How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

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Cubejunky
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by Cubejunky »

I grew up in the late 80's early 90's, so I had alot of them on VHS and the ones I didn't have I would watch when they aired on TV, I remember when AMC's Monsterfest would air them during Halloween, or when TNT would show them early mornings. For the longest time my copy of Godzilla Raids Again was a copy I taped off TNT, along with Son of Godzilla. I did see Godzilla 98 and Godzilla 2000 in theaters.

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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by Tyrant_Lizard_King »

Hell I first saw Godzilla Raids Again on The Disney Channel of all places.
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Dannybeane
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by Dannybeane »

We had an old mom and pop video store called Max's Video when I was growing up. There they had copies of Megalon, Gigan, MechaGodzilla and G-85. I was constantly begging my parents to rent those. We would occasionally make trips to block busters where they had Sea Monster and GRA but those were rare. The rest of the films were recordings from TNT's Monster Vision along with whatever the Scifi Channel would show. Right before G98 came out, I discovered a certain bootleg company and begged my parents to buy me bootlegs of the Heisei films. They were super expensive so I only was able to see like one or two films a year. One for my birthday and one for Christmas. I picked up G vs Biollante at Suncoast. The rest were bought through DVDs when I was in college or acquired through "other means".

It may be me wearing rose tinted goggles but watching films in the 90s was fun because it was like a giant quest to find them and it really made you appreciate them more. Now a film premieres in Tokyo and you can torrent it almost 24 hours later. Since I have all the films on blu ray/DVD I no longer have a need to crawl through the monthly channel listings hoping to catch a Godzilla film on TV. Christ I can't even remember the last time I watched a television broadcast of a Godzilla film.

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KingKaiju
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by KingKaiju »

I also want to add that children today will never understand the struggle of Blockbuster, Hollywood, Video Update, and Family Video stores.
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by Dannybeane »

And tearing through the TV guide for the week to find all future giant monster movie showings so you could set up the VCR to record them. These are truly some rosy colored glasses I'm wearing!

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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by Creature22 »

KingKaiju wrote:I also want to add that children today will never understand the struggle of Blockbuster, Hollywood, Video Update, and Family Video stores.
Hollywood Video was my place for renting Godzilla films as a kid; they had a good selection in my area.
I also had Suncoast, which is where a lot of the newer Heisei films would be sold. One of the first Godzilla videos I owned was Godzilla vs Destroyah on VHS, I had to be about two or three at the time. I thought it was going to be another old style Showa film.

I had nightmares for months.

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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by Pkmatrix »

Tyrant_Lizard_King wrote:Hell I first saw Godzilla Raids Again on The Disney Channel of all places.
Oh! I remember that broadcast!

For a little while I lost my recording of GRA, so I re-recorded it on the Disney Channel. That's where I finally got a copy of GTTHM too, I think.

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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by spottedming »

Well being born in the mid 90s the first Godzilla I was exposed to was of course 98, which I'm gonna say as a monster movie its alright, as Godzilla on the other hand not so much. Being from the uk aswell meant that alot of Godzilla stuff was rather limited. I only really found out about toho's Godzilla through the GameCube game destroy all monsters melee, so I asked my folks for Christmas to see if they could find me any movies, sure enough come Christmas 2003 I got terror of mechagodzilla (my favourite one) and the vs king ghidorah and mothra battle for earth double disc, so I essentially watched these movies through imported discs and 2nd hand vhs growing up

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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by GodzillaDude »

Back when my local video rental store sold VHS tapes, I remember constantly picking up Godzilla 2000 which still remains as one of if not my favorite Godzilla film to this day (vs King Ghidorah and 2014 Godzilla are my other two favorites at the moment). Also remember nabbing that and King Kong vs. Godzilla on VHS at some kind of grocery store as well. Thankfully I saw either of those before the 98' version! lol
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by StAiRcAsE KiTtY »

I had VHS tapes. When Godzilla 1998 came out, I was in absolute heaven. Up until that time, I had all the films in one way or another. Then came the releases of, what I thought were, brand new films from the Heisei era. Only a bit later did I learn they were actually released in Japan prior and not in the United States. Films like Hedorah and Destroy All Monsters were a lot harder to get in my childhood. My father and I would finger through the TV Guide every week looking for Godzilla and other monster/sci-fi movies one of us, or both of us, hadn't seen. I remember recording a showing of King Kong Escapes off of the Sci-Fi Channel around 1997. That was my only copy of that film until the DVD release in 2005 or so. The same is true for both Godzilla vs. Hedorah and Destroy All Monsters and a few others.

