After KONGORILLA was aborted, Toei went back on their own and wanted to do a kaiju flick in the vein of a big-budget American disaster movie called DEVIL-MANTA. The film was to be about a giant flying manta ray from the void stirring up some destructive mayhem and would have been similar to the way 1978s MESSAGE FROM SPACE was done, production wise that is. But the boxoffice success of STAR WARS in the US and other territories in 1977, caused Toei's producers to shift gears and go from monster epic to the 1978 space oprea take of the ancient Japanese novel "Saga of the Eight Dogs of Satomi" (Satomi Hakkenden). Pictorial sketches featuring the unmade title monster attacking a metropolitan city and flying over smashed and smoking buildings can be seen in the 1987 book "Making of Toei Heroes". (And if anyone reading this has the book, we'd love to get some of those pics scanned for the site - Madison Carter)

Enrty Written by Rafael C. Gonzalez
Special Thanks to Keith Akein and Augusr Ragone of Henshin Online