Uploaded here is a recording of the Kaiju Sharksploitation from this year’s G-Fest. A camrip was already circulating, but this should be a little easier to see, plus a bit of extra content that was added at the end. There are still a few things that didn’t get mentioned that some people asked for (Zaidabeck from Akumaizer 3, the unmade King Kong vs Orca film), but I think we hit most of the major topics.

A little late in getting this one uploaded, but here’s last year’s G-Fest panel on Kaiju in Comics, cohosted by Jessica Tseang of the Kaiju Kingdom podcast. Jessica is a respected comics authority, so she had a lot of insight to bring on this deep-dive into original non-manga comics dealing with giant monsters and robots.

New panel recording up on YouTube, this one is from Anime NJ++ this year. This one covers the Sushi Typhoon imprint and some general history of Japanese splatter films, so it may be a bit edgier than our usual content.

In this episode, Kevin, Josh, and Lux sit down to discuss Netflix’s 2023 adaptation of Yu Yu Hakusho. As three relatively hardcore fans of the source material, we get into a fair amount of minutia comparing the new incarnation to different adaptations from years past, so it’d be good to have a passing familiarity with the property before listening… but hey, it’s a good idea to have a passing familiarity with Yu Yu Hakusho in general, so if you haven’t ever read the manga or watched the anime, now’s as good a time as ever to give it a shot (but don’t start with the Netflix series).

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This went up on YouTube back in September, but somehow I missed linking it on the blog: a presentation Mike Dent and I did at G-Fest 2023, covering the history of late-night tokusatsu shows. Due to the plethora of content and the limitations of time, we only got up to 2007, so a part 2 will follow in some form eventually.

And actually, while we’re at it, here’s the Kaiju Transmissions panel from the same show:

There’s one more panel from G-Fest that still needs to be edited and added to YouTube, so keep an eye out.

Last weekend was Otakon, where I got to give a panel detailing the wild intersection of Japanese pop culture and Marvel comics. This one details Marvel books based on Japanese properties, manga’s influence on Marvel, and Marvel characters in Japanese titles, which was a lot to cram into an hour (let alone 45 minutes due to a schedule reading accident!)

This summer’s G-Fest panels were also recorded, so those are next on the agenda.

In this episode, Kevin is joined by Alex, Connor, and Jared as the gang look back on the decade since Ultraman Ginga debuted, recapping all of the mainline Ultraman shows and trying to decide exactly what “New Generation” means. This is perhaps not a great episode for novices, but experienced Ultra-fans who want to get our perspectives on everything going up through Ultraman Decker (which, we neglected to mention, could be a play on “deca” being Greek for “ten”), excluding Trigger, since we covered it last year.

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Of course, we recorded right before the Decker movie hit, so we had not seen the teaser for the next series yet.

Also:

Forgot to post this here earlier, but here’s a presentation for Kaiju Masterclass from earlier this month, giving an overview of Takashi Yamazaki’s entire filmography and speculating about what it might mean for his future Godzilla movie. After that, it turns into a miscellaneous Q&A on a variety of kaiju-related topics.

One more G-Fest recording for this year! This panel had content from across Asia, but we only had time for the Japanese part at the show, so a bonus recording will come out in the near future to go over a few of the remaining slides that covered Korean and Chinese dinosaur flicks.

Another G-Fest panel is now up on YouTube, looking at various trailers for projects that either never saw the light of day, or wound up quite differently from their initially advertised incarnations. I wasn’t able to actually play any trailers during the panel, but links to lots of them are in the description.

Jessica Tseang was due to interview the great Godzilla and Ultraman franchise actress Tomoko Ai at G-Fest this year, but wasn’t able to attend the convention due to a sudden emergency. Since Amanda was already on interpreter duty, Kevin stepped in as Jessica’s replacement for the interview.

We talked about Ms Ai’s career on Ultraman Leo, her time at Toho with Terror of Mechagodzilla, as well as a stint at Toei including guesting on Goranger and (almost) leading in The Kagestar. It was a fantastic experience for us, and hopefully this recording is a good overview and is a suitable consolation for anyone who also wanted to go and couldn’t make it to the convention this year.

Special thanks to Chris Marti for help with editing this episode!

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