Do watch the rest as they are fun but as you pointed out they are a little more kiddie.

But then again some of the original run are kiddie too, lets not forget that horrible one with the kid who dreams with Minya.

Overall I prefer Showa, but that one is easily the worst Godzilla movie I've ever seen. People like to make fun of Gigan and Megalon, but at least those are entertaining stupid. All Monsters Attack in the other hand is just boring stupid.

I'd rather watch the Roland Emmerich movie, given the choice.

Major downside with this release is that it won't have the new 4K masters, probably because Toho won't want to license those before they put out their own box set. Considering how much more expensive this collection would've been in Japan and that there are no restrictions regarding region coding between Asia and North America, Toho would probably lose way too much money to let Criterion put them out in the US. A shame but that's the way it is.

The specter of reverse importing rears its ugly head again...

Whose brilliant idea was it to put Japan in the same region as the US anyway?

They didn't want to have the same region as China.

Should've gone Region B then...

...then again, I also wish HD-DVD had won since it had no region coding at all.

I feel like that would have caused even more problems.

That probably would've been confusing since B is mostly PAL territories afaik.
Anyway, region is irrelevant if the discs are tri-region (I see quite a few of them here) or your BD player is region free...I only have one of those atm, and one other that is DVD RF. I also have two PS3 consoles running CFW (so DVD/BD region free) but I haven't used those to play DVD/BD movies, just no need yet.

Region coding on Blu-Ray is awful as there is no one fits all as far as playback goes like with DVD (a player with "region 0" can play anything). Also, Japan uses region 2 for DVD which is indeed used in Europe as well. The market was certainly more restricted back then.

To me, region free Blu-Ray playback is a must. Sure there are plenty of great titles available in Europe but anyone who lives here, especially in smaller countries, just how much you are missing out if you don't keep an eye at the market in North America and Asia.

As I said I see a fair amount of tri-region discs and I'm not sure if I'm missing much, maybe it's more of a problem in Europe idk. For the most part it's usually cheaper and easier to import from Asia and Japan here. Importing from the US has nearly always been costly.

Anyway, I'm not heavily into anime or anything I just pick up some stuff that catches my eye whenever.
Godzilla? Yeah I'd probably go for non-US if I could get original cuts and audio but still have English subs.
For the most part I dislike dubs no matter who is doing the VA, yeah there are exceptions to that but it mostly just feels wrong.
Movies that aren't in my native tongue need subtitles, that's what seems natural to me.

It's Criterion so I am assuming that all the movies have Japanese audio and English subs.

So last weekend I watched Mothra '61 and Godzilla vs Mothra '64 and they are better than Mothra '92, more serious storylines, lots of politics and talking heads that exceeded my Japanese skill by far but I still enjoyed them more than Mothra '92. I guess a giant moth is never going to be able to have really cool fights with anyone though.

Anyway so last night I went back to Heisei with Godzilla vs Mecha Godzilla. For me this brought back the fun of Godzilla vs King Ghidora. Good G-Force characters, plenty of action, some bad a** smack down no holds barred monster fights, not too much slapstick. Really enjoyed this one. Found out that the Japanese actually call Rodan "Radon", never noticed that before. I liked how the humans actually had a fighting chance in this movie. Just shouldn't have used those grappling lines in the first showdown with big G, you would've had him! Those Jtai guys in regular battle tanks and fighter planes sure are still eager to fight though, even though hundreds have been instantly wiped out with no chance in all the previous films!

Looking forward to Godzilla vs Space Godzilla.

It's worse than DVD since barring a handful of manufacturers, nearly all players could be easily modified region free just by finding the maintenance menu or some other tricker with the remote control. Blu-ray in the other hand has nothing like that. The only way to get a region free blu-ray player is by buying one.

Which is really grates me because the only kind of region free player I can maybe buy domestically is the super high end ones which of course cost way more money than I have, and I have to pay premium to import them on top of the region modding...which is why I'd rather just buy a separate region A machine since it's unlikely I'll ever need to buy a region C coded disc, but then the problem is that I have to buy it from the US which costs even more to import. And I did that, but the f***ing thing broke down after a year!

I'm thinking I should just buy a cheap region free player in Europe at some point. At least then mailing it back when it breaks under warranty won't cost so much that I literally can't do it. Currently the only way for me to watch my region A titles is on my PC, and I hate watching movies on my PC.

Sony PS3 console, CFW. You don't need a hardware flasher to do this now.

I haven't owned a console since the OG NES.

It's the cheapest option for a decent quality RF BD player. Forget that it's a console.

Ten years ago or so I bought a very cheap, fairly low-quality Blu-Ray player from Philips. After some months I discovered that you could install a different firmware and lock the region to A, which is what I did and used it for American and Japanese Blu-Rays for a couple of years until I bought the Pioneer and later on the Oppo.

Philips was pretty much just crap as you probably knew but back then there we no cheaper option (I think it was like a 120USD solution). The main weakpoint with the Ps3 is it's chroma upsampling errors, but I guess it can be justifiable considering the age of these machines and certainly the prices they go for nowadays.

I've had a few cheap BD players, only one has region select from factory (Laser). The problem I've seen with most cheap players is that they sometimes have trouble playing certain discs, in some cases they refuse to acknowledge the disc at all, or they'll play (sometimes after an extra long boot) and randomly encounter read errors.

PS3 consoles never seem to have this problem.

I seriously hope they have a US version and a JP version like they did with ‘54 some time ago. Those movies are usually quite recut and the titles and openings are totally different. These crappy insulting dubs are 50 years old now and and the only way most fans have seen these movies so deserve to be preserved, IMO. Obviously one wants the original too.

This was done with ‘54 a while back on DVD. It works very well. Not every G movie has that many differences though, obviously.