BARUGON - 1966

Ennemi de Gamera, on peut dire sans se tromper que c'est une mauvaise langue. Barugon is the title antagonist from 1966's Gamera vs Barugon aka War of the Monsters

Not to be mistaken with Toho Studios' floppy eared burrowing dinosaur BarAgon (from Frankenstein Conquers the World, Destroy All Monsters and GMK: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, BarUgon (or Balgon in some circles) was the first adversary of the giant fire-breathing turtle, and would set the bar for the enemy monsters to follow in the Gamera franchise. Insane creatures with very non-humanoid designs, and an even crazier array of almost mechanical, but otherwise organic body weapons and powers.

The latest addition in a long lineage of jungle dwelling demons, Barugon was a feared evil of a South Seas island, whose native inhabitants have always been able to slay the monsters upon every rare generation. However in modern times, a group of Japanese treasure hunters come to the island, and mistaking the opal-like egg of Barugon for an actual opal, foolishly takes the unborn demon back to civilization.

On the way there, the egg is exposed to the unnatural heat of an infrared lamp, causing the newly hatched Barugon to quickly mutate into a bigger, far more dangerous version of its already terrible species.

The gigantic adult Barugon appears in Kobe Harbor, and proceeds on a nearly endless rampage across Japan. Fatally freezing hundreds of hapless victims with his icy breath, knocking down tall buildings with its powerful chameleon-like tongue, and the bizarre ability to project a devastating rainbow-beam from his dorsal plates, which fries anything and anyone, unluckily enough within its kill-zone.

Even Gamera, having return from his brief imprisonment in space, has great difficulty in fighting Barugon, and ends up being frozen by the demon for the majority of the movie (it really was a Barugon vehicle after all).

Ultimately, the Japanese military succeeds with a mirror-based method to physically handicap Barugon with its own rainbow beam. And its Barugon's secret weakness to water that finally ends the villain's reign, as the newly freed Gamera sinks his tusks into its neck during their climactic conflict, and drags Barugon to its doom beneath a lake.

Although this was Barugon's only true film appearance, it did return by the magic of stock-footage in the disjointed, possibly non-cannon 1980 film Super Monster Gamera, as the last of evil alien Zanon's monstrous champions (the others also being stock footage of past Gamera foes). Barugon was than given a modern re-imagining in manga (comic) form in 2003, retelling the film's original tale by setting it between the events of Gamera 2: Advent of Legion (1996), and Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris (1998).

Additional art by Sky Gojira skyegojira.deviantart.com * Mark Rivers (aka Hawanja) hawanja.deviantart.com
Mecha-Gregole: mecha-gregole.deviantart.com * Keizer Ghidorah keizerghidorah.deviantart.com

New pics sent by Rafael C. Gonxalez, thanks !