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Post #969875

Author
God Save Pop Punk
Parent topic
Info: My Logo Preservation Project
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/969875/action/topic#969875
Date created
15-Jul-2016, 3:28 PM

The Toho Company Ltd. logos in the Godzilla series have fallen victim to this tendency pretty frequently in the US. In their initial American theatrical runs, the US distributor would substitute their logo for Toho’s, but for most of the films from 1966 on, the versions readily available in the US are ostensibly the International export versions commissioned by Toho with English dialogue and text provided by a company in Hong Kong or by Frontier Enterprises in Tokyo, depending on the film.

However, on US home video releases, the older films sometimes have the Toho logo that was used at the time plastered with a more recent version. Some of them also feature new video-generated title cards and credits, as well as trademark and registered trademark logos added to the monsters’ names in the titles. Some of the 1990s films, originally released by TriStar in 1998, remove the logo entirely, plastering it with the TriStar logo, which in the case of Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991) causes the opening music cue, which originally started as the Toho logo faded in, to start several seconds into the longer TriStar logo. These versions also often featured new video-generated credits and other text, as well as subtitling the elaborate Japanese title cards, as opposed to the International versions’ tendency to simply paste the English title in white lettering on top of the Japanese title. (They still used the International dubbed audio, however.) Not all of the currently available Blu-ray versions issued by Sony reflect this, however, since many use either new masters or straight transfers of the International prints.

The films from 2000 to 2004 are also straight scans of the International prints, with the TriStar logo sometimes added before the Toho logo. Godzilla 2000, released in 1999 in Japan, has actually had its International dub effectively replaced worldwide by TriStar’s theatrical version of the movie, which features a unique (and much livelier) dub as well as a number of edits that improve the pacing and continuity of some scenes. Notably, while this version does begin with the TriStar logo, a vintage Toho logo appears right after it, a conscious choice on the part of the American editors.