Warning: SPOILERS for the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters episode “Secrets and Lies” are ahead!
While it’s good to see Godzilla back in action for the new Apple TV+ show Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (and enhanced in a specific way from the 2014 Godzilla movie), this latest MonsterVerse entry is also serving as a platform for new Titans to shine. For example, the opening episode saw a familiar Mother Long Legs fighting a Mantleclaw on Skull Island, and “Departure,” we met the Ion Dragon, whom was residing in the wreckage of the USS Lawton. Then in this latest episode, titled “Secrets and Lies,” viewers were introduced to a Frost Vark living in Alaska. Well, during his interview with CinemaBlend, Monarch’s VFX supervisor Sean Konrad revealed that the Frost Vark was the “most challenging” Titan to design for the show.
Konrad goes way back with the MonsterVerse, first working as a digital compositor on Godzilla, and then serving as the visual effects supervisor on Godzilla: King of the Monsters. So during my conversation with him, I asked what the most challenging Titan he’s ever designed it, whether it was in one of those older projects or in Monarch. He selected the Frost Vark, referring to it as the “ice mole,” and explained his reasoning as follows:
I'll talk about this one, because I was an artist in 2014, and so I was not necessarily designing monsters back then. But on this one, the ice mole, I think, was one of the more challenging ones that we had. We went through a design process, and we pre-vized everything out, we post-vized it and then we put it into the scenes. We're watching and it's like, well, that's not scary enough. We started deconstructing why that was, and we were like, ‘Okay, well, we need to give this thing a really scary, fierce mouth, and we need to give it eyes that can emote and all of these things, rather than what the design originally was. And sometimes those things evolve once you get past post-viz, but we pivoted and found some like really cool things from it, which allowed us to give the monster more of a personality as well. It's like a really satisfying thing, but also a really difficult thing.
It’s a tricky thing making a Titan look both scary and realistic, and originally Konrad and his team weren’t able to hit that target with the Frost Vark. Fortunately, they finally reached the design that you’ll see below, and just like most of the Titans we’ve seen over the last decade, you definitely wouldn’t want to cross paths with this monster. Unfortunately for the main protagonists in Monarch’s 2015 storyline, they encountered the Frost Vark at the end of “Secrets and Lies” when they discovered the wreckage of Hiroshi Randa’s plane in Alaska. The Frost Vark was responsible for this, and now it’s set its sights on these characters after destroying their own plane and killing the pilot that brought them there.’
We’ll have to wait until “Parallels and Interiors” airs to learn how Kurt Russell’s Lee Shaw, Anna Sawai’s Cate Randa and these other key members of the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters cast get out of this jam, but I will be interested to see if the Frost Vark appears in any future MonsterVerse projects. Along with Sean Konrad, other behind-the-scenes talent who worked on this series include showrunner Chris Black and executive producer Matt Fraction, who discussed why Monarch doesn’t focus on characters we’ve already met; director Matt Shakman, who explained why Godzilla and the MonsterVerse have the same appeal as Marvel characters; and executive producer Tory Tunnell, who teased how King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong influence Monarch.
New episodes of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters premiere to Apple TV+ subscribers on Fridays. Max subscribers can stream the first four MonsterVerse movies, and the animated series Skull Island can be accessed with a Netflix subscription. Following Monarch’s conclusion, the MonsterVerse will pick back up when Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, one of the bigger 2024 movie releases, hits theaters on April 12.
