Personally, I think the difference here is that the Showa era only started doing that excessively is when budgets were reduced to shoe string tier budgets and Japanese cinema was essentially dying a slow painful death. Whereas Heisei, to my understanding, consistently had bigger budgets, hence why some are quicker to accuse them of being uninspired when elements are recycled.JAGzilla wrote:Heisei and Millennium absolutely have plenty of original elements, I'm not questioning that. But you can't pretend for a second that they don't recycle things every bit as egregiously as the Showa films did.
(Rest of this is just personal thoughts I've opted to dump here, not a response to anyone in particular)
Though on that note (and forgive me for digressing a bit) I do think some of the criticisms of them for bringing back King Ghidorah, Mothra, and Rodan are a bit odd. They're nearly every bit as iconic as Godzilla so I'd say their returns were inevitable, even in the 90s. It's more of a question of how impactful and well done the new versions are. Heisei Ghidorah's design has stuck around for decades now, as has Mecha-King Ghidorah, though the origin for Heisei King Ghidorah is almost always discarded.
Overall I think the Millennium era handled new kaiju better than Heisei did. Orga is a better evil Godzilla clone gone wrong, Megaguirus has a delightfully sinister and arrogant personality and cool design and is typically regarded as the highlight of her movie, and Monster X is great in terms of design and posing a much more deadly challenge to Godzilla. Obviously Keizer Ghidorah was a bit off the mark but still. That and in some ways the Millennium era's reimaginings of classic kaiju seemed to register better with people too. GMK Baragon is pretty much the default nowadays and Kiryu is near universally beloved. Mothra in Tokyo S.O.S. is a high point and in terms of practical effects wizardry is a huge step above Heisei Mothra. Only exception to this is GMK Ghidorah.
