First Exposure to Gamera?

For the discussion of any Gamera related movies, comics, video games, etc.
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LSD Jellyfish
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First Exposure to Gamera?

Post by LSD Jellyfish »

A lot of people have recalled on this site how they were introduced or became a Godzilla fan. I'm curious how many of you were introduced or became Gamera fans. What was the first time you became aware of Gamera, and what was the first Gamera movie you saw?

My first Gamera movie funnily enough might have been the last fifteen minutes Gamera Guardian of the Universe. My father was flipping through the channels and called me over knowing I liked Godzilla. I was very young and this was maybe around 2001 or 2002, so perhaps the latest Godzilla film I had seen was G2000. Still, I had not seen most of the Heisei entries, and was blown away by the action. After that, I recall seeing a cameo by Gamera in Captain Underpants:

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(thanks to the reddit user Minya for posting this, I originally saw this in black and white when I was a child but since then they've added color).

After that my next exposure to Gamera was this horrid fantastic dvd:
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This might amuse a few of you, but the DVD was so weird quality wise (hard to explain, there were weird menus and such poor quality) that I was creeped out by it. Gyaos eating the people genuinely scared me too. After that I watched the other Gamera releases and fell in love with the Heisei trilogy.
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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

Post by Vakanai »

LSD Jellyfish wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 3:58 am A lot of people have recalled on this site how they were introduced or became a Godzilla fan. I'm curious how many of you were introduced or became Gamera fans. What was the first time you became aware of Gamera, and what was the first Gamera movie you saw?

My first Gamera movie funnily enough might have been the last fifteen minutes Gamera Guardian of the Universe. My father was flipping through the channels and called me over knowing I liked Godzilla. I was very young and this was maybe around 2001 or 2002, so perhaps the latest Godzilla film I had seen was G2000. Still, I had not seen most of the Heisei entries, and was blown away by the action. After that, I recall seeing a cameo by Gamera in Captain Underpants:

Image
(thanks to the reddit user Minya for posting this, I originally saw this in black and white when I was a child but since then they've added color).

After that my next exposure to Gamera was this horrid fantastic dvd:
Image
This might amuse a few of you, but the DVD was so weird quality wise (hard to explain, there were weird menus and such poor quality) that I was creeped out by it. Gyaos eating the people genuinely scared me too. After that I watched the other Gamera releases and fell in love with the Heisei trilogy.
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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

Post by Major sssspielberg! »

Ok, after reading about Gamera I was with my mom at the mall and saw one of the old DVD sets. I can't find any pictures or references on the web now, but I want to say it was Mill Creek, around 2005 or 6. They dropped the Gamera series in two halves, one was Gammera up to Guiron, sans Gyaos, which appeared on the sister set. They were cheap, only about 5 or 10 bucks a pop.
Anyways, the DVD boxes themselves smelled really weird. But Gamera grew on me pretty quick.
Last edited by Major sssspielberg! on Fri May 21, 2021 5:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

Post by Gigantis »

This is probably true for.. majority of people here lol but i honestly wouldn't have known who Gamera was without Godzilla. I heard that Gamera sported some similarities to Godzilla one day, looked more into it and.. that was that. I think the first Gamera film i watched was Guardian of the Universe.
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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

Post by Terasawa »

I don't exactly remember, but I probably first heard of Gamera in one of the earliest Godzilla sites, in the letters section of Dark Horse's Godzilla #16 (where I thought the author meant Gabara), or in Robert Marrero's Godzilla, King of the Movie Monsters. I had or had access to all of these in 96/97 but I don't remember the order of events anymore.

I definitely had my first Gamera movie on video by the end of '97 -- an unlicensed tape collecting Ghidrah, Gammera, Terror Beneath the Sea, and Warning from Space -- but I remember I couldn't really get through it back then. The first Gamera movie I remember watching in full was Gamera vs. Guiron, also on VHS. I wouldn't say it made me a "Gamera fan," but at the point I was already dedicated to seeing and collecting all the Japanese monster movies I could find. Only five of the Gameras were officially available at that time, so I was able to get all of those by 1999, I think; I also got GotU in there somewhere.

