Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Master Of Monsters

Instead of filming a puppet of Godzilla in stop-motion, as O'Brien had done for King Kong, Tsuburaya put an actor in a rubber suit and ran the camera at high speed, making Godzilla's movements seem appropriately ponderous when played back. The suit, however, weighed 220 lbs. (100 kg), and the actor inside it lost 20 lbs. (9 kg) in six weeks of shooting.


Buy the book here:
Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters: Defending the Earth with Ultraman and Godzilla

Read a review here.

I flipped through this book recently in a Barnes & Noble and it's just packed with photos like the one above. I worshipped Ultraman as a kid and there's tons of info in there about him. This is going on the Christmas list for sure.

5 comments:

Mantan Calaveras said...

Aw,I read through this past summer at my Uncle's place. Really fun book. I love how Tsuburaya basically got to spend his career playing with over-sized toys.

Hopsy the beer drinking clown said...

I remember spending many a Saturday afternoon at the local run-down theater watching godzilla type creature-double-features..ahhhh the memories...looks like a cool book.

The Gill-Man said...

Godzilla, Gamera, Mothra...all of these monsters were in regular rotation alongside Dracula, The Wolfman, The Creature, etc when I was a kid. Loved them all then...and still do to this day!

Looks like a great book!

John Rozum said...

This is a great book. Best of all I had my copy not only signed by the author, August Ragone, but original Godzilla suit actor Haruo Nakajima as well.

Rot said...

The bragging rights to that are quite impressive : )


That's incredibly cool, man.