Posted 20 August 2019 - 10:29 AM
Been away for a while.
I’ve been watching some old reviews on Godzilla and Gamera (AlextheHunted and Brandon Tenold) and I noticed some interesting things.
For Godzilla, he started out as symbolism for nuclear destruction, but became more kid friendly as time went on. They put in Minilla because they thought he would attract children. Then they made Godzilla’s Revenge a few years afterwards, universally slammed as the worst Godzilla movie ever made. It was composed mostly of stock footage (Godzilla probably has two minutes of new footage total), the plot centered around a little boy who DREAMED about being on Monster Island with Minilla...as you can imagine, not very appealing. And the craziest thing was the director was the same guy who directed the original Godzilla!
Similar shinnanegans would continue well into the seventies. Godzilla vs Hedora was an environmental message-type movie that appealed to kids, and the studio was so furious with the director that they accused him of ruining Godzilla forever.
Toho also held a contest for kids to create their own superhero, which resulted in Jet Jaguar, but Toho wasn’t convinced he could carry his own movie, so they put him in a Godzilla movie.
Gamera had a lot of similar production problems as well, exacerbated by the trends towards child friendly monsters. Two of the original movies had plots revolving around the Osaka Expo and Seaworld, as those two financed those movies. The last of those original movies, Gamera Super Monster, was a last ditch attempt to save the series, and much like GR, relied heavily on stock footage and relied on several plot gimmicks to keep people interested (in this case, have three alien women turn into superheroes, but they were almost as useless as Hinata).
I feel like something similar had happened with Naruto and Boruto is the result. As time went on, Naruto struggled to stay relevant, and assuming Kishimoto has been lying about planning NH, SJ sought to appeal to the NH fans given how loud they were, and here we are now.
While SP to my knowledge doesn’t rely too much on stock footage, I feel the production value on the Naruto series as a whole was going downhill and seemed to have been getting really lazy as of late with their character designs. I also feel the technology in Boruto is just a gimmick to get people to read it; it clearly wasn’t planned in the original Naruto and there’s no explanation for how they got this technology in such a short amount of time.
And while I don’t think SJ was suffering significantly financial wise (with so many series, I think most of them should have kept its head above water), I feel like they were really desperate to make lightning strike twice instead of moving on to some other series. So far, it seems MHA and Black Clover are the new kings.