Ok, finally got around to looking at this (been a *long* week).
I actually ended up enjoying this book much more than I thought. I'm not the biggest Heisei fan, and the Heisei series has been covered to death (probably moreso than both the Showa and Millennium series combined), so I was skeptical that this could offer anything new. However, this book surprisingly has loads of concept art I had never seen before anywhere. For example, we have all seen the concept designs for Gigamoth, Bagan, Space Godzilla, and Destroyer a gazillion times, but this book had loads of different concept/design ideas/proposals that were fascinating and rarely, if ever, printed before. Another neat behind the scenes photo was from some battle story boards for
GvsKing Ghidorah, where Godzilla has King Ghidorah's severed head in his mouth.
One of the most interesting parts of this book was an original story idea pitting Godzilla against a kaiju called
Barubaroi. He resembles a wierd cross between Hedorah/Biollante/and John Carpenter's
The Thing. Angilas was suppose to have a role in this film, and apparently he would shape-shift into Barubaroi (perhaps Barubaroi has the same powers as the
The Thing?). My Japanese reading skills are still poor, so bare with me as I try to read it all and translate it. We have all heard about unmade projects considered for
GvsDestroyer, such as "
Godzilla vs Ghost Godzilla", but I've heard next to zilch on
Godzilla vs Barubaroi. Fascinating stuff.
Overall, there is plenty of never before seen stuff in this book for me to recommend it. I want to read more and find out more about this Barubaroi fellow as well.
Downside: The book skips over G85. Yeah, yeah, spare me all the "G85 was technically showa and not Kawakita's film"...(
*cue annoying internet troll character from the Nostalgic Critic*)....bottom line, it's part of this particular series of G films and should have been covered. Also, there were some really interesting concept art for the proposed film
GvsMechani-Kong film where Godzilla was suppose to battle Mechani-Kong while G-Force (?) was suppose to go inside Godzilla's body and battle him from within....but sadly, no concept art of Mechani-Kong is present. Also, I echo Godziszewski's opinion that stills from the films themselves are a little dark/murky (though in fairness, I give them credit for trying something new instead of posting the same old stills seen a million times in other books). However, as I mentioned, the unseen concept art and storyboards are the main strengths of this book, so this was no big deal. Also, how about some of Kawakita's work beyond these films (Mothra 3 films, SFX work on the various Godzilla Pachinko games, etc)? Or perhaps he will milk that in a future book...can't really blame the guy for trying to milk the cash cow dry.
I'll add more stuff when I have more time (for example, there was a neat Gotengo design that "BLOWS AWAY" the updated
GFW Gotengo).
In the meantime, here is dakaiju Barubaroi (sorry for the quality, as I have no scanner):
It doesn't really cost me all that much. Also, I do collect books on the genre as part of my hobby, not just figures. And *real* quality books on the genre rarely come out these days (The excellent Yosensha Mook books being the only really recent ones).
. Business is business, and there's still a market for these books, despite how much it's dwindled in recent years.
) Losses: 26
