The Monster Island Film Vault (MIFV) will soon conclude its third season, “Ameri-kaiju,” but due to a combination of unforeseen circumstances and overextension, season four (“The Monster Island World Tour”) has been delayed until January 2024.
Host Nathan Marchand kicked off the third season in January 2022 with an episode featuring Ryan “The Omni Viewer” Collins in a discussion of the proto-kaiju film, The Lost World (1925), which featured stopmotion special effects by the legendary Willis O’Brien. Since then, Marchand has chronologically covered several examples of American-made kaiju films (outside of the King Kong franchise) from different eras of American cinema, including Mighty Joe Young (1949), The Giant Claw, and Pacific Rim, with various guest hosts, as is tradition on the podcast. However, during this time, Marchand expanded his ambitions with more elaborate story segments with a larger number actors, two other podcasts (Henshin Men and The Power Trip), and a staff writer/editor position on Kaiju Ramen Magazine. This workload proved to be more than Marchand could handle, causing frequent delays in episode production. Along with this, behind-the-scenes issues have plagued MIFV and Marchand’s other productions, requiring more of his attention to navigate them. He produced several bonus episodes, such as recordings of panel presentations he gave at conventions, in the interim.
While he initially planned to complete season three and then switch to a weekly schedule for season four to get the show back on track and has already pre-recorded almost half of the season four episodes in anticipation of this, such a schedule has proven to be untenable.
Instead, MIFV will resume its normal schedule—second and fourth Wednesdays with bonus episodes on fifth Wednesdays—starting in January 2024. This will allow time for postproduction to resume on the currently recorded episodes. In the meantime, Marchand will publish some bonus episodes, such as a Halloween special, a Christmas special, and a full episode on Godzilla: Minus One, among other things.
Marchand is grateful for his loyal and patient fans and listeners, and he looks forward to continuing to entertain and enlighten them through tokusatsu in 2024 and beyond.
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