Topic on User talk:Titanollante

Hello, I thought I should write to you on behalf of me and my friends about misinformation about what counts as an incarnation of King Kong and the Gotengo.

I noticed that on the King Kong page that Gorilla from Go! Greenman is listed as an incarnation of King Kong, however nothing supports that other than the suits being the same. It'd be like counting Jirass as an incarnation of Godzilla, for example.

As for the Gotengo, the Ra from Super Atragon is known as the New Undersea Battleship, and the title of the Gotengo is Undersea Battleship. They are the same incarnation. As for the Gohten, with the literal name "Goten", it is just the name of the Gotengo without the "-go" at the end. Also, in the Final Wars Super Complete Works, and All Toho Mechanic Encyclopedia, they both in some way directly call the Gohten the Gotengo. Saying they are separate would be like saying Kong (MV) and King Kong are separate, when that is not the case due to WB's purchase of RKO and thus they have historical rights to the character of King Kong.

Thank you in advance.

Firstly, nothing about the Gotengo situation is "misinformation", it's a difference in opinion on how it is covered on the site - Gorilla/Kong you could debatably call misinformation though. I agree with you on the first point, disagree on the second.

Gorilla being treated as Kong is very outdated, as most of the pages on Greenman kaiju are. Gorilla should have his own page divorced from the King Kong one. But I don't understand your being in opposition to Gorilla and Kong being lumped together yet want Gotengo and Gohten to be.

Your King Kong example makes no sense to me, because the Gotengo and Gohten are both owned by Toho; it has nothing to do with rights. The Gohten is a separately-named vehicle that has entirely different capabilities. It's clearly inspired of the Gotengo, but that doesn't make them one and the same. The two are treated separately even as recently as the Toho SFX Movies Authentic Visual Books series. If the Gohten was just supposed to be another appearance of the Gotengo, why change the name? Final Wars didn't, Super Fleet Sazer-X the Movie didn't. Also, you're going to need to provide page numbers for the books you cited, because the entry on the Gohten in All Toho Mechanic Pictorial Book (page 160) doesn't mention the Gotengo, and I can't find any reference to the Gohten or The War in Space in Godzilla: Final Wars Super Complete Works.

The Ra from Super Atragon I feel even more strongly about. The fact that it is called the "New Undersea Warship" does more to support the fact that it's separate from the Gotengo than that they're the same. The closest comparison you could draw is something like the Super X and Super X2, being iterations of each other. But even that comparison isn't air-tight because Atragon and Super Atragon are not in continuity with each other. The Ra is only a spiritual successor to the Gotengo; the Gotengo doesn't exist in the Super Atragon continuity, so it being the "New" Undersea Warship is entirely an IRL marketing thing. Again, it is a reinvention of the Gotengo concept with a different name and different capabilities.

Even if I conceded that the Gohten and Ra are incarnations of the Gotengo, they should still have their own pages. Shoving all of the information on the Gohten under the Gotengo's page is redundant when the Gohten already has its own page - and the Ra should too.

In the Final Wars Super Complete Works, on page 82, and you see the Gohten included with all of the Gotengo incarnations on one of the first pages in the book.

https://imgur.com/a/QawPAPu

As for the All Toho Mechanic Pictoral Book, it is listed on page 276.

https://imgur.com/a/4oTA253

Please note that this image includes a statment from Super Complete Works as well as the Pictoral Book. For the name Gohten, I can't help but find this the least strong point you brought up. The suffix "-go" is no longer appropriate on the Gotengo as it's no longer a submarine. It has a new suffix known as UNSF. Putting "-go" at the end of Gohten wouldn't make sense because that's taking the SS Minnow, building it for space, and keeping the SS is an acronym of "sailing ship", directly referring to water. As for the Ra, if you look at the marketing its treated as a new version of the Undersea Battleship, being the Gotengo, of course. The Gohten and the Gotengo are usually right next to each other unless its counted their movies as separate. They don't directly call the Gohten the Gotengo because of the suffix issue. As for the h in Gohten, it's probably there to be closer to the meaning of roaring heavens. Also, the Gohten is sometimes spelled without the h. I can see what you mean with the Ra, but the name Undersea Battleship was most likely used because people recognize it more with that name.

If you concede to the Gohten and the Ra being incarnations of the Gotengo, their stats should be listed on the Gotengo page, similar to how Godzilla incarnations' stats are listed on the main Godzilla page, but said incarnations have their own pages as well.

Page 276 of Mechanic Pictorial Book doesn't mention anything about the Gotengo, it's just storyboards of the Gohten. This is a far cry from your claim that it "directly call[s] the Gohten the Gotengo."

The explanation that the Gohten doesn't have -gō in its name because it's a spaceship is also fairly nonsensical. The kanji 号 is extremely versatile and is used for practically any vehicles or heavy machinery - it even extends as far as cyborgs (a la X-1 from Gamera vs. Zigra or Jinra from Mikadoroid). There are examples of Toho spaceships using the gō suffix, such as the P-1 or the SPIPs. "UNSF" is not a suffix, it's a prefix, and it isn't even present in Japanese. Calling UNSF a replacement for 号 has zero basis whatsoever - the name was deliberately changed to "Gohten" to distinguish it from the Gotengo.

Monster incarnations are far more clear-cut than this; iterations of Godzilla are always called Godzilla and are (almost) always clearly the same character. Even Kiryu is still designated Mechagodzilla. I have never seen an official source call the Gohten "Gotengo" and in fact I could probably compile a list of sources where the two are covered separately. There is no reason to believe the Gohten is the Gotengo. Clearly based on the Gotengo? Absolutely. But are they the exact same craft? No, I do not believe so. I'm hesitant to throw around the word "incarnation" when the two aren't related beyond superficialities.

The text that was listed in the imgur link , when translated, says the following:

"He was also in charge of designing Gotengo in "The War in Space", which he was invited to participate in as an art designer after he retired from Toho. [The image above, a sketch of the Gohten] is an explanatory diagram of each part's arnament."

They directly call the Gohten the Gotengo.

I see 轟天 on that page, but not 轟天号.

Relying on Google Translate doesn't make for a very convincing argument... "Gotengo" is not written a single time there.

"After retiring from Toho, [Yasuyuki Inoue] was invited to participate as an art designer on The War in Space, and also designed the Gohten." (東宝退職後に美術デザイナーとして招かれて参加した『惑星大戦争』では、轟天のデザインも担当。)

As for the other passage you posted in that album (the source of which I don't know), it says "The New Gotengo is based on the space battleship Gohten that appears in the Toho movie The War in Space, of which director [Ryuhei] Kitamura was a big fan." (新・轟天号は、北村監督が大ファンだという東宝映画「惑星大戦争」に登場する宇宙戦艦・轟天がベースになっている。) That again proves nothing - nobody is arguing that they aren't derivative of each other, they're just not the same vehicle.