The Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster reconstruction is available now!
The 1080p HD reconstruction of the original US version of Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster is completed and available to download! Have a look on the spleen or send a private message for details.
Notes on this release:
- The Toho transfer had its contrast and saturation boosted slightly in order to alleviate its rather flat appearance.
- While a “first draft” of the project was prepared using the Classic Media DVD recreation of the US version as a reference, it was revised using a VHS rip, meaning that the numerous errors in the CM version are corrected here.
- A sound synchronization error, present in all available versions of the dub, that affected much of the scene of Naoko and Shindo at home and extended into the What Are They Doing Now?/”Call Happiness” scene, has been corrected.
- The audio for the US version was largely sourced from a PAL DVD released by an Australian company called Siren. This DVD featured an original scan of a 16mm TV print, meaning it had higher sound quality than any other available source, all other releases being made from an old videotape master. However, the Siren version is full of splices and gaps in the audio as well as some audio distortion, so many small portions of the soundtrack had to be carefully patched using the audio from the Classic Media DVD.
- The Walter Reade Organization logo was reinstated before the title card. The version used here was in effect a collaborative effort: The icon and text were recreated by Video Collector, and placed/scaled using an actual image of the logo. The recreation made by goji1986 from Toho Kingdom for his Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster reconstruction was used as a reference for the starfield; I made the background.
- The original “The End” title card was recreated using the Siren DVD as a reference; its “stretched” appearance (similar to the opening credits) is apparently how it really would have appeared in a scope print.
Merry Christmas, folks!
Original post:
I’m currently working on an HD reconstruction of the re-cut, dubbed US version of Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster, released by Walter Reade-Sterling. I’ll be using a bootleg copy of the Japanese Blu-ray as my primary video source and using the Classic Media DVD recreation of the US version as my primary reference and audio source, while also correcting a couple of editing and audio sync errors in that version.
I managed to get about halfway through syncing the HD video before Vegas became unusable due to repeated freezing, crashing, and misreading the file I remuxed the Blu-ray video into for editing, so I muxed a new file with a different program and started over. I’m just shy of a half-hour into the movie at this point, though thanks to the shuffling of scenes in the US version it’s not always possible to be precise about how far through it I am. After that, I’ll have to recreate the English credits (including reinstating the Walter Reade-Sterling logo in place of the Toho Scope logo that Classic Media haphazardly inserted at the beginning), which ought to be relatively simple.
I’m hoping to have this out by Christmas, and given how simple the project is overall and how it’s going so far, I’m reasonably confident I can manage that. After that I plan to do an HD version of Monster Zero for release hopefully sometime in January, then reconstructions of Godzilla vs. the Thing, Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, the US TV version of Son of Godzilla and finally (for shits and giggles, since someone sent me the Simitar DVD) Godzilla’s Revenge throughout the rest of 2017. There’ll probably be more after that; that’s just all I have planned at the moment.