While I appreciate it as its own thing, I always felt Heisei MOGERA strayed too far away from the whole “mole theme”. Moguera’s name is even a pun on the Japanese word for mole! The Heisei vesion’s drill nose is puny and its design is focused on flight rather and digging.
I understand why most Godzilla fans prefer it , since its the design that was in a Godzilla film, but it honestly feels the design is unfitting for the “character”.
I’d like to talk about some other takes on Moguera:
Marmit Moguera: based on concept art while the movie was still being made.
You can see how the design was transitioning from an organic monster to a cyborg, to eventually the robot we got in The Mysterians.
Protoype Figure to for the toy Mogera toy released in 2007.
It appears they eventually went for a less stylized toy.
Finally, the figure that inspired this post ,the 4 inch rubber trendmaster Heisei Mogera figure.:
Honestly, this slightly different nose drill pulls the design together for me, while the actual suit the drill only looks good from certain angles in my opinion. While this “drill-bit” version is different enough I don’t compare it the Show Moguera drill. Though if the head was bigger, the nose could retract or extend as needed.
(the suit shown from a good angle).
Finally, we have the Bandai Heisei Mogera toy, displaying one of its features that are way too silly for the Heisei tone, sadly. The silliness of hammerspace transformation attachments would have actually sell me on the design more. This is like what you would expect if Jet Jaguar fiddled with Heisei Moguera.
While I can appreciate the Heise Moguera design with a few tweaks, I honestly would prefer future incarnations to focus on an overall “digging” aesthetic , even if we keep the space travel function and make it mine asteroids.
Unlike Ganimes and Kameobas, Gezora is hinted by legends of the locals to have already been gigantic before coming under the control of the space amoeba. Its cold powers do seem more on the supernatural end than the purely natural powers the other two kaiju, Perhaps from occupying Gezora the space parasite learned how to turn its hosts into kaiju, allowing it to create Kameobas and Ganimes.
On an unrelated note: I found this little tidbit while looking for a picture
Assistant special effects director Teruyoshi Nakano has openly expressed dissatisfaction with the names of Gezora, Ganimes, and Kamoebas, even rather jokingly suggesting “Gesoi” as a better name for Gezora, saying at a panel at G-Fest in 2004, “We made a mistake in naming those kaiju! One reason that [Space Amoeba] was not successful was because no one liked their names. Since Gezora is a big squid, it would have been better to call him Gesoi because that’s what people say when they order sushi! But then everyone would think you’re ordering sushi! So the names of the kaiju were bad” and “The names of these kaiju in Japanese are lousy. The names don’t fit, and the kaiju just aren’t scary. Maybe if we named the three differently, the movie would have been better. It was the names that killed the three kaiju.”
Monsters and Stuff 