Talk:Bride of Godzilla/@comment-3367060-20150313231002/@comment-26357212-20150504234449

"Ah, I thanked Enshohma because he gave me the link to your article... sorry if you felt pushed aside! Your link was in the article and not just down here, too. It's just the link in the "External Links" though. I'll change it so it looks like words and not just a link."

Oh, I see. I checked out Enshoma's post and it was just sort of picking things out from my article. I'm not THAT concerned about credit (my sprite rip of G:MOM Rodan, which I also found on this wiki, even spells it out "I don't care about credit"), what REALLY bugs me is that this isn't secret of privileged information, anyone with google translate and wikipedia can find out about all of this, and yet, here we are playing the telephone game anew, and because people gradually go from secondary to tertiary to who knows how far removed of a source, stuff gets mixed up and lost and translation and this is how stuff like "Godzilla vs. Bagan" get started. Because no one's doing any fact checking.

That said, the article is fine, my reaction is prooooobably mostly a gut one. But more on this in a second.

"Also, the articles do mention that "Robomusume does not have an actual name" and that it's not its official name. But I guess it's tucked away and not really obvious so I'll change it a bit."

Okay, so if you're talking to someone who doesn't speak English, and you point at a cat and say "annoying fuzzball," they're going to think you're saying this is what the English word for that animal is. I just used that because I wanted something to call it, like I do with Oodako and Ookondoru and Ooumihebi and the rest, but with a little bit of that aforementioned telephone game misunderstandings happen. I have found that there are STILL people who honestly believe Deutalios - who had an actual design - actually looks like King Molerat from Ultraman Tiga because of a certain website.

Calling it a fan nickname, I guess, is technically right, but really the important part is just to say "robot daughter," or use Robomusume in the article but then explain what that actually means at the end, rather than the "fan nickname" thing. If I were doing the article, I wouldn't use Robomusume at all and just refer to her as "robot daughter" in every instance, including the character article, since this would keep it consistent with Oodako et. al. I didn't do this on my personal blog because it's not intended to be an exhaustive encyclopedia.

So, yes, this is something of a nitpick, I'd have to say. I just want to make sure I'm not misleading anyone into thinking this is a name either me, Enshoma, or that guy who wrote that article back in 2010 have simply "made up" for the character.

"Godzilla vs. Bagan was never planned? That sounds... alarming, to say the least. So is that the same case as "Godzilla vs. Satan"?"

There's no hard evidence for either. "Bagan" has the benefit of an interview where Kawakita is taken aback by the question of whether such a film was ever planned, but his answer is, I'm paraphrasing because I can't remember it exactly, "...I'm not sure, I don't remember such a thing, if it was no one brought it up to me." That's not damning, it still technically could have existed. HOWEVER! Really think about where this got started in the first place. Up to now, there has never been any mention of such a project by a primary source. As a matter of fact I can't actually remember reading about it anywhere other than the internet on English fansites. Doesn't it just make more sense to assume that it's speculation based on the new monster in Super Godzilla, as dumb kids on the playground are likely to do, rather than invent some sort of pseudo-conspiracy where Toho is just hiding all the drafts and paying off Kawakita to lie about it? For the record, Godzilla was actually planned to show up in a cameo at the tail end of "Mothra vs. Bagan," so yes, technically there was a time when the two were going to appear together.

As for "Godzilla vs. the Devil," it's actually not nailed down at all, since unlike "Bagan" the only place I've seen this interview with Tanaka mentioned where he supposedly debunks this rumor... comes from Toho Kingdom. So, that's your clue right there. I've never seen this interview reproduced or referenced elsewhere without the sole source being TK. On the other hand, considering the evidence to the contrary, that it definitely DID exist... well, you come up equally empty handed.

So here are the actual facts that are known: in 1978, there was a listing for a "U.S.-Japan Coproduction Godzilla" among the upcoming Toho films that year. You've probably seen the picture floating around. This is the beginning and end of the known facts regarding this project. No Devils, no Frankensteins, no nothing. There simply isn't any concrete info to be had.

But there are things known that support BOTH of these projects being rumors. We know that Saperstein really did love War of the Gargantuas, and probably did want to see Gaira and/or Sanda go up against Godzilla. We know that sensationalistic occult horror was very in-vogue in the late 70's, and that a sure-fire way to make Godzilla "serious" again would definitely be the addition of demons, which also fit nicely with Saperstein's black and white moralistic perception of the Godzilla sequels. But we also know that despite the glut of stories being passed around in the late 70's, not only did only one see the light of day (or possibly two if A Space Godzilla was really initially planned as a film), but the others were TOTALLY ignored until much later when bits and pieces were picked up by foreign fans, and even then only very little survived. Tomoyuki Tanaka was dead set on not just making Godzilla serious again, but bringing him back to his roots, and when we look back at the scrapped films of the late 70's through his eyes, then suddenly it actually looks like "Coproduction" was an attempt to get Saperstein to help fund "Resurrection of Godzilla," the story which would eventually become "Return of Godzilla." This isn't a known fact, no one, as far as the English-speaking world knows, has gone on record making a connection between "Coproduction" and "Resurrection," and this is my own speculation, but it sure makes a lot of sense.

It's easy to guess how "Gargantuas" got started as a rumor from there, as I said Saperstein is well known to have a fondness for them and probably has said directly that he wanted them to fight Godzilla and I just don't remember it, maybe. "Devil" is a little more cryptic, however, which COULD lend credence to it being something more than a rumor... or, there's my theory, which is that someone played the telephone game with a badly translated or misinterpreted 1980 "Resurrection" draft and interpreted the three forms of Bakan (that's not a typo, by the way) as being demons or something.

I WANT to believe that all three, Bagan, Gargantuas, and especially the Devil, were very real and there are secret drafts for each in some secret Toho vault... but the evidence simply doesn't add up.

"As for how we present stuff here... each character only gets 1 page. MechaGodzillas are an exception, and might really be the only exceptions, aside from Moguera. Zilla is also kind of an exception in that the 1998 'Godzilla' is in the Zilla article."

Yes, and I don't understand why. It's especially confusing when you have the page including information on Mechagodzilla 2 titled "Mechagodzilla 1." The split Moguera pages in particular made me shy away from writing up a page for G-END because I didn't know if it should go in MGR-IInd's page or if it should be a new one. It also stopped me from contributing to the Gotengo article, because I couldn't tell if I was supposed to make a new one for Ra and Liberty, and where the hell the Super-X 3 version from early drafts of Godzilla 7 were supposed to go. Gotengo? Super-X 3? Liberty?

Probably most confusingly, Godzilla has a separate article for the Hanna-Barbera and Marvel versions, yet both iterations of the character are also included on the main Godzilla page. It isn't consistent even within the system sometimes.

But enough of all that. Thanks for the reference in the actual article, and also thanks for helping spread this information around. I understand that due to the nature of open wikis like this, quality and veracity is going to vary from subject to subject, but credit where credit's due you're certainly not intentionally being intellectually dishonest. I'm still most upset that there's so much info that's just out in plain sight and nobody's talking about it. This is a good start, though. Anwyas, sorry if my comments are too aggressive or bring anyone down.

93/93

Mal

p.s. Had I stuck to my plan of just doing decade-by-decade articles about unfilmed or undeveloped story ideas instead of going off and doing this whole other thing, I probably would have been way more helpful to this wiki than I am now, just sort of lurking and complaining about not understanding the format. Oh wells. u.u