Kaiju musings, Gamera vs. Godzilla

[dvandom]

You know, all told, I still prefer Gamera to Godzilla, which I can only chalk up to "first exposure" syndrome. After all, Gamera's setting has a distinct lack of one element generally guaranteed to hold my interest:

MECHA

The Toho-verse is rife with mecha battlers, both robot-like (Moguera, MOGUERA, Jet Jaguar, Mecha-Godzilla, Mecha-Kong, etc) and vehicle-like (Atragon/Gotengo, Super X, many others).

Daiei, on the other hand, tends to skimp on the fighting mechs. They run towards abstract alien spaceships that interact mainly via beams. One of them, Zigra, can turn into a giant monster, but it's a distinctly organic-looking monster, not a robo-kaiju. And humans are pretty much limited to real world technology, with minisubs and rotating restaurants being about it in Showa (60s/70s stuff). In Heisei (Gamera 1-3 in the 80s/90s) there's even less in the way of high tech stuff...even the space traveling alien Legion does so via biological propulsion, and the ancient Atlantean tech is also all biotech. Jack squat for mecha in Gamera the Brave (2006), too.

I can only conclude that the soft spot I have for the flying, flaming turtle comes from the fact that Channel 18 showed Gamera vs. Guiron one Saturday afternoon when I was 8, and I imprinted on the king of all turtles.

Of course, as an adult, I think another thing that appeals to me about Gamera is that there's a well-developed setting, but not one that's flooded with work like Godzilla. I seem to like finding the semi-obscure corners of things and messing about with them (i.e. I played Staq Mavlen on LegionMUSH before he started to appear in the v4 comic regularly). Godzilla has so much done with it that there's not a lot of room for me to play, and probably has an order of magnitude more fan work, if not two orders.

Maybe I'll make a Gamera-verse mech. It'd almost have to be alien, though, as there's no precedent in the setting for humans to have access to advanced tech.

Comments

[foomf.livejournal.com]

Huh. I apped him once, got two or three RP sessions, then stopped playing muxen for City Of.