Interesting, Theres Something About This That Feels LessMechagodzilla And MoreGodzilla If He Was A Robot.

Interesting, there’s something about this that feels less “Mechagodzilla” and more “Godzilla if he was a robot”.  Specifically its kind of like the character designers used the basic premise of a Mechanical Godzilla to design it without drawing from any previous Mechagodzilla designs, and thus it lacks certain staples like the chrome coloring and yellow eyes, as well as having more skeletal, robotic limbs due to not being a suit.  Its not necessarily a bad thing (though I agree with Matt that it’s a strange choice in a movie dedicated to visual nostalgia), but it does make you rethink what defines the character and ponder what other recurring elements previous designs had beyond “metal Godzilla” that tend to be taken for granted.

One thing that’s always confused me is that its almost always the specific quadrupedal bat stanced wyvern bodyplan that Vermithrax originated.  Which is odd considering bats are A. tiny by comparison and don’t need to support a lot of weight, and B. aren’t particularly good at walking around anyway.  You’d think if they were really concerned with realism they’d go with a design that was better suited to handle weight and locomotion, like the more upright quadrupedal stances seen in Pterosaurs or the bipedal stance seen in birds as well as some wyverns in Japanese media.  I kind of wonder if part of its constant use may be down to it being less time consuming in CGI to use the same basic animation rigs that have been present since the controls for Vermithrax’s Go Motion model.

A Thought About Pop Culture Dragons

When I was a kid, in the ‘90s, I remember dragons were always depicted one of two ways:  either as a standard European Dragon (you know, four legs and two wings, breathes fire, etc.) or as a standard serpent-like Asian Dragon.  While Asian Dragons still pop up from time to time, at what point did the traditional European Dragon drop off and get replaced with Wyverns (two legs, two wings)?

Like, it definitely predates Game of Thrones becoming a popular TV show though I think it definitely has helped solidify it (I remember they changed the design for Smaug in the Hobbit films to a Wyvern to try and cash in), but it was already a trend in the years leading up to it.

I don’t remember Wyverns being a thing at all in media prior to, say, Reign of Fire.  Like, I know there were Wyverns in movies before that, but it’s like that movie serves as some sort of border - prior to that Wyverns were rare, after they seem to be the most common.  Why?  It couldn’t have been THAT movie, of all things, to do it, could it?

I suspect @tyrantisterror might know, being the resident dragon expert.  :p

I don’t want to hijack that other swell thread for this but isn’t it kind of weird that the official stock image of the whole gang has velma seemingly leaning her entire weight on their dog’s head?

At least as far as the Rodan design, for me it was less about realism and more that I thought it would be cool to see a take on him with elements inspired by Azharchid Pterosaurs.

Like scale up that baby Sauropod to adult size and your already halfway there to a pretty menacing iteration.  Of course you’d want to have something with more Rodan specific features but elements like the upright quadrupedal stance and stork like head and neck make for an impressive yet predatory visage even when on the ground, which I think works for a Kaiju known for snacking on human sized treats.  So it’s pretty cool to see some of those elements make their way into this anime (though Rodan seems to be strongly puny in this for so reason).

It’s amusing, many of these redesigns (Rodan and Anguirus especially) look like what the “realistic” fans expected from a hypothetical new american movie between 1998 and 2014. But now we live in the post-2019 era, with the latest american movie going mostly in the opposite direction, trying to stay faithful, and instead it’s the japanese anime that does this and it feels like an exception to the rule rather than the rule.

Tweety Bird has a pretty well defined personality: a sadistic sociopath who puts on an innocent facade in order to get away with cold blooded torture.

I feel like Tweety Bird is the Mickey Mouse of Warner Brothers. An icon they’ve made unavoidable, yet nobody can really describe the character’s personality or anything particularly funny about them. How would you even explain Tweety if your goal was to sell Tweety cartoons? A bird who’s just kind of nonchalant about everything?

What if it turns out these aren’t actually the heads but the individual streams of the gravity beam being fired by the much larger Ghidorah still in space.

Said Ghidorah might itself be the beams of an even larger Ghidorah.