Best of the Gamera episodes, hands down. Friggin’ masterful episode all the way. THIS is the one you wanna show if you wanna show someone a Gamera episode.
This is the most exuberantly, wholeheartedly, utterly guano insane movie in the Gamera series, and having all that ridiculous stuff to bounce off works to writing team’s advantage.
For one thing, you have that sequence where Guiron emerges, and his design is… well, it’s terrible, to put it charitable, prompting an all-timer from Crow (“I know, they made me in a hurry!”), and then doing his best butcher impression as Guiron holds up a chunk of the Space Gaos he just chopped up (!!!).
In the middle of all that? Guiron decapitates Space Gaos, leading to Crow going “Quit while you’re ahead!”, which gets Joel in a de-limbing kinda mood!
AND THERE’S SO MUCH MORE THAN THAT
You have the weird alien twins, the tranquil Cornjob theme song getting new lyrics declaring that “we are filled with shame” and going to the extent of Servo’s dark lyrics about how “Cornjob will be blamed,” the gang flipping out over that one kid’s traffic accident obsession, all the weird stuff going on in the kaiju battle like the impromptu gymnastics routine and the throwing stars, the donuts and gray water, just… EVERYTHING.
But but but wait! We can’t let this go without mentioning the Gamera theme song! The pure energy that this draws from the riffers? It’s amazing. And that’s both in the theater and in the host segments! There’s something so gleefully enthusiastic about that song, and that gets something out of Joel and the Bots, pushing them to have as much fun with that as possible.
I’m not doing a good enough job of describing that energy escalation, but the overall effect of the song on these guys is something to marvel at. Heck, the whole episode is!
