Lost Projects:Godzilla Vs. Astrogodzilla

[Godzilla Lover101]

I don't know if this would be any better than SG but it always bothered me that Mothra didn't have a big role in the film, yet she still makes an appearance. Honestly this sounds like the scraped GMK plot.

[KaijuFiend]

Very interesting. Sounds about on par with what we got in SG, and as such, I don't have much of an opinion on whether it would have been better or worse.

[RumbleJapan]

Invasion of Astro-Godzilla.

it's of THE astro-Godzilla, damn it.

also, do people need to use the brightest colors they can find to color the fonts? it makes it hard to read.


finally to get my ass on topic, MOGUERA still looks stupid and would have been WEAK as it always was. the concept art is cool, but ultimately i would have liked a skinnier version of what we ended up with.

Hasn't the Dove campaign taught you anything? You don't need to be skinny to be a robot. Social upbringings these days...ugh.

Astrogodzilla has a certain ring to it that Spacegodzilla lacks. Sounds a lot like a 50s flick.

[JGAR]

Astrogodzilla, or simply Astrozilla, are better names than Space-Godzilla.

[KaijuFiend]

Astrogodzilla, or simply Astrozilla, are better names than Space-Godzilla.

Astrozilla is the best name of the three

[cultistofvertigo]

Well now, this is interesting. So I found this thread while searching for "クリスタルゴジラ" (Crystal Godzilla) what with the print in the Heisei Perfection book not being a thing I can run through an online translator, and the concept art on that page in particular has gone completely without any sort of explanation at all in English. And, of course, still hasn't.

So if the "Astro Godzilla" story is true, then that means GvsSG actually had 4 stages of development, which probably went:
1. Return of King Ghidorah, Orochi style
2. Astro Godzilla
3. Crystal Godzilla
4. Space Godzilla

Astro must have come before Crystal, since it's mentioned nowhere in the book, which I assume means it was even earlier. The rumors about the dragonflies for Space actually go as far back as Astro, where the basic final plot is established. so in the middle, where Crystal is, we can probably assume based on this new article and everything else that Crystal Godzilla went something like:
- Moguera swapped for Mechagodzilla, and Kawakita fought to get him back in during Space
- A sliced budget would probably mean axing the dragonflies and Little G and Mothra's participation in the final battle
- Any sort of substantial shape changing for Crystal is gone, the only remnant being his "flying form" which just has more crystals

At that point you're basically talking about the finished film but with a different name and design, being that Crystal Godzilla was red and had crystalline dorsal plates that doubled as wings. But even then, Space Godzilla had both of those things as well, as Heisei Perfection clearly shows "dorsal plate wings" on designs marked as Space Godzilla as well, they just aren't made of crystals. THEN you get the Super Godzilla design taking over, and magically everything makes sense.

Excepting of course, still, for those weird "psychedelic rogue's gallery" designs, which clearly mention the name Space Godzilla on the actual artwork themselves, and with the absence of an explanation in Astro, whatever the hell that mess is came pretty late in the game. Since all the known full drafts of "Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla" are from early 1994 rather than late '93, that stuff was really close to the wire. My guess is that it was for some sort of surrealistic animated sequence, like, maybe after SG died all those images of Godzilla's past foes would form in the space pollen or something? Just thinking out loud here, there's still no explanation for those things at all.

But there are problems with the Astro Godzilla story as well. For example, the ONE thing that survived from the very earliest days of Godzilla 6, when it was still Return of King Ghidorah ver. 3, are Space Godzilla's "telekinetic" powers which are the vestiges of Ghidorah's gravity powers. Design wise, too, one can draw a straight line from Ghidorah to the winged and twin-tailed Astro Godzilla, which also gives the impression he had some Ghidorah DNA in him as well (which, if my idea about the Erika-like "dying after images" is right, would explain why you'd have Biollante, Mothra, AND King Ghidorah be included, although it doesn't explain that weird skeletal scorpion monster). But according to this story, not only was Moguera axed and then brought back in, but the powers of the antagonist changed from gravity manipulation to freeze rays and mind control, and then back to gravity manipulation again.

