Thursday, March 27, 2025

Two Big Toho Studios Monster Fans

The combination of Godzilla and Toho film studios makes for a formidable tag team. The famous Japanese production complex is so synonymous with the rubber-made monster that it's hard to believe that it actually has produced non monster movies.

However, the purpose of this piece is to go for the studio's biggest star: Godzilla.

In September of 1988 I became friends with a chap who had been living in the same building as me. Richard and I hit it off right away once we decided to converse with one another. (We first crossed paths in late 1984 but it was a polite "hello".) He was in the midst of his physics master's degree program at the University of Toronto, and I, a recent film-school graduate, was working very occasionally as a designer on films and television commercials.

How tickled I was when he told me that he was a big fan of the Godzilla pictures. Making monstrous moves was a natural step for us.

A pot of tea, a bowl of unhealthy potato chips, two geeks in front of a VCR-powered television set: Godzilla; Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster; Godzilla vs. Mothra; King Kong vs. Godzilla; Destroy All Monsters; Godzilla, 1985; you get the picture.

Richard earned his PhD in Particle Physics, and is now working in Lost Alamos, New Mexico; and I stomped around in the film and television business here in Toronto.


Postscript: Richard responded to a certain post I had written in May of 2020: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UFO Flicks)"You don't want to know what I think of UFOs (Oh yes I do!) . . . Every time science advances, it shows that there is nothing special about humans. We are probably some of the dumbest creatures in the universe!" (No comment.) Soon we'll be doing a little chat, the transcript of which I will post to this website.


No comments: