Around late 2006, after going to monster jam with my dad he ask me if I wanted to watch Jurassic park or Godzilla. "What's Godzilla?" I asked him "you've never heard of Godzilla?!?" he replied. he then showed me Jurassic park that night and then the 98 zilla the following morning. From then on the Tyrannosaurus Rex became my favorite prehistoric animal, and that first viewing inspired me to learn all I could about dinosaurs. To this day I still strive to become a paleontologist.
As for Godzilla, two months or so afterwards I obtained my first true Godzilla movie, a VHS tape of Godzilla vs. monster zero. I still remember sitting down in awe as Godzilla and Rodan were being revived on planet x and I was hooked from then on. I collected most of my first viewings of the Showa era (particularly Mechagodzilla 74/Gigan) on VHS and seeing the 93 Mechagodzilla on TV. I later got several of the Heisei/Millennium films on DVD, losing them over the years and buying new ones in the 2010s.The last Godzilla film(not counting 2014 of shin both of which I have watched) I had a first viewing of was Godzilla vs. Megalon in 2014.
Also I remember me & my family not utilizing DVDs en-masse until 2009, I thought VHS tapes were more efficient back then, because DVDs scratch easily. Sorry for the HUGE story.
Never forget the Showa Era, R.I.P, Haruo Nakajima 8/7/2017. ExtraTHICC!
My brother and I used to own a DVD copy of King Kong vs. Godzilla and a VHS copy of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla back in the early-to-mid 2000s, any others we saw via downloading torrents.
I started watching Japanese monster movies on TV, long before home video even so much as existed. I lived in the Philadelphia area and watched Mad Theater and Horror Theater hosted by Dr. Shock (this was back in those dear, departed days before Movie Macabre with Elvira, Mistress of the Dark). I remember watching Gamera vs. Jiger (when it was Gamera vs. Monster X) on one of them; I don't know which one. I also may have seen on them Gamera (as Gammera the Invincible), Gamera vs. Barugon (as War of the Monsters), Gamera vs. Gyaos (as Return of the Giant Monsters) and Gamera vs. Viras (as Destroy All Planets). I don't remember ever seeing Gamera vs. Guiron (as Attack of the Monsters), though.
My first Godzilla movie was Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (as Godzilla versus the Sea Monster (yes, that version, which I did not know was edited)) which I watched at my grandparents' house. I believe it must have been ca. 1968, because that's when it came to the U.S. on TV. That possibly means that I may have watched it on its premiere in this country! All I know is, when the Big G was awakened with that makeshift lightning rod and his dorsal fins sparked briefly and his eyes opened and he burst out roaring from that seaside cliff, I was hooked for life! That one will always have a special place in my heart.
I also remember watching both of the Toho King Kong films, Mothra vs. Godzilla (as Godzilla vs. the Thing), Godzilla vs. Hedorah (as Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster), Gappa the Triphibian Monster (as Monster from a Prehistoric Planet), Yongary, Monster from the Deep and two TV shows, Ultraman and Giant Robo (as Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot). Ah, those were the days, indeed! (Unfortunately, I never got to watch The X from Outer Space; if I had, I'd probably have liked that one, too!)
Looking back on all this, I may have actually been a "Monster Kid" and not even known it at the time!
Last edited by mikelcho on Sun Jan 06, 2019 6:42 am, edited 3 times in total.
I rented lots of the DVDs from Blockbuster Video and Hollywood Video and this one video store that seemed to only exist in my home city before it closed its doors. I also watched most of the Heisei and a few of the Millennium films on Crackle.com and several Showa films on two other streaming website that I don't remember the names and I don't know if they still exist anymore.
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.
Also, if I remember correctly, I first watched Godzilla 1985 on YouTube over a decade ago.
By the time I turned 14, I watched every Godzilla movie except Godzilla vs Biollante, which I finally saw when my dad bought me the Echo Bridge DVD back in 2012.
Last edited by CrimsonBloodX on Thu Nov 12, 2020 10:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"You are the Arbiter. The will of the Prophets. But these are my Elites. Their lives matter to me. Yours does not."
