Cosmic Monster title!
I'm pretty sure the Goodtimes "Cosmic Monster" was unlicensed. Their release was actually the worst of that version: a lot of the movie was cut, even things that weren't thrown out by Cinema Shares. I think the GT tape runs about 70 minutes!

Sci-Fi (which had its own "package" of Godzilla movies from Toho, and separate from the five Sapersteins and the four from Alan Enterprises) was the cable home for Godzilla on Monster Island (as you mentioned) and Godzilla vs. the Cosmic Monster. The former and Megalon (also on Sci-Fi) were identical to Cinema Shares' releases but "Cosmic" was actually the international version of GvMG (the same transfer released on video by New World, Starmaker, etc.) with a Toho-created title card affixed.

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August once spitballed that Toho did this as a means of regaining control over the "Cosmic Monster" title.
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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^ Man, there's too much to keep up with! Especially when you consider the unlicensed stuff.

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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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eabaker wrote:For Smog Monster I went ahead and duped the copy-protected version, so for years I watched it with the saturation constantly fading up and down. The first time I saw it looking decent was a theatrical screening of the export version (on a triple feature with the export version of DAM and a subbed version of ToMG).
I did the exact same thing :lol: . In 1990 I was in 8th grade, one of my closest friends and I created this grand plan to save up money and over spring break one day he would bring his VCR over to my place so we coujld rent and dup a bunch of films from a new BBV that opened up. It was further away but had Smog Monster, Gamera vs Barugon, Monster from a Prehistoric Planet, Gorgo and the Adventures of Ultraman Movie.

We had to watch them all 2x so we could each make a copy, we did it over 2 days. It wasn't until a few days later did I realize the problem with Smog Monster. It's too bad beause my uncle actually had 2 VCR's that, for whatever reason, were immune to the magnetic duplication blocking, I should have asked him to make a copy for me...oh well... I eventually bought one from a mom & pop Video rental store going out of business.

From the late 70's to late 80's I saw most of them on TV, born too late for theaters, and had most of them copied from TV before they came out on VHS.
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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VHS tapes from parents/grand parents when I was a kid. I remember when I was but 9 or 10 and the Heisei movies started hitting shelves at stores like Sun Coast. Relied on Sci-Fi Channel for a few movies that we could never find on VHS. Had Godzilla vs. Hedorah, Destroy All Monsters and King Kong Escapes recorded on VHS for the longest time before they got regular DVD releases, except for DAM which we eventually stumbled across with the awesome box art. Also had War of the Gargantuas recorded from an old showing on TNT's MonsterVision, which was my only source of that movie until Classic Media released it on DVD back in 2008, which means that recorded copy got a lot of mileage over its near 13-years of existence. Frankenstein Conquers the World is another one I had recorded from a mid-90s showing during AMC's Monster Fest, complete with intros and outros by the great Roger Corman talking about the "deleted from US release" octopus scene. This is another recorded copy that got A LOT of mileage before an official release came out on DVD.

When I got older, DVDs started to take off and I managed to get all of the films on DVD as they were released in the US while also getting the likes of Biollante and Return of Godzilla on Region 2 DVDs from Toho's library, granted I still watched the VHS of G'85, Biollante and Megalon a lot. A lot of these DVDs I still use because I haven't gotten around to updating to Blu-Ray... yet.


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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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Terasawa wrote:
Angilasman wrote:I remember seeing that Godzilla's Revenge tape with that cover at Tower Records! Really enjoyed Paramount's packaging of their Toho flicks in the '90s, even if they occasionally mixed up details between the movies. By the time I got serious about getting all the movies the Simitar releases had superseded them.
Yeah, I really love those Paramount tapes from the '90s. Greg Winters was the artist that did most of those. His art came up recently in a Facebook group I'm in and it was noticed that he probably just used likenesses of whatever promotional material he had available. His Last Days of Planet Earth painting uses the likenesses of Yumi Shirakawa and Akihiko Hirata from a Rodan publicity still, Margaret Sheridan from The Thing, and the guy on the Atari 5200 Defender cartridge. Most of his paintings for the Paramount releases have sold on eBay. (He also did a lot of work for Sega.)

I remember peeking in the window at Sam Goody and thinking I saw Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, which I already had. It was actually Paramount's TOMG, which was brand new to me. Shout out to my dad for suggesting we go in and have a look anyway. That was a big day: we also picked up Biollante and Star Wars.
We never had a Sam Goody, at least to my recollection. The Tower Records was only infrequently visited by me before it closed down, but this is caused me to remember the most prevalent store for me as a tween and teen: Suncoast video.