Gamera vs. Viras, vs. Jiger, and Super Monster weren't part of the ubiquitous Sandy Frank package in the '90s, so I had to wait until 2003, 2004, and 2006 for those (respectively) via subtitled bootlegs and an early YouTube upload (the latter). I first saw G2 and G3 as ADV released them in the summer of 2003, and I only got around to GtB a few years after the Tokyo Shock release.
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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

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I first became aware of Gamera's existence in '96 or '97. I had most likely seen King Kong vs. Godzilla, my first kaiju film, by that point, and I think what happened was I drew a picture of Godzilla attacking a city. I showed it to my dad, who had been a casual kaiju fan as a kid, and he suggested I add Mothra, Ghidrah, and Gamera to the picture, and gave me a very basic rundown of who they were; that was the first I'd heard of any of them. And then I went ahead and added my highly speculative idea of those monsters to the picture; I based Ghidrah on a toy hydra I had, and drew Mothra eating a semi truck. :lol: I don't remember what Gamera was doing, probably just flying with his rocket thrusters.

I didn't actually see any of the movies until the early 2000s, when I caught bits and pieces of vs. Baragon, vs. Gyaos and vs. Zigra on the SciFi channel. I don't remember much of what I thought, but I was definitely just glad for any and all kaiju content I could get my hands on back then. By the time I saw any of the full Showa movies, unfortunately, I was a cynical teenager, and not at all impressed. My second impressions on going through the Legacy Collection DVDs in my 20s were a lot more favorable, and I love the Heisei Trilogy.

I still need to see vs. Viras and The Brave.
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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

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When I was a kid, I didn't really get sucked into the online world until late 2005/early 2006. I'd have been about eleven years old at the time. Before then, I just used the computer for bad point-and-click CD games like Tonka. :lol:

Naturally, one of the first things I did was start looking up Godzilla movies: namely the many that I had never seen before. Because I lived in Canada, Godzilla films were a lot harder to come by, not helped by the fact that I was (and still am) the only Godzilla fan in my family. I owned the Simitar VHS box set with King of the Monsters, Mothra vs Godzilla, Monster Zero, Godzilla's Revenge, and Terror of Mechagodzilla; as well as VHS tapes for GINO and Godzilla 2000. I had also rented over the course of my life Godzilla Raids Again, Ebirah, vs Hedorah, vs Gigan, Tokyo SOS, and Final Wars; but I only retained any real memory of the latter three.

Truthfully, what clued me into the fact that I was missing out on a whole wealth of Godzilla movies out there were the Atari/Pipeworks games coming out at the time. I knew there just had to be a Godzilla vs Megalon movie out there. A Godzilla vs Mecha-King Ghidorah movie. A Godzilla vs Destoroyah movie. A Godzilla vs Jet Jaguar movie.

And that curiosity was what ultimately brought me online, alongside a desire to learn the names of monsters seen in Final Wars that I had never seen before.

And so I began my research, with help from the many Godzilla fan sites that were up during the day – I remember my favorite was Kaiju Headquarters. I found and memorized the names of all the movies in the franchise; I discovered new monsters I had never heard of before, such as Biollante and Battra; I found sound effects of their roars (thank you, Rodan's Roost!) and when I was very lucky, music from their films. During that exciting time of discovery I also, naturally, came across Gamera.

Gamera? Oh, dear, I hated Gamera. Not that I had ever seen a Gamera film, of course, but this eleven-year-old child reasoned that Gamera was nothing more than a bad ripoff of Godzilla, and boy did I resent him and his rogue gallery for that.

Still, though, that innate curiosity had me poking around the profiles for Gamera and foes in Rodan's Roost and Kaiju HQ anyway, just to see what they looked like and what they were capable of. I read about their movies and saw a lot of reviews praising the Heisei trilogy; which, of course, I hated. :lol:

So I continued to hold a quiet resentment for Gamera up until my high school years, when I discovered the power of online shopping. During this time I had began to slowly collect all the Godzilla and Toho kaiju films I didn't have, relying heavily on Christmas gifts and birthday presents. I had become a more frequent user of Youtube, and it was while looking at Godzilla music videos that I stumbled across a similar music video for Gamera, featuring scenes from Gamera 3.

