Word: toho
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...scare swept the country. The incident, coming less than a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, traumatized Japan. Working with director Ishiro Honda, Tsuburaya turned his octopus into a mutant dinosaur, awakened by a nuclear explosion and not happy about it. The project was quickly green-lighted by the prestigious Toho studio...
...TriStar division (both owned by Sony). The partners put on hold a movie they had in the works, dubbed Project X, about ("I kid you not," says Devlin) a giant meteor on a collision course with Earth. Lee was also the most persistent of the studio execs in persuading Toho to lend out its famous monster. Still, when he saw Tatopoulos' model just hours before it was unveiled for the Toho board of directors in Tokyo, Lee was stunned. "It was just so different," he says, "so improved." Devlin says he heard of a little more consternation: "'You have...
...heart-stopping moment," says Lee, who knew Toho could sink the proposed Godzilla then and there. Some quick talking took place. Says Emmerich: "I told the Japanese guys the biggest difference would be that the creature is very lean because he's very fast. I also told them, 'Guys, we either do it like this, or we don't do it at all. It's your trademark, but if you don't do it this way, I'll go make another movie, and you'll have to find someone else.'" That argument carried some weight: Toho was the Japanese distributor...
Careful not to invoke the name Sony (and thus stir up intra-Japanese competitiveness), Lee asked the Toho board members to think of the pair's model as the "Tristar Godzilla," a line extension of their own "Classic Godzilla" franchise. And most important, he says, "we left the model in the boardroom overnight so they could get used to it." Whether persuaded by all or part of the delegation's arguments, Toho gave its blessing the next day. Says Tatopoulos: "The Japanese told me that the new Godzilla is miles away from the old creature but that I kept...
...Toho board, the Sony delegation had argued that there was precedent for the revisions, pointing out that Godzilla's looks shifted with each movie. For example, the eyes, originally on the side of the monster's head, migrated to the front (they've moved back to the side for this version). The original 1954 Godzilla, wild and untamable, is physically different from the relatively benign creature that does battle with the triple-headed King Ghidorah in Destroy All Monsters (1968), from the oversize Japanese nationalist who takes on a visiting American ape in King Kong vs. Godzilla (1963) and from...