I'm not saying that's impossible or anything, it's just that when you zoom out and look at Godzilla 6 as a whole, there's only one part of the story doesn't fit and actually breaks from the otherwise pretty linear development, and that's Astro Godzilla. Still, with how little is actually known about Godzilla 6 compared to every other VS series film (except Godzilla 3, of which all I know is that there were two drafts in 1990 called "King Ghidorah vs. Godzilla" on the cover and "Godzilla 3" in the actual screenplay, and they only differed in some details about the ownership of the Musashi-2), this is some pretty cool stuff.

As for me personally, I would prefer almost anything over Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla, and Astro Godzilla sounds pretty cool. Still what I would have liked to see more than anything was what exactly they were going to do to connect Ghidorah and Orochi, because I really don't think they would have literally used the '94 Orochi, but maybe like a three-headed version of it. And that sounds pretty kickin' rad. I'd be way more satisfied with a second Ghidorah in the VS series than "it's Godzilla but from space," which is a special kind of lazy.

I hope bumping a two-month-old thread isn't a big deal, since I wanted to try and put some of the pieces together in this thread since you're already talking about it, and there's really a pretty shocking lack of information in English on this subject (not just Godzilla 6 but all the development/lost project sort of Tohoverse stuff, like how I'm still apparently the only English speaker who knows about Bride of Godzilla for some reason) in addition to the rumors and outright lies like the kind of stuff on Toho Kingdom. I've been blogging about it but what I have up there is already way outdated compared to what I know now.

You know, there used to be a really cool "unused Toho creations" or something like that thread around here. It was pretty awesome, somebody should think about starting another one of those up and getting the word out about things like King Vulcan, G-END, Dr. Shida's Robot Daughter, Chamelegon, etc.

[Pkmatrix]

^ Wow, that was a great post, cultistofvertigo! That really helped me better understand Astro-Godzilla's place with everything else in Space Godzilla's development.

Also: Bride of Godzilla? What? That's the FIRST I've heard of that! Have you written about it on your blog? Can you link to it please, I'd love to hear more!

[LSD Jellyfish]

As an aside note this pretty much confirms Spacegodzilla's origins as being from Biollante and both Mothra despite the two explanations. A lot of the concept art gives Spacegodzilla Biollante like features including the big maw. This script/thing justifies that it was supposed to just come from Biollante. Somehow mothra making Spacegodzilla always just seemed like a dick move to me.

I wrote up a thread about how Spacegodzilla is better with the ESP element and one of my reasons for it was the fact that the cosmos introduction makes sense. However if mothra was actually supposed to play a bigger role in the movie that scene where Miki is visited by the cosmos would have made sense. Little Godzilla would have made more sense too. It's a shame orochi bombed because that film wasn't good to begin with.

[Kenpachiro Hirata]

Overall it sounds just as messy as what we've got. Some basic parts of it are better tho. The finished product had no "invasion from outer space" feel to it which was kinda the point of the concept. The psychic control over Junior is a great idea too. The freezin' breath seems redundant but still better than yet another gravity beam. The "Astro" part sounds more accurate too and a nice nod to "Kaiju Daisenso".

[GigaBowserG]

Finally, here's some concept sketches that show, what might've been the look Astrogodzilla have been sporting in the flick, had not Toho had gotten a severe case of cold feet.
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/k63 ... 0002-1.jpg
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/k63 ... ge0001.jpg

Echoing cultistofvertigo, went through those pages posted there and no mention of AstroGodzilla. Surprisingly, not really any mention of Crystal Godzilla either, it's... more alluded to. Talks about the "crystal organism" concept, but not Crystal Godzilla itself. Fortunately, something about that exists elsewhere.

Curious how there hasn't really been any mention of this AstroGodzilla draft in any Japanese books, as far as I've seen.