Curiosity getting the better of me, I watched it. The special effects absolutely blew me away.

"Okay," I reasoned. "Maybe Gamera isn't so bad after all."

And wouldn't you know? Youtube at the time currently had the full movie of Gamera 3. So, with nothing to lose, I decided to give it a try.

Well, let me tell you, if that music video had blown me away, then this movie was on a whole 'nother level. "Holy shit!" I thought, only fifteen or sixteen years old at the time. "That was one of the best kaiju movies I've ever seen!" With only one movie, I was hooked. I had gone from hating to loving the character of Gamera, and I wanted more.

The very next DVDs I got where AVD's releases of the Gamera trilogy. I watched them in reverse order (because of course I did :lol:) and loved the latter two films; I liked GotU well enough at the time, but it took a few more years to really grow on me. I found the Showa series on youtube later on, watched them, and predictably hated them (save for Gamera vs Barugon.) I bought Gamera: The Brave and fell in love with that one too. By age seventeen I had seen every Gamera film and had (mostly) completed my Godzilla/Toho collection; and wouldn't you know it, that was the very same year I joined TK.

Gamera 3: Whether it's overrated or underrated, I owe that movie a lot for broadening my horizons.
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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

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JAGzilla wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 8:01 am I didn't actually see any of the movies until the early 2000s, when I caught bits and pieces of vs. Baragon, vs. Gyaos and vs. Zigra on the SciFi channel.
Possibly on AMC? They ran the Sandy Frank Gameras around that time, usually during Monsterfest or in the Halloween season. Also during that period, they also ran one every morning at 6 for a week, which was pretty cool. Those movies play even weirder when you're groggy as hell.
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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

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Terasawa wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 8:51 am
JAGzilla wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 8:01 am I didn't actually see any of the movies until the early 2000s, when I caught bits and pieces of vs. Baragon, vs. Gyaos and vs. Zigra on the SciFi channel.
Possibly on AMC? They ran the Sandy Frank Gameras around that time, usually during Monsterfest or in the Halloween season. Also during that period, they also ran one every morning at 6 for a week, which was pretty cool. Those movies play even weirder when you're groggy as hell.
Might have been. It was definitely early in the morning, whatever channel it was. I know SciFi was regularly airing '70s Godzilla films around that same time, and I caught parts of Gigan and Hedorah, among others. Part of Gappa, too, though I don't know what channel that was.
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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

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My first time with Gamera was with Dr. Shock on Mad Theater and Horror Theater during the 1970s. The usual suspects were there: Gammera the Invincible, War of the Monsters, Return of the Giant Monsters (maybe), Destroy All Planets (also maybe) and Gamera vs. Monster X (I know I never saw Attack of the Monsters). These were the originals, long before Sandy Frank.
Last edited by mikelcho on Fri May 21, 2021 2:33 pm, edited 11 times in total.

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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

Post by Missingno. »

My first exposure was on AVGN/Cinemassacre's Top 10 Giant Movie Monsters list. Aside from being able to see the original through MST3k shortly thereafter, I hadn't been able to track down any of the movies in the years that followed. Then in 2016, I was browsing through the movies section at a Wal-Mart when I found the Gamera Legacy Collection in one of those large bins, which contained the 11 movies released between 1965 to 1999. With it, I pretty much marathoned all of them to finally satisfy the curiosity that had lingered in me over these movies that had eluded me for so long. Honestly, the only ones I really enjoyed were the original, vs. Barugon, and the Heisei series. I still have yet to see Gamera the Brave, though.
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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

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In the early 80's Return of the Giant Monsters and Gammera The Invincible played on TV pretty regularly along with other Godzilla films in the S.F. Bay Area. Oddly enough, since I didn't really pay attention I always just called Gaos "Rodan" :lol: , and was excited whenever "Gamera vs Rodan" was on TV. Then a couple years later, probably 83 or 84, I saw War of the Monsters and that blew my young mind a; NEW Gamera movie! (I thought there were only 2).

