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ATOM Stop Motion Models: Glypton and Mastemuth
Our two ice age monsters/Trogcestors are now finished! Glypton has one of the more unique inner skeletons of any of my kaiju, as he’s one of the few that has an “ab crunch” - because an armadillo needs to be able to curl into a ball. Mastemuth is a big fucker, which, like Bronton and Pathogen before him, means his articulation is hindered by the sheer weight of him, but his mouth and tail still allow him a good bit of emotion.
Aliases: bleh Date Discovered: October 13th, 1954 Place of Origin: The Siberian Monster Zone Notable Stomping Grounds: The Siberian Monster Zone, Typhon Island Height: 200 feet Wingspan: 700 feet f…
A crapload of kaiju files were posted today and yesterday! Above is the Writhing Flesh, whose artwork was 50% larger than is normal for my kaiju drawings because holy fucking shit all those little warts and things fucking hell
We also have...
Mastemuth, a giant behemoth!
Glypton, a giant armadillo!
And finally, Gorale, a giant joke on the fact that Godzilla’s name is a combination of the Japanese words for “Gorilla” and “Whale”!
Date Discovered: April 28th, 1954 Place of Origin: The Glacier Oasis Notable Stomping Grounds: The Glacier Oasis, The Siberian Monster Zone, Typhon Island Height: 140 feet Length: 300 feet Biology…
Today, finally, to the great relief of all those wondering when the madness would end: there are finally some mammalian monsters in the ATOM Kaiju Files. I know, I know, how awful that we’ve gone almost 30 files so far with kaiju based solely on scaley, cold blooded reptiles, exoskeleton-clad arthropods, and a couple of freaky non-mammalian aliens for good measure. Scandalous!
Thank god it ends. Thank god we saw reason. Thank god there’s finally some mammals here.
Anyway, our first monster today is Mastemuth, a giant prehistoric mammal of unknown clade, because it’s not actually based on any one real mammal, but rather a smattering of them plus some original weirdness. He’s an asshole!
Our second monster, Glypton, is kinda sorta based on prehistoric armadillos, in that it has a heavily armored tail ending in a club, but also more based on real armadillos, and also wooly because I wanted it to be wooly. Like Mastemuth, it’s less based on a prehistoric mammal that actually existed, and more based on the concept of a prehistoric mammal.
That’s kind of the subtle design motiff behind these two: as the retrosaur kaiju in America are based on outdated scientific beliefs about dinosaurs combined with pop culture science, these two, who both hail from Russia, are based on the pop culture idea of Ice Age mammalian megafauna: they’re wooly, they’ve got saber teeth, and they’re murder machines in their own unique ways. While Ice Age megafauna aren’t quite as exaggerated/”monsterfied” in pop culture as dinosaurs were & are, they still get it to some extent - and I thought it’d be fun to play with that, although it’s taken me years and tons of revisions to get it right. These guys used to just be a giant wooly mammoth and sabre tooth tiger, respectively (or at least a giant wooly mammoth and sabre tooth tiger took their spots in the series).
Both of these kaiju hail from Russia, or as it was called in the timeframe of ATOM, the U.S.S.R. Russia posed a fun problem for me in ATOM - along with the USA and Japan, it’s arguably one of the countries in the world that has the biggest relationship with nuclear weapons, especially in the Cold War. It should have just as many kaiju crawling around it as the USA and Japan do in ATOM’s universe. However, the kaiju in the USA and Japan are inspired by the pop culture trends of giant monsters in those countries - the USA is full of giant bugs and retrosaurs (and eventually some bug eyed aliens), while Japan is crawling with weird Tsuburuya inspired monsters.
Well, Russia didn’t produce a lot of giant monster movies, and as such has no trends for me to homage in ATOM. What would make Russia’s monsters unique? It’d be nice if they had a theme like the USA and Japanese kaiju do. I eventually decided on a two part theme for Russia’s kaiju. Part one are these Ice Age monsters - the retrosaurs of the Pleistocene. Part two... well, we’ll get to that next time.
Glypton is also a nod to another person’s kaiju OC, Armadon, a giant armadillo that had a crossover with Tyrantis back when I wrote horrible fanfics on Kaiju Headquarters in middle school. You can look them up if you want to know more about Armadon, or if you want to see my embarrassing attempts at writing from when I was a very young teenager! The guy who wrote Armadon’s stories was a pretty solid dude - one of the few people in the kaiju fandom who wasn’t an asshole to me when I was an annoying and stupid teenager on the early internet. So, y’know, when I say “these stories are embarrassing” I’m just talking about mine and mine alone - I’m not badmouthing the guy who made Armadon. Cool dude, cool kaiju, wish I knew what happened to him. Maybe he’s working on his own novel about Armadon. Wouldn’t that be nuts?
One last note on names: ideally these guys would have Russian names that are pun-y like my other kaiju names, but I feel significantly less confident making pun-y names in Russian than I do in English (I was slightly more confident with Japanese because Godzilla and pals provided some examples of how to make it work, but even then only 1 of my Japanese kaiju actually has a Japanese name, so....). My handwave is that “Glypton” and “Mastemuth” are their international/USA names, while their USSR names would be Russian derived. If anyone has good suggestions for Russian names for these two, I’d appreciate the help!