My earliest memory of the place was actually looking at the LaserDisc for Godzilla vs Biollante. I wasn't even sure what a LaserDisc was, but it looked so cool! I only got into online shopping in the latter part of the decade but before then this was my go-to place in the 2000s because they stocked all the more obscure genre stuff and things from smaller distributors. At the beginning of the decade I rounded out my VHS collection of Godzilla movies there, and a while after that Sony's DVDs seemed to be stocked in more places like Walmart or Best Buy I counted on Suncoast for any title released on DVD buy ADV or Media Blasters or the like. I even remember handling things I didn't end up buying like the Neptune Media Gamera tapes.

It was a bit of a bummer, because things were rarely on sale at that store and everything was MSRP. I really had to save those allowance dollars to purchase these things!

You know, Godzilla vs. Biollante had to be one of the most prevalent video tapes in American stores from the 90s to the 2000s. There always seemed to be two or three copies of the tape at Suncoast, even at the very end of the VHS era.

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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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Angilasman wrote:We never had a Sam Goody, at least to my recollection. The Tower Records was only infrequently visited by me before it closed down, but this is caused me to remember the most prevalent store for me as a tween and teen: Suncoast video.

My earliest memory of the place was actually looking at the LaserDisc for Godzilla vs Biollante. I wasn't even sure what a LaserDisc was, but it looked so cool! I only got into online shopping in the latter part of the decade but before then this was my go-to place in the 2000s because they stocked all the more obscure genre stuff and things from smaller distributors. At the beginning of the decade I rounded out my VHS collection of Godzilla movies there, and a while after that Sony's DVDs seemed to be stocked in more places like Walmart or Best Buy I counted on Suncoast for any title released on DVD buy ADV or Media Blasters or the like. I even remember handling things I didn't end up buying like the Neptune Media Gamera tapes.
Suncoast was great, too, but I don't think it lasted all that long in my area. I can't recall ever buying DVDs there, at least not at the one nearest me. I'm pretty sure one a little further away was where I nabbed G2 and G3 on DVD. Like you, I remember Neptune Media's tapes were sold there. They definitely had the better sci-fi and horror sections, compared to Sam Goody.

Suncoast was where I got:
Varan
Mothra (the 1993 release from TriStar)
Various Godzillas including SOG (Anchor Bay; they carried the box sets forever) and DAM.
Gamera vs. Zigra (and probably most of my other Celebrity Gamera tapes)
You know, Godzilla vs. Biollante had to be one of the most prevalent video tapes in American stores from the 90s to the 2000s. There always seemed to be two or three copies of the tape at Suncoast, even at the very end of the VHS era.
I had to get another copy of Biollante in 2002 after my VCR destroyed my first copy. That was another Sam Goody purchase. Interestingly, this one doesn't have the video spot for The Opposite Sex and the HBO Video logo is more modern, so evidently they had a later production run.
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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The Godzilla series on VHS was the biggest scavenger hunt I ever embarked on. I went to Ma and Pa video stores, the big chains, and kiosks at the mall to try and find these things. Some were easy (Godzilla Vs. Gigan), others were not (Destroy All Monsters).

I also remember checking the new TV guide every time it came to the house to see when Godzilla movies would be playing on TV. It became ritualistic after a while, so much so that when it would come in the mail, my mom would just hand it to me right away when it came.
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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Oh man, checking the TV guide every week , man that brings back memories....but I was able to see a few rare gems that way such as AIP Dagora, Gamera vs Monster X, Super Monster, etc.... That ran on late Friday or Saturday nights. Getting Godzilla movies was easy by comparison, except for AIP DAM, and Godzilla Raids again, the only Showa Godzilla films I Never saw on commercial TV.
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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Kids nowadays will not understand the thrill of Video Update, Hollywood Video, and Blockbuster, as I'd go to multiple locations discovering different Godzilla films!!
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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KingKaiju wrote: Thu Nov 19, 2020 2:34 pm Kids nowadays will not understand the thrill of Video Update, Hollywood Video, and Blockbuster, as I'd go to multiple locations discovering different Godzilla films!!
AMEN! Walking into a video store to rent out a movie and maybe buy some candy was more fun than just streaming movies in your house.
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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KingKaiju wrote: Thu Nov 19, 2020 2:34 pm Kids nowadays will not understand the thrill of Video Update, Hollywood Video, and Blockbuster, as I'd go to multiple locations discovering different Godzilla films!!
Kids also wont know the frustration of going to different rental stores and grabbing the same movie but with different titles on the box, like Godzilla vs. The Cosmic Monster and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla.

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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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GojiDog wrote: Mon May 11, 2020 4:03 pmI also remember checking the new TV guide every time it came to the house to see when Godzilla movies would be playing on TV. It became ritualistic after a while, so much so that when it would come in the mail, my mom would just hand it to me right away when it came.
Same here, except it was the movie listings in that TV magazine that would come inside the family's Sunday newspaper.

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