S.G. Browne

Lost Creatures Fun Facts (Part III)

Continuing with my series of Fun Facts about Lost Creatures, here are a couple of facts about two of the stories in the collection that center around giant monsters.

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LOST CREATURES Fun Fact #5

The concept for “Scattered Showers with a Chance of Daikaiju,” the opening story in Lost Creatures, came to me while watching the movie War of the Gargantuas back in 1990. I thought: if Japan is always being attacked by giant monsters, would meteorologists in Japan forecast daikaiju attacks along with the weather?

LOST CREATURES Fun Fact #6

Another of my “giant monster” themed stories that appears in Lost Creatures is “The Curse of the Amazing Colossal Thing From Outer Space,” which originally appeared in the anthology Drive-In Creature Feature.

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Filed under: Lost Creatures,Random Monsters,Short Stories — Tags: , , , , — S.G. Browne @ 7:26 am

Lost Creatures Fun Facts (Part I)

This is the first in a series of Fun Facts about Lost Creatures, my new collection of short stories, on sale now. I’ll be sharing these over the next couple of weeks, so I hope you enjoy them.

First up are a couple of Fun Facts about my short story “Remedial English for Reanimated Corpses,” which takes place at Bela Lugosi University, where the werewolves and vampires rule and the zombies most definitely drool.

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LOST CREATURES Fun Fact #1

Professor Warner, who teaches the titular class in “Remedial English for Reanimated Corpses,” is named after Andy Warner, the protagonist and hero of Breathers.

Oh, and “Remedial English for Reanimated Corpses” is available as a Kindle single for the low, low price of FREE until May 22.

LOST CREATURES Fun Fact #2

The idea for “Remedial English for Reanimated Corpses” originated when I was interviewed for the zombie documentary DOC OF THE DEAD and explained my theory that zombies are the nerds of the monster world, while werewolves are the jocks and vampires are the frat boys.

If you click on the DOC OF THE DEAD link, you can watch my explanation, complete with the cartoon graphics below, at the 45:52 mark of the documentary. (I also have contributions at the 20:13, 38:47, and 1:16:02 marks.) If you’ve never seen the documentary and are a zombie and/or pop culture fan, it’s definitely worth the time.

 

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Monster Insurance

I ran across a random clip from War of the Gargantuas the other day, the 1966 Ishiro Honda film where the bad green Gargantua and the good brown Gargantua battle through the streets of downtown Tokyo, crashing into buildings and bringing them crumbling to the ground, generally causing mass destruction, and it got me to thinking:

Do people who live in Japan have the option of purchasing monster insurance?

After all, we have earthquake insurance in California, hurricane insurance in Florida, and tornado insurance in Oklahoma.  So I figure in Japan, they ought to have monster insurance. After all, a monster does a lot of damage to a city. Maybe not so much in Kyoto or Osaka, but definitely Tokyo. I bet the rates would be astronomical in Tokyo.

I wonder if there would be separate policies, depending on the monster. Coverage against Godzilla would probably be the most expensive policy, while Mothra, Rodan, and the Gargantuas would be less expensive monsters to insure against, since they attack the city less frequently.

I think if I was a contractor, I’d want to live in Japan. They’d always be rebuilding, so I’d never have to worry about finding work.

And then there’s the question of monster warnings. Would they be like tornado warnings, with the siren sounding throughout the city while on the news they’d say something like “Mothra sighted over Guam heading west.”

Or maybe it would be like a weather report:

“The weather today will be cloudy, with a chance of Rodan by late afternoon. The extended forecast shows a break on Tuesday and Wednesday, possible Gargantuas Thursday, with a Godzilla trend taking us through the weekend.”

Or maybe I have too much time on my hands.

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Filed under: Just Blogging,Random Monsters — Tags: , — S.G. Browne @ 8:03 pm