While pondering my reasons for having more affection for Gamera than Godzilla, I hit upon a reason I should like Godzilla better, and figured it might be worth discussing here too.

    Namely, "hard tech" levels are a LOT higher in Godzilla (all three ages) than Gamera.

    Toho has things like the Mecha-Godzillas, Super-X, Atragon, Gotengo, Moguera/M.O.G.U.E.R.A., the maser tanks...all sorts of high tech "made of metal" stuff. Sure, there's some softtech (cyborgs like Kiryu, purely biotech things like Biollante), but there's just loads of mecha in the Tohoverse (both with and without limbs) that can fight kaiju.

    By contrast, Heisei Gamera is pure softtech (Gyaos and Gamera as Atlantean bioweapons, Legion's softtech panspermia tricks). Millennium Gamera is too small a sample to tell much, but what plot device tech there is seems to revolve around biotech as well.

    Showa Gamera has plenty of alien space ships, but no alien robot monsters (Zigra turns into a spaceship, but looks pretty organic as a kaiju). The humans have nothing more advanced than minisubs piloted by Boy Scouts and rapidly rotating restaurants with bowls of fake blood on top of them. In the original Gamera, he was lured onto a giant space rocket capable of closing around him and blasting into space, so that's one piece of "higher than real life" tech, but it was passed off as the sort of thing that might be found in real life. There's no maser tanks (regular ol' machinegun-firing gunships take out the Mini-Legions in Gamera 2, for instance, and a lot of F-104's get sliced up by Gaos in Showa), and certainly no giant robots built by humans to go fight Gamera or any of his rogues gallery. Even the spacewomen in Gamera, Super Monster have no offensive tech, just a microbus that can turn into a film smudge and a forcefielded suitcase they can live in. And no, I don't think I want to count the Yamato that shows up in GSM as a monster-fighting mech.

    So, is there something I'm missing or forgetting? Is this a fundamental difference between Gamera and Godzilla, the nature of technology in their respective worlds? And would a Mecha-Gamera even be feasible in any of the kaiju ages? Obviously, I play with the idea via my fan-kaiju G.U.I.R.O.N., but is that pushing the boundaries too much?