So here's one from the vault. About 15 years ago I started making Godzilla movies. It all started when I was able to procure a horrible black and white camera with no focus. Just the sort of thing you'd want to start your film career on. I made my first film, showed it off to a few people and it was a hit. It was terrible, it's star was none other than Imperial Godzilla and didn't have much going on for it.

Some time later my friend joined me in making another one of these horrible home movies. Soon we were able to secure his Dad's color VHS tape recorder. Now we were in business! Of course with that came the problem of being unable to get the date and time off the film. Sometimes the dates were way off, years even! Not that those sort of things stopped us. At least that camera had color, zoom and the ability to focus! We made several more Godzilla movies, all with similar themes and direct sequels to one another. Sometimes we weren't able to get the color camera, so it was back to the horrible black and white ones.

At the time these really weren't meant to be seen by anyone. I can't imagine we ever dreamed that someday a venue like YouTube would exist to share them. The quality is horrible. The puppetry, special effects and dialogue hilarious. I still have a few of the VHS tapes, though I'm not sure what happened to the others. Here's a montage I made of four of the films. I tried to mostly include some fight scenes. All of these movies were at least 2 hours in length, some ran for 3 hours or so. As kids we hated that Godzilla movies had so much talking by humans... So of course our movies surprisingly mostly had talking by human characters, played by a variety of action figures. The parody of my Brother, simply known as Brother appears in many films.

Warning, this is an abomination of cinema. These should be viewed by no one. Or everyone. Note to future film makers, there is almost no form of string that will hold up Godzilla figures. In almost every scene a string would snap and the figures would fall. All part of the process.

I also don't have a good way to get these onto the computer, so I just taped them with my handheld off the TV. It makes the quality even worse. Which, you know, is only fitting. Like a dunderhead I didn't think to properly mic this, so the audio is very low. Sadly the audio is usually the best part and I cracked up when I was recording this today. That said, if you crank the volume up way high you can kind of hear some. If not, you're probably not missing much. I decided to upload these pieces because this is the epitome of Japanese Monster Week. My devoted love to all things Kaiju and the cheese of bad monster movies.



Below is a bonus scene. This is my friend narrating a painfully long scene where we did a special effect of burning a "city" which looks to be comprised of a handful of old Check Cola cans. Ah, those were the days. The audio is the best part of this (sadly not very loud again but it is on the VHS) as he spends five minute stalling as a concerned newsman, as I struggle to light the city ablaze and resort to burning mounds of dirt. The shaking camera, clearly we invented years before Cloverfield. Oh man... Good times.



Someday I'll figure out a better way to upload these full movies and promptly collect my Oscars.