Upping the anti - and the scale!

     With my first works, The Fantoccini Family, complete and shown I felt a need to scale up and break out. I achieved both. Upping the size of the work just seemed like a logical step, given the corresponding size of the parts I was working with. It was a medium based decision all the way. Bigger! = Better? = Not necessarily. However, bigger due to specific medium requirements was a yes all the way.  So the first decision I made was to up the scale. Finding direction for the new work was another matter entirely. What in the same genre would translate best?

Godzilla

     I knew I wanted to continue with the same line of thinking as the Fantoccini Family. I had been stealing glimpses of my past, as found through journal entries, writings, and recollections. I wanted to apply these sci-fi, media based, memories of my youth to this newly found passion. I needed a topic that was seemingly larger than life. Both larger in media and in scale. Nothing, to my relocation at the time, was larger than life than the Sunday morning televised matinee of the Godzilla series of movies. The B-movie genre in general had always appealed to me and was already translating quite successfully with the Fantoccini work I had just finished. Direction found.

Godzilla vs. Mecha-Godzilla

      I watched Godzilla religiously on good old channel 5. We only had 4 stations after all. It was either that or Business Watch, Soul Train, or Columbo! What would you have chosen? Each episode brought massive monster combatants, really bad lip synching, and piss poor acting, to my young mind. One of the first heroine I acted out as a child with friends on the playground was Godzilla. He was the good guy after all, even if he started off as the opposite. He battled all sorts of baddies, like King Kong, Mothra, Mecha-Godzilla (My personal favorite BTW), and king Ghidorah. Godzilla could glow in the dark and throw electricity and flames from his mouth. He was a bad ass. Power Rangers be damned, he was the original ass kicker! I meant to honor him, if not his nemesis and original genera of B-movie style monsters. Cheesetastic!   

Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah

 
  So into the build I stepped, thinking of little more than the original Godzilla episodes and B-movies of the like. Enter King Ricoh. Named both for the copiers I derived his parts from and the ultimate three headed baddie from the Godzilla movies, King Ghidorah. I originally envisioned all three heads and a set of giant wings, but in the end, I settled for one head and massive wings with glowing UV tips. I wanted to create a copier bots version, in UV lighting for effect, of two rough neck monsters battling it out much like the original Godzilla monster battles I watched in my youth.

Spiga

     Enter King Ricoh's nemesis, Gamma 32! While King Ricoh was a single headed take on King Ghidorah, Gamma was a near free for all, loosely adapted from Spiga. He was to become a mutant, radiated, overgrown, spider and nemesis to King Ricoh. Gamma 32, named after an electric motor manufacturer/supplier for large industrial office copy machines, was to be an 8 foot by 8 foot spider with moving parts, motors, and lazer based special effects. He would stand his ground against King Ricoh, and complete a mostly stationary scene that lived only in my mind as envisioned from my youth. The GOOD monster vs. the BAD monster. A new and completely confusing concept to a 7 year old kid. But I remembered, none the less.

Next Post - An update to The B - Movie Monster Bot section of the blog complete with build details and images.