I’m always a bit leery of buying books devoted to Showa movies. Way too often they are filled with black and white production stills mixed in with a few screen grabs taken from the movie. ...and sadly that exactly describes this book (or “mook”, magazine style book) focused on Gorath (1962) and Dogora (1964). Honestly, the saying don’t judge a book by its cover sadly doesn’t apply here. The front, showing a black and white production still mixed with a slightly pixelated repurposing of the Gorath DVD cover imagery, is actually a fair representation of what to expect inside. So how does this book fair? Sadly, it’s a weaker entry in this series.
Now to give a bit of context, I’m purchasing these books out of order. As a result, this is the first one I’m reviewing that features two movies in one. Despite that, the format is more or less the same although they have shifted around the order of things. It still starts with a perspective, in this case on the special effects process of their respective films. It then goes into bios, although interestingly Gorath the star has its own bio that precedes the others. I’m not used to seeing Gorath treated this way, but it mentions stats and feats related to the “black dwarf star” (which impressively it even notes that under modern classification it should be known as a brown dwarf star instead). Anyway, that’s followed by bios for the machines and monsters along with the human cast. You then get a blow-by-blow of the events in the film.
As for what’s different, the middle of the book highlights the acting careers of Takashi Shimura and Ken Uehara, with a paragraph for each and a lot of black and white production stills from various films. It also has a half page look at the two movies from non-fiction author Asato Izumi, which I’m really not sure why they keep going back to him to get his perspective. The book concludes with a two page look at the career of screenwriter Takeshi Kimura, who has worked on everything from Bandits on the Wind (1961) to Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)... but was only involved with Gorath (1962) and not Dogora (1964), making him an odd person to highlight for this book.
Anyway, what’s missing is an interview, which is a real shame as those could often be the highlight of a particular book in this series. With that gone, what is the highlight of this particular book? It’s actually the bios for Gorath and the machinery seen in that 1962 movie. There are a lot of cool facts in there that aren’t often mentioned in other publications. That said, the book is lighter here than I would expect for this series, like it skips over the Atomic Burrower from the 1962 film, but that seems to be an issue with the books that cover two films. Sadly, and speaking of, there isn’t much of a highlight to the Dogora section.
In terms of the main drawbacks, it’s the images really along with nothing else being particularly noteworthy besides the Gorath bios. As previously mentioned, most of the images are either screen grabs from the movie, which someone with the Blu-ray could get in higher quality, or black and white production stills. Literally there are only three color production stills in the entire book, and two of them also appear on the cover. So that’s one for Maguma, one for Dogora and at least one rare one for Gorath that I hadn’t seen before.
In all, unless one is trying to collect the whole series, I’d say this particular volume is probably safe skipping. That said, ultimately it’s an okay book, and seeing as these are on the cheaper side if someone is a big fan of either film it could still be a worthwhile addition in someone’s collection.
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