The Godzilla franchise was just a phase I went through, like Power Rangers and Pokemon, until after the release of Godzilla 1998. I didn't really become a *BIG* fan like I am now until a bit after I was 18 when I decided to revisit the franchise. I didn't see Godzilla 2000 and the following films until around 2007 or so.

I was told about Yog: The Space Monster (Space Amoeba), several Showa Gamera films, and the Mysterians by my father in the 1990's, but I wasn't able to see them until the DVD releases in the new millennium.
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by Great Hierophant »

I first encountered Godzilla sometime in the late 1980s. My local video store had a few VHS tapes of Godzilla, namely Godzilla vs. Mothra, Godzilla vs. Monster Zero, Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, Terror of Mechagodzilla and Godzilla 1985. Other films I could sometimes catch on TBS, hosted by Grandpa Al Munster. I received a Goodtimes Home Video tape of Godzilla vs. Megalon and remember taping Godzilla King of the Monsters! off TBS. There were some films I could never seem to catch like Godzilla Raids Again or Destroy All Monsters, I would take Ian Thorne's book out of the library and dream of the day I could watch the rest of the films. This was in the early 90s and eventually Godzilla vs. Biollante found its way to the video store, so I knew there was at least one new Godzilla film out there. Books and Magazines told me about more films.

In the late 90s, when I had a job and was just graduating high school, I had a complete set of Showa Godzilla films on VHS. I also discovered an anime store in the city that sold Japanese VHS tapes with subtitles, but I did not realize until later that these were bootlegs. Interestingly that bootlegger appears to be still in business.

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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by YongaryMan »

When I was a kid I lived in Michigan and had Detroit television channels.
Two or three times a year they would broadcast "Monster Week" on the 4 o'clock movie.
The 4 o'clock movie was broadcast Mon-Fri at 4:00pm on a local station right before the local news.

Even thou it was simply called "Monster Week" the movies were always Japanese Kaiju movies.
Godzilla, Mothra, Gamera and the like.

I remember during the school day how excited I was to run off the bus and put on Channel 7 for the movie.

This was during the 70's...way before DVDS, Videos and the Internet were around.
That is what made these kind of events enjoyable. You had a set time to watch them. Like a celebration.

My brother would watch them with me...but my parents hated them!!! Again that was more of the fun!

Miss those days!!

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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by shadowsfall »

vhs, library

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Mr. Xeno
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by Mr. Xeno »

I used to watch every Godzilla film I could find countless times with my grandparents. My grandma used to record them off TV or order them somewhere off the mystical Internet. I remember that I nearly blew through the roof when she told me that she ordered a copy of Smog Monster. I also remember often finding them in a Suncoast store, with shit nearly coming out of my ass when I first saw a copy of MechaGodzilla '02 in there for the first time (didn't even know it existed before that). Another memorable moment was when my dad took a trip out of state, and came back with the Classic Media '02 collection as a present. Ah, good times. It didn't matter what the movie was 99% of the time; as long as I found and got Godzilla movies, I was a happy child.
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by bobbyjack »

I was born in the mid 70's. During the late 70's-early 80's they would play the old Showa movies on Channel 7 at 4:30 in the afternoon. I remember watching Godzilla fight King Kong, Mothra, Ghidrah, Megalon, and Mechagodzilla. I remember the ones with Minya too. I loved these movies as a little kid. I had a small plastic T-Rex dinosaur toy that I used to pretend was Godzilla. Never remembered ever seeing Ebirah or Hedorah until watching the movies as an adult. I remember seeing Godzilla 1985 once on TV in the late 80's but don't remember much about it. Saw Godzilla '98 in the theater when I was in Hawaii while in the military. Didn't like it very much. Didn't give Godzilla much thought until I had kids. About 3 years ago when my son was 5 and my daughter was 3, I got a bunch of the old Showa movies off Netflix for them to watch. Of course they loved them too. Then I found out they made a whole bunch more movies in the 90's and early 2000's. Never knew they existed so I watched them all for the first time with my kids. Took my kids to see Godzilla '14 in the theater and we all loved it. Now we own all the movies on DVD or BluRay except for Son of Godzilla, Godzilla Vs. Mechagodzilla '74, and Return of Godzilla (1985). We recently watched all of them after we got 42" of snow at our house last week. The cool thing also was my SMHA SCV King Ghidorah came in the mail near the end of our movie marathon.