In the early 90’s Blockbuster Video was a staple of my childhood. Browsing the NES games, I saw the box for Godzilla: Monster of Monsters. I’ve been a dinosaur fan since before my earliest memories (in fact, some of my earliest memories are pretending to be a T. rex, running around in a hunch and holding out two fingers). So of course I thought this looked like possibly the coolest game ever. And it was! I loved that game.
When it was time to return it, my mom said she thought there was a movie about Godzilla (little did she know...) so she took me over to the scifi section and we found maybe 6 or 8 videocassettes. After looking them over and reading the descriptions on the back, I settled on the original Vestron Video Godzilla: King of the Monsters! Of course I loved the tape and watched it multiple times before its due date, at which point I returned it and rented another Godzilla vhs. Eventually I saw all the films that location had and began begging my parents to call around and take me to any other BBV in the area to scout out other Godzilla movies.
I received the first one I owned on my next birthday:
By the time real info about G’98 started leaking online at sites like Barry’s Temple of Godzilla I had most of the films either in my vhs collection or had at least seen them via rental (notable exceptions being Destroy All Monsters and Godzilla Raids Again b/c those were basically impossible to find in the early to mid 90’s). At that time I was already buying bootleg vhs’s of the Heisei series via old fashioned mail order from the one bootlegger everyone was using back then...
Man, those were fun times. Back when I wasn’t even sure exactly how many godzilla movies there even were! And then discovering there were new ones that had only been released in Japan!
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Okay, must've been around '92 or so - before kindergarten: went to my cousins' house and they were watching King Kong vs. Godzilla. I was familiar with Kong as my parents showed the original and Mighty Joe Young to me on old recorded VHS tapes. When I came home I asked why we didn't have any Godzilla movies (seemed a reasonable question!) and the next day Dad came home with the Goodtimes tapes of King Kong vs. Godzilla and Godzilla vs. Megalon.
Frequented video rental stores. Saw many that way. Godzilla 1985 had a theatrical run and successful VHS run so every rental place, no matter how small, seemed to have that one. In addition, Barry's Video had King of the Monsters, Smog Monster and Rodan (shelved with the Godzillas). That place Mom thought was a front for prostitution had Monster Zero. That place on Airport Road had Biollante (scary for a kid!), Sea Monster, and vs. Mechagodzilla. Got the Paramount King of the Monsters tape for a birthday. Around that time TNT was frequently showing the Saperstein package (King of the Monsters, Mothra vs., Monster Zero, Godzilla's Revenge and Terror) on TV. Watched the marathons! When Joe Bob Briggs took over MonsterVision on TNT they largely dropped older stuff in favor of more contemporary horror (not Joe Bob's choice: he likes the old stuff, too) and at that time Cartoon Network began showing the old Hanna Barbara cartoon, which picked up the Godzilla-on-TV slack for me as a kid.
I remember some confusion about alternate titles. Finding out that Hedorah and Gigan were the same ones I'd already seen as Smog Monster and Monster Island.
In 1998 Godzilla movies were back on TV to tie-in to the new movie hype. I concentrated on collecting the whole series on tape. I devoured the Godzilla Compendium, which gave me baseline knowledge of the franchise. A little over a year or so later I was buying my first subtitled tapes with the Daimajin Trilogy. A year after that I was buying bootleg tapes to get unavailable films, Japanese cuts, Ultraman episodes... and, of course, I began keeping up with new releases and such. Saw Godzilla 2000 in the theater five times!
So, yeah; by age 13 around the dawn of the new Millenium I was pretty darn savvy about the genre and had a growing library of films. I also moved on from being just a Godzilla fan to being a kaiju fan on general as I had only seen a couple of non-Godzilla kaiju flicks as a kid.
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.
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.
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Terasawa wrote:That was a big day: we also picked up Biollante and Star Wars.
