Thread: Monsters-HD Alert: Godzilla Fantasia 4/11 Premieres

Godzilla Fantasia / The Legend of Godzilla: (1984) Everybody's favorite big green guy in an official collection of
clips (pre-Biollante) from the Big G's best scenes set to the original soundtrack music. Also included is a Toho
Fantasia that chronicles the exploits of the big G outside of his own films.

Here's an interested review into a newer version released in 1997 and compared to the 1984 version.


Source

Reviewed by John Rocco Roberto

Returning to the tradition of Godzilla Fantasia and Legend of Godzilla, Toho Video has released Godzilla Fantasy on laser disc and video cassette. "The Godzilla Fantasy Returns!" the box art touts, and the cover design features and impressive array of kaiju creatures featuring Godzilla surrounded by MechaGodzilla, King Ghidorah, Biollante, Mothra, SpaceGodzilla and Destroyah. But unlike its 1984 counter parts, Godzilla Fantasy fails to live up to both its expectation, and its predecessors.

Utilizing the same format as the Godzilla Fantasia releases, this tape contains 45 minuets of footage, beautify re-master in letterbox format, cut exclusively from the recent Godzilla series. While the scenes depicting Godzilla battling everything from the Japanese military might to King Ghidorah and SpaceGodzilla are exciting and enjoyable to watch, the tape lacks the quality and feel of the original versions.

Unlike Godzilla Fantasia, which featured newly arranged recordings of the classic Akira Ifukube Godzilla themes, Godzilla Fantasy features no new musical arrangements, the scores, written by Akira Ifukube, Rejiro Koroku (Godzilla 1985), Koichi Sugiyama (Godzilla vs Biollante) and Takeyuki Hattori (Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla), are simply several different queues lifted directly from the film soundtracks and edited together. The results is an erratic and sometimes choppy soundtrack, which detracts from the overall enjoyment of the video. In addition to the disappointment in the arrangement of the soundtrack, the musical selections picked to accompany each scene are completely mismatched. Examples of inappropriate musical selections include the military march from Godzilla 1985 matched to footage of the Super X, and "Countdown" from Godzilla vs Biollante tacked to footage of the second battle between Godzilla and Biollante. The most glaring example of this mis-matching however, occurs towards the end of the tape. Scenes of Godzilla melting down, taken from Godzilla vs Destroyah, are no longer accompanied by Ifukube's stirring "Death of Godzilla" theme. Instead, the march from King Kong vs Godzilla (taken from the end credits of Godzilla vs Destroyah) is heard, completely ruining one of the most moving scenes in the Godzilla series.

For visual material, Godzilla's greatest battles are well represented, but often the footage is lifted straight from the films without the benefit of additional editing. Thus, Godzilla's battle with MechaGodzilla at Makuhari is still marred by the shot of Godzilla tossing MechaGodzilla across town, and the footage of SpaceGodzilla, battling MOGERA amid an asteroid belt, arguably the worst SPFX footage in the series, is left intact.

Overall its nice to see a Godzilla video released after so much time, but giving the quality of the current Mothra series, the apprehension of the Tri-Star project, and the 4800 yen purchase price, it would have been nice if Godzilla Fantasy had been a recently released, all new Toho Godzilla film. I guess we fans will just have to wait.

I watched this for about an hour last night, it was great. It made for some nice background music while I was reading my A/V rags.