Trivia / Gamera: Guardian of the Universe

---

• Acting for Two: In addition to playing Gyaos, Yuumi Kageyama also cameos as a newscaster.
• Channel Hop: While the previous films were distributed by Daiei themselves, Toho (who produced the Godzilla franchise) took over the distribution rights for The Guardian of the Universe as well as the later Heisei series films.
• Directed by Cast Member: The ADV dub's ADR director, Matt Greenfield, also provided additional voices.
• Dueling Dubs: Britain got a very different dub of the film, with a bitchin' techno soundtrack to boot. You can hear a snippet of it here.
• The Other Darrin: Both Takateru Manabe and Jun Suzuki replace Umenosuke Izumi as the title character.
• What Could Have Been: Plans on rebooting Gamera had been around since at least the start of the 1990s. Earlier drafts had many of the elements seen in the final film, such as Gamera being from an ancient civilization and bonding to a human, but other facets did change over the revisions and new crews over the years. Some of these early plot ideas would be reworked into Gamera the Brave.
  • Originally both Gamera and Gyaos started out small and grew over the course of the film. Gyaos escapes into a research station whilst flightless and growing, killing all of the staff. Gamera's egg meanwhile is found within the mummified remains of an ancient Gamera.
  • Their was also a Cold War metaphor as Gyaos was originally a weapon made by a rival civilization as a living weapon of mass destruction.
  • The protagonist was originally a young boy and his friends, in a clear homage to the Showa era. There was to be a scene of them constructing a model city out of boxes and having the infant, tortoise sized Gamera stomp around in it whilst shooting a movie as a nod to the original film.
  • The mental bond between Gamera and the child lead was originally entirely telepathic and shown in dreams, rather than the magatama necklace and link.

---