Did you know the original version of City of the Gods was a Mockumentary?

City of the Gods: The Return of Quetzalcoatl had an odd path toward its publication. When I was first working on the story, I naturally thought it would work best as a movie. After all, the kaiju genre is primarily a movie genre. Aside from occasional novelizations, there really have not been a lot of notable kaiju novels. I worked on it as screenplay for a while but the whole thing felt a little flat to me, the characters really didn't pop the way I would have liked them to.

At the time (in the aughts) I was very involved with sketch comedy and improv here in Chicago. I had a lot of comedy friends. I was also in school for Media and was looking to do a final project so I combined the Quetzalcoatl idea, with my comedy friends, and we got a camera and equipment and shot The Making of Quetzalcoatl: The Defender, a short film embedded above. The film is a send up of the very self-important "making-of" documentaries that were included as DVD special features at the time (especially "The Beginning" doc included in The Phantom Menace.) I had a notion of releasing it on a DVD as a special feature to a movie that was essentially just two hours of green screen with a commentary track. Still not a bad idea.