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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by Kore321 »

I grew up in the 70's and I remember every Thanksgiving (Thursday and Friday) they played a marathon for King Kong and Godzilla. I always looked forward to watching them during the Thanksgiving holiday at my Aunts house. They always played the same movies.
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by Zarm »

It was vhs tapes from the library for me (mid to late 90s)- mostly showa, and about half of heisei. I distinctly remember what a big deal it was when they got Mechagodzilla II, finally. The Godzilla compendium and burgeoning internet filled me in on entries that the library did not possess - such as the original Gojira and Raids Again, and Destroy All Monsters. Come 2000 - after the extremely disappointing American version which I did not see the theaters - I was thrilled to learn of Godzilla 2000 being in the theaters and was right there in the front row... though experiences with this film and The Phantom Menace taught me that one should not actually watch a movie from the front row, as you can hardly see any of the details. ;)

The Millennium series was experienced primarily through whatever Sci-fi channel showings (back when they still spelled the channel right) I could tape off of TV through my grandmother, who had the Syfy channel, while I did not. That's how I saw everything up through Against Mechagodzilla - at which point I lost touch for several years. It was an extreme surprise to me that Tokyo SOS & Final Wars had come out without my hearing about it at all - it was someone referencing the vs. Zilla scene from Final Wars that first brought it to my attention, and when I spoke to a friend that had seen them, I wasted no time in going out and securing a copy of both films - finally on DVD - to finally complete my viewing of the series.

By that point I had already purchased a few Heiseis (such as the space Godzilla and Mothra 2-pack, and another one with Destroyah) as well as several Showa films randomly as they appeared at garage sales.

It's only been in the last couple of years that I've gotten serious about collecting the entire series. The 2014 Godzilla was the final film that I saw in the theater with my wife before the birth of our first child. Now the second one is newly arrived, and we have just completed our DVD/Blu-ray collection. :)
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by Stevo_1985 »

When I was a kid coming across a Godzilla vhs was rare. The few that come to mind that I was lucky enough to find occasionally at the video rental were KKvsG GvsG and GvsMG. For a long time I had to resort to a series of recordings of tnt's monster vision Godzilla marathon. I still have them laying around somewhere... The 1-800-flowers and John Denver commercials were relentless but I became a master of trimming stems. I also believe they aired commercials for Ridley Scott's legend airing on TNT and "the great untold story of the civil war. Andersonville." JC. I remember these commercials very vividly.
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by g2vd »

When I was a Kid coming across a Godzilla VHS or DVD was beyond the point of rarity to the point of never happening unless it was ol' GINO. but in the absence of all that there was one place that always had them Barnes And Nobles.

If it wasn't for that place I likely wouldn't be a fan today simply because I wouldn't of had have access to any Godzilla film at all at that time.
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Re: How did you watch Godzilla movies growing up?

Post by MechaMinya »

I first encountered Godzilla as a little guy in the early 70s on the local Saturday midnight TV show SHOCK THEATER. The film was DESTROY ALL MONSTERS and it rocked my world. I next encountered GODZILLA VS THE SMOG MONSTER on the big screen at a kiddie matinee. It is still among my favorite Godzilla films. A few years later, I encountered Godzilla on the big screen with GODZILLA VS THE COSMIC MONSTER. I was super excited about it as I had read all about it in FAMOUS MONSTERS magazine, referred to as GODZILLA VS THE BIONIC MONSTER! The next time I encountered Godzilla on the big screen was...GODZILLA 2000 and I was the only person in the theatre! The picture was not doing well at the box-office and in the middle of the week I enjoyed something of a private screening!

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