War of the Monsters

All the way back in my post about King of the Monsters, I briefly mentioned the 2003 Playstation 2 title War of the Monsters, a game stomping the same grounds as SNK’s monster wrestling dust-up, but separated by an ocean and a decade’s worth of technological development in video games. I’ve stressed it over and over again that giant monsters are a topic that has been woefully underrepresented in the video game sphere—a situation that annoyingly does not right itself in the time between posts where I talk about it (although that GigaBash game from last year might be worth looking at)—and for the longest time, War of the Monsters was probably the highest profile entry, or at the least the highest profile one that didn’t have Godzilla’s name plastered on the box. It had the pedigree of being a first-party Playstation game released during the PS2’s unstoppable reign as the top console, and was developed by Incog Inc. (formerly the much more sensibly-named Incognito Studios), a company formed by the lead developers of Sony’s popular Twisted Metal series, alongside Sony’s stalwart Santa Monica Studio—the “original concept” was provided by Twisted Metal and God of War lead David Jaffe, back when he made video games instead of embarrassing Youtube videos.

There is an obvious logic to getting some the leading minds behind the car combat genre to tackle a giant monster game—they are both, after all, concepts that revolve around massive property damage, and in terms of raw tech, Incog could probably carry over the physics engine that powered the PS2 Twisted Metal entry that released a year-and-a-half earlier. You can feel the car combat roots in the basic feel of War of the Monsters, the way it moves and the way it’s structured, although it also attempts to go back to Twisted Metal‘s origins in the fighting game genre in a more direct manner, with hand-to-hand combat rather than a back-and-forth bombardment of projectiles (although there’s plenty of projectiles in this as well). It’s easy to see that this game is making a genuine attempt to be both a appealing competitive smash-em-up and a loving homage to the giant monster movie genre—in some ways, it represents the last hurrah for a specific view of creature features, and a last ditch effort to take what King of the Monsters was trying to do and get it “right.”

Giant Robo/Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot

We haven’t ventured back to the original Japanese Monster Boom in a while, but there is still material there left to pore over. Giant Robo hails from the latter half of that brief period of monster ascension, debuting within weeks of Ultraseven and Monster Prince, and feeling a bit like a halfway point between those two series: espionage antics involving an international peacekeeping organization as well a child hero with his own giant, monster-fighting companion. It ended with the same 26-episode run as Monster Prince, a truncated existence easily overshadowed by the much longer and more influential Ultra series, but unlike Monster Prince, Giant Robo was dubbed and aired on North American television thanks to the efforts of our old pals at American International Pictures, its title changed to Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot. Johnny Sokko became something of a staple of syndicated TV in the seventies, gaining a cult following among English-speakers who went on to start punk and ska bands referencing it—so despite being “lesser” tokusatsu, it has had a surprising amount of staying power in both the west and in Japan, where it has received irregular reboots (all of them animated) in the decades since.

Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace – “Skipper the Eyechild”

Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, which aired six episodes on the UK’s Channel 4 in early 2004,came out of the same British alternative comedy scene that fostered previous subject The Mighty Boosh, and both not only share many of the same actors, but a similar outlook that combines wry dialogue and a love of the utterly ridiculous. Matthew Holness’ Garth Marenghi, “author, dreamweaver, visionary, plus actor”, is the image of a pompous hack whose astronomical self-importance never allows him to notice his own clear lack of talent, and the show itself becomes a parade of cliches and ineptitude taken to the extreme. But the brilliance of Darkplace is not that it’s full of things that are blatantly wrong, but that all those things are wrong and yet the mastermind behind them still thinks he is somehow making great art—what Holness is parodying is not simply wilfully mediocre storytellers, who are content just churning out trash without a care (although Marenghi also admits to being “one of the few writers who has written more books than they’ve read”), but the kind of superstar writers who let any amount of success get to their heads.

As a prolific author of horror novels in the eighties, the first possible inspiration for Marenghi people mention is Stephen King at his most popular (and most cocaine-fuelled), but he seems just as much inspired by local UK purveyors of over-the-top schlock like James Herbert, author of The Rats (I would think the quality of Merenghi’s writing is based more on the latter than the former.) Even though Darkplace was short-lived and little-viewed when it originally aired, it has gained a cult following in the years since, and Holness has used that to not only periodically revisit the characters from the series, but to move into directing legitimate horror movies with his 2018 film Possum, and will soon publish a short story collection written in-character as Marenghi.