Thread:The King of the Monsters/@comment-3011868-20160207202525/@comment-3011868-20160207211406

It's no problem at all.

First of all, I think "new international title" for the additions of trademark symbols is something of a misnomer. As in this case, the only new things are the trademark symbols, and those are negligible, IMO.

About Mechagodzilla in the U.S.: the first release was as "Godzilla vs. The Bionic Monster." Cinema Shares/Downtown Distribution pulled this version after threat of legal action from Universal. Reportedly, the "Bionic Monster" title was similar in design to Toho's international title, however, it's never shown up on video. :( Then Cinema Shares hastily re-released the film as "Cosmic Monster." The title, as shown in the gallery, featured the text on the left with Basil Gogos' poster illustration on the right. When making 16mm prints to be syndicated to television, Cinema Shares opted to crop the poster, as obviously the entire 2.35 title wouldn't fit in a 1.33 television frame. So yes, that's true. Attached is a high quality screenshot of that crop job from a 16mm transfer.

Toho's international versions of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla 2 and Godzilla 2000 have not been released on video. I was hoping Sony would have included at least the audio from G2K on their Blu-Ray. Mechagodzilla 2 is actually an interesting case: it was originally dubbed circa 1993/94 in Hong Kong and probably featured much of the cast from the King Ghidorah and Mothra dubs. That full international version made it to India, where they dubbed most of the movie while keeping Toho's English text (minus the title, unfortunately) and bits of the original English dub. The version that has been released by TriStar on video, DVD, and Blu-Ray is actually a newer dub, produced around 1996-98. While most of the leads have been dubbed by actors that dubbed SpaceGodzilla and on, some of the audio in the "new" version is retained from the original! No one is really sure why that's the case, or even why it was redubbed in Hong Kong. Here's a link to the video evidence of the original dub: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3cmdm4

Also attached is the Hedorah title from the Power Multimedia disc. These PMM DVDs of the five '70s films are probably unlicensed, but the transfers are unique because they're telecined from old 16mm prints of the international versions. As nice as the TriStar discs are, they aren't fully accurate representations of the original international versions. One irritatingly inconspicuous change made by TriStar is the "remastering" of audio. Because the English audio is usually rougher than the Japanese, TriStar seemingly went through each film and replaced non-dialogue scenes with the original music and effects tracks to make the audio sound clearer. In the process, some lines have been removed. (Most notably, "Move over!", in Mechagodzilla.) Fortunately the PMM releases contain the original, unaltered soundtracks as well as the correct English text, titles, logos, and credits.