My Quest is (nearly) at an End

I cannot remember a time in my life without Godzilla. I have interests that I remember vaguely starting at one point or another and some interests that I remember starting with a certain point (like when I first saw the cover to ‘Doctor Who and the Cybermen’ and I became very curious about what it was) but, like the Muppets, I only remember the Godzilla switch being in the ‘on’ position.

I don’t know why this would be. The Muppets make sense as I know I watched Sesame Street so having early memories of them makes sense. My parents have no real fondness for Godzilla so it’s not like they’d have the movies on constantly. Is it just that I don’t remember the trigger point? That I don’t recall the moment when the normal childlike fascination with dinosaurs turned into a fascination with their fictional descendant? I suppose it’s not important when or why it started, the important thing is that the interest is still there.

When I was younger, I’d read about movies, knowing that I’d never have a chance to see most of them as I didn’t have cable or a VCR. Once I got a VCR, I started collecting tapes of things but knew I’d never get to see the Japanese versions of the Godzilla movies. When I started finding fansubbed bootlegs of the Japanese movies, I figured there was a chance I might be able to see them eventually. In the early days of DVD, there were only a handful of quality Godzilla DVDs amongst all the public domain junk. Now there are legitimate versions of most of the Godzilla films available on DVD that feature both the original Japanese versions of the film as well as the American edits. Wow.

After picking up the recently released Godzilla Collection (Classic Media’s box set of their previously released DVDs as well as two disks currently exclusive to the set) I looked at my shelf of Godzilla films and was shocked to realize that I have nearly all of them. There are a couple of the later films that I don’t have in the versions I’d like and a few I don’t have at all but I’m seriously close to having a copy of every Toho Godzilla film (yes I’m being very specific with that statement in order to indicate the fact that a certain film isn’t in the listing).

This is weird. My quest is almost at an end. I didn’t expect that would happen. Ever. Now, if they’d only release a quality widescreen version of ‘Godzilla vs. Megalon’ I’d be all set.