When I first learned Biollante existed, it was not yet available for sell-through, just rental. I learned about it from a Tower Records in-store video catalogue, and it would have cost me about $90 to pick up a copy. It wasn't until months later, while visiting Palo Alto (about 44 miles from where I lived at the time) that I was even able to find a rental copy and finally see the movie, and since that was copy guarded, I had to buy a $20.00 bootleg in order to obtain my own first copy.
Tokyo, a smoldering memorial to the unknown, an unknown which at this very moment still prevails and could at any time lash out with its terrible destruction anywhere else in the world.
Yeesh! The worst I had it was with Smog Monster, which was out of print by the time I started collecting the movies. The local library had a copy (which I only rented twice before someone stole it) but it too was copy-protected, so I couldn't make my own. The export version was on Sci-Fi a few times a year starting in 1996 but we didn't get Sci-Fi until about 2000. The other option was eBay, but sellers routinely sold that tape for nutty prices. (Some things never change.)
Terasawa wrote:Yeesh! The worst I had it was with Smog Monster, which was out of print by the time I started collecting the movies. The local library had a copy (which I only rented twice before someone stole it) but it too was copy-protected, so I couldn't make my own. The export version was on Sci-Fi a few times a year starting in 1996 but we didn't get Sci-Fi until about 2000. The other option was eBay, but sellers routinely sold that tape for nutty prices. (Some things never change.)
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).
Tokyo, a smoldering memorial to the unknown, an unknown which at this very moment still prevails and could at any time lash out with its terrible destruction anywhere else in the world.
I'm a bit sad my Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster VHS vanished in one of my many moves. I used to watch it religiously, along with our Mothra vs. Godzilla tape (pretty sure my Dad still has that one). Granted, I don't even own a VHS player anymore, but I wish I still had it for nostalgia's sake.
The wisest words ever spoken on TK: "When I Saw The Showa Movie's white My Friend's They seid WTF is This Your showing Me to Men Fighting In suit's they found At party city Butt when I Showed Them The Heisei film's they thoght They where pritty fun To Watch"
I'm on the weird cusp of late-90's technology and early 2000's innovation with home media so I remember watching a lot of them on VHS and then the rest on DVD.
The video rental stores around me had a great selection. I had the usual Blockbuster and Hollywood Video but also a place called Mondo Video that had bootleg, subtitled copies of the Toho Video VHS tapes. I remember renting Destroy All Monsters from that place and saw it for the first time subtitled. Sad that it closed a while ago, it was a fantastic place.
I don't remember a lot of the specific releases I watched, but for some of the VHS tapes they were the Anchor Bay releases that formed the G85 mural. I also remember finding Gigan and G85 at a flea market towards the beginning of the last decade when I still had a VCR.
Yeah growing up, it was VHS/DVD for me, it went from weekly Blockbuster rentals, to buying that old set of DVDs with the green backgrounds and the titles across the bottom, it also had Rodan in the set for some reason. Then the Heisei 2 pack DVDs followed by the Millennium single DVDs.
_JNavs_ wrote:that old set of DVDs with the green backgrounds and the titles across the bottom, it also had Rodan in the set for some reason
Until you mentioned Rodan I thought you were talking about the 2014 Kraken releases and I was about to hit a new depressive low for fear that 2014 is now "old."
But nope, you're talking about the 2002 Classic Media set.
_JNavs_ wrote:that old set of DVDs with the green backgrounds and the titles across the bottom, it also had Rodan in the set for some reason
Until you mentioned Rodan I thought you were talking about the 2014 Kraken releases and I was about to hit a new depressive low for fear that 2014 is now "old."
But nope, you're talking about the 2002 Classic Media set.
Yes! I loved those, rewatched them until they were scratched beyond playability. (or at least Rodan was)
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.
I didn't have access to films like DAM and G:RA, heck, i didn't get GvKK until 2008. I don't know if they were just harder to find at the time, like Biollante, or if i was just unlucky.
DAM had a barebones release from ADV in the early 2000's and GRA didn't make it to DVD until Classic Media's 2006 release. KKVG came out in 05 to cash in on the Kong remake and Biollante was never available until 2014 due to licensing issues.
and 
were never really friends.
is best girl, 
is best boy
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