King Kong Vs. Godzilla - Preservation

Preservation

This film is infamous for being one of the most poorly preserved tokusatsu films. In 1970, director Ishiro Honda prepared an edited version of the film for the Champion Matsuri, a film festival that showed edited re-releases of older kaiju films along with cartoons and newer kaiju films aimed at children. Twenty-four minutes were cut in total. Unfortunately, this has become the only Japanese language version for which 35mm materials are available to Toho, and it is unclear what happened to the uncut original version's 35mm elements. Fifteen of the missing twenty-four minutes can be found in 35mm prints of the US version, while the remaining nine are only known to exist in badly faded 16mm prints of the 1962 uncut version.

For the film's 1991 laserdisc release, Toho completed a crude reconstruction of the original 1962 version. A 35mm Champion Matsuri copy was used for the majority of the film and the uncut 16mm internegative was spliced in for all the missing portions, on many occasions within the same shot as an incomplete Matsuri shot, resulting in missing frames and inconsistent quality. This laserdisc transfer has been the basis for all home video editions of the uncut Japanese version since 1991.