(American version) Personnel taken from A History of Gamera. Nezura Due to the success of The Birds and Toho's Godzilla films, Masaichi Nagata, the then-President of Daiei Film, wanted to produce a similar film and developed Giant Horde Beast Nezura, a film that would have featured overgrown rats attacking Tokyo. The film project was assigned to Yonesaburo Tsukiji to direct the special effects and Noriaki Yuasa to direct the film, despite the studio thinking Yuasa was a "wash-out". Yuasa became attached to the film due to other directors refusing to accept the assignment, feeling that the film and its genre were beneath them and would have ended their careers. Stop motion, mechanical props, and suitmation were initially used to portray the creatures, with Ryosaku Takayama building several prototypes and a radio controlled prop, but these were unsuccessful and the crew were forced to use live rats crawling over miniature cities. However, the rats were wild, uncooperative, and infested with fleas. Due to this, the health department forced the production to shut down. The cancellation of Nezura left Tsukiji's privately-owned studio in debt. Nezura was originally billed as Daiei's "premiere monster movie" scheduled to be released for new years in 1964. Due to the resources that went into developing Nezura, Nagata was adamant in using those resources for a monster film. Gamera Nagata conceived the idea for Gamera in 1965 upon flying back home from the United States. According to screenwriter Niisan Takahashi, Nagata claimed to have envisioned a tortoise flying alongside his airplane or saw an island shaped like a tortoise. During a monthly planning session, Nagata shared his tortoise vision with his staff and ordered them to create ideas for it. Producer Yonejiro Saito contacted Takahashi about potential ideas, to which Takahashi shared his first story treatment titled A Lowly Tortoise Flies Through the Sky. Takahashi then wrote a four-page treatment titled A Fire-Eating Turtle Attacks Japan. After reading it, Nagata requested a full screenplay. Gamera's name was originally conceived as "Kamera", due to "kame" being the Japanese word for "turtle". However, the name was changed to "Gamera" due to "Kamera" sounding too close to the Japanese pronunciation for "camera". Special effects technician Ryosaku Takayama designed the turtle suit used in the film. Yuasa inherited the Gamera assignment due to Nezura and was constantly belittled by studio execs and colleagues who believed the film would fail and would never