Comment from James Groman:
I first saw the amazing 1954 film, Creature from the Black Lagoon when it was shown (in the original 3D format!) at our local Library when I was a kid. I could not get the film out of my head for weeks afterward, and took advantage of any opportunity to talk about it with anyone that would listen to me. I was obsessed with the incredible design of the Creature himself, which was a marvel of design, sculpting and rubber monster suit tech at the time.
Over the years I’ve had a couple chances to sculpt the Creature, as well as Creature-like sea monsters very much inspired by the gill-man.
As my toy design career began to have a renewed success a number of years back, I took the time to design and sculpt my own aquatic gill-beast very much inspired by The Creature. I began to show the sculpture around to different companies, and was so excited to get interest from Kaz.Kadowaki and his Japan based Vinyl Toy company ACRO. I was very familiar with ACRO from their fantastic line of redesigned Ultraman monsters in the Kaiju Remix series they produced.
I decided to name my deep-sea denizen Namazu, after the Japanese Mythological giant Catfish who was known to cause earthquakes and tsunamis. In our redux of the myth, our monster is the true Namazu, a beast so ferocious and horrible that the story of him being a giant catfish was fabricated to make his existence more acceptable to the fragile minds of humans. Now, for the first time, we know the true appearance of the great Gill Beast: Namazu!