Then a couple years later, as I started reading film encyclopedias and sci-fi film books and Magazines, I discovered there were several other Gamera films I had not seen. Next in 1989, My Mom got me "Gamera vs Gaos" on VHS (Celebrity Kids) from KB Toystore. I watched it and enjoyed it...but there was something "off" about it, It didn't have the same opening, and the voices didn't sound right (This was my first unwitting experience of a different dub, and the horrors of Sandy Frank). I went back to KB toystore and they had Gamera vs Zigra, so I bought that. I also later subsequently rented the other Sandy Frank Gamera VHS from a Blockbuster Video and just made copies.

It wasn't until late into the dvd era that "public domain" copies of the AIP Gamera films I saw on TV as a kid were made available. Now thankfully we have the Arrow BRD set that is comprehensive and covers pretty much everything.
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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

Post by Dynomy-DX »

I was looking up Godzilla AMVs when I was younger (early internet, and the fact that this was the most exposure I got to these characters) but then one AMV was different. Really different. It wasn’t Godzilla, but some fire breathing turtle? I checked the name of the movie the music video took from, and went down the research rabbit hole. At least, the most research a 7 year old knew how to do. I knew about the Heisei Trilogy, I was familiar with some Showa stuff like Barugon and Guiron. But the rest from there was just me finding out about the rabbit hole that is the Gamera lore.
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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

Post by eabaker »

It was the 80s, the movies were on TV regularly. No idea what the earliest ones I saw were.
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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

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Terasawa wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 8:51 am
JAGzilla wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 8:01 am I didn't actually see any of the movies until the early 2000s, when I caught bits and pieces of vs. Baragon, vs. Gyaos and vs. Zigra on the SciFi channel.
Possibly on AMC? They ran the Sandy Frank Gameras around that time, usually during Monsterfest or in the Halloween season. Also during that period, they also ran one every morning at 6 for a week, which was pretty cool. Those movies play even weirder when you're groggy as hell.
I think that's how I was first exposed. Second grade, morning before heading off to school, caught the Osaka Castle fight between Gamera and Barugon.
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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

Post by tbeasley »

I was introduced to Godzilla and Gamera both through toys. For Godzilla it was a Trendmasters bendable (I think). I had seen Jurassic Park on VHS and loved dinosaurs so (again, I think) my grandma got it for me. Soon after that I got Godzilla vs the Sea Monster on VHS and someone taped Son of Godzilla off TV for me.

Gamera was a few years later - My grandpa's friend had gone to Japan and my grandpa, knowing I liked Godzilla, asked him to bring back a souvenir for me. What he got was a Bandai Gamera 1996. I didn't know who this was until, like LSD Jellyfish oddly enough, I caught the ending to Gamera GOTU (the oil refinery battle) on TV. Sometime later I rented the ADV dubbed VHS from Blockbuster (I also remember renting Reptilian and buying Godzilla 2000.)

It wasn't until I began browsing kaiju fan sites that I realized there were other Gamera movies, my toy was from a sequel, and there were older Gamera films as well. ADV's Heisei trilogy set was one of the first things I remember ordering online, and I hunted down a bunch of those cheap 'public domain' sets to view the Showa films (it feels like shortly thereafter the Shout! Factory DVDs were announced).

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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

Post by Terasawa »

JAGzilla wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 9:19 am I know SciFi was regularly airing '70s Godzilla films around that same time, and I caught parts of Gigan and Hedorah, among others.
I know this is off topic but it's also a good time to plug my catalog of the complete broadcast schedule of all kaiju/tokusatsu films on the Sci-Fi Channel (as best as I've been able to determine).
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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

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For me it was MST3K. Same goes for Godzilla.
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Re: First Exposure to Gamera?

Post by JAGzilla »

Terasawa wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 2:14 pm
JAGzilla wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 9:19 am I know SciFi was regularly airing '70s Godzilla films around that same time, and I caught parts of Gigan and Hedorah, among others.
I know this is off topic but it's also a good time to plug my catalog of the complete broadcast schedule of all kaiju/tokusatsu films on the Sci-Fi Channel (as best as I've been able to determine).
That's a cool, useful resource. I'll have to take a closer look at it sometime, and try to figure out when some of my viewings were.
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