Godzilla vs. The Thing
Four different versions of the film were used to create a complete audio-master and sync before any work started. Again, I had already done this back in 2015, but I never trust myself and always start each project over again from scratch.
The titles were the next thing to tackle. The only true full widescreen version of the English titles out there is from a non-anamorphic Simitar DVD. Being non-anamorphic though, the overall quality is pretty poor. The sharpest version is the Monsters HD/Classic Media sources, but those are cropped and not in the proper aspect ratio. In the end, I was able to upscale both sources and by combining get an adequate overall complete restoration of what the titles should look like. They’re still a little soft, but probably the best option until a new source becomes available. The final API title card was upscaled and partially recreated.
The biggest thing to tackle with this reconstruction was the Frontier Missile scene. I examined every available source. As has been noted in the past, many of these are missing frames and/or animated effects, so all clips were conformed to a timeline to make sure each stayed in sync and note where material was missing. This allowed me to also validate quality. It quickly became clear that an Anolis DVD reconstruction from a few years back was not only the most complete, but the sharpest image.
However, the Anolis sequence was VERY dirty, with lots of scratches and dirt burned into the print. Using the same AI upscaling as I have in some of my previous reconstructions, the overall sharpness of the upscaled images was undeniable. The dirt and scratches I tackled with a different AI filter in Resolve. This was able to provide much cleaner images, but the software also caused some new issues, particularly with the explosions. The dirt removal actually totally removed the animated effects also! I wonder if this might be what happened with some of these versions in the past. I had to find some way to use the clean footage, but only for certain parts of each frame. To do this, I used a very basic tool that let me load both the dirty and clean tracks on top of each other. Then, frame by frame I went through the entire sequence and erased the new artefacts created by the cleaning tool. I retouched all 4,096 frames of the sequence one at a time! All of the animated effects were left intact, and explosions returned to their original versions, while leaving the dirt hidden. Even some of the scratching was repaired, but without more professional tools this is the best I could get the material to look for now. There were two short sections that just wouldn’t work with the cleaning tool, so I restored those back to the dirty version fully until there is better software to tackle those.
The other major concern with this entire sequence was the color grade. The print Anolis scanned this material from was affected by color fade. The entire sequence has shifted more to the red/magenta spectrum. While a good color grade can counteract some of this, it does make it harder to get a more consistent result. Each shot was graded separately. The other thing about color grading is a lot of it is down to personal preference. I did take into account input from some friends, and I hope the end result was worth all the hard work. I do think its about the best, and most complete version of this sequence I’ve seen. I also wanted the color grade and quality to blend as seamlessly as possible with the newly restored Japanese material around it. Let me know what you think.
Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster
Again, I stared by comparing two different versions to make sure the audio track was complete first. Not much to note here, only a few frames here and there.
For the most part opening titles were recycled from my 2014 reconstruction, just updated to make sure the scale remained correct and matched to the new restoration. The original End title card was also corrected for the aspect ratio and graded to match the grading of the new restoration.
Monster Zero
AIP and other title cards are recreated or re-used from my original reconstruction. All were scaled to make sure they matched the new restoration.
Starting with the opening shot, there were several captions that were faithfully recreated and scaled to correct aspect/size.
The title card for “The End” was easily recreated, however, creating clean footage to insert this over proved much harder. The 終 (end) kanji was superimposed over moving footage of trucks. This made it difficult for any CGI replacement. But, I didn’t want to switch back to poor quality footage even for this single shot. In the end, I managed to recreate the footage using a mixture of CGI, animation still image and for one tiny bit, an upscaled portion of the Classic Media DVD. Its all fairly seamless and you still get to enjoy the shot from the newly restored footage.
Two burnt in Japanese subtitles were removed using CGI and faithfully recreated English captions for Lake Miojin and Washigasawa used instead. For the black and white “news” footage, I recreated the English headlines and used the widescreen Simitar release for the original size and placement.
Similar, the full widescreen image of Namikawa’s letter to Glenn was lifted from the Simitar DVD. However, the quality was poor, so this was merged with the higher quality (but not fully widescreen) image from the Classic Media DVD. This footage was then upscaled using the AI software – you can now pretty much read the handwriting along with the narration.
And that’s pretty much it. The newly restored footage brings out so many details lost in past transfers. Its almost like watching these movies for the first time. I keep noticing things I’ve never seen before, even though I’ve seen these movies 50+ times.
My Twitter page has a lot more images from these reconstructions, so feel free to go over there and check them out (link in signature). If you’re interested in more details, or links to download any of these reconstructions just PM me here, or contact me on my Twitter page.
