Godzilla 2000: Millennium (Export dub)

The 23rd cinematic Japanese appearance of the perhaps the world's most iconic monster, Godzilla 2000 opened in Japanese theaters to good box office performance, but received mostly mixed reviews.

TriStar, the holders of the character in the U.S. at the time, found its performance favorable enough to release it in North American theaters. Prior to acquisition however, Toho had their own English dubbed version commissioned by a firm in Hong Kong, as was standard practice. This dub served as the basis for Mike Schlesinger's heavily re-edited U.S. version, financed with a budget of about $1 million.

After a fairly underwhelming 2 week run of the film in U.S. theaters, Schlesinger had planned to include the Japanese version with Toho's dub as a feature on the original TriStar DVD release of the film, but per Toho's insistence, the inclusion was canceled for fear of reverse importing and possibly other reasons (Toho's own DVD release came out only a few days prior to the TriStar DVD).

As a result, the deemed "unusable" international export dub was never heard again, and the U.S. version remains the only way to view the film in English as of 2016. Contrary to popular belief, lines from the export dub to not appear in TriStar's trailers for the film. These lines appear to be something created by TriStar's marketing department with no involvement from the U.S. looping team, since all audio from the film heard in those trailers are from the fully mixed Japanese track, and the looping team only used the original English dub for audible reference.

The only audio from the export dub that survives in the U.S. version or otherwise is a line read by an actor named Jack Murphy delivered by a fisherman character in the first reel of the movie ("But as long as the beer is cold, who cares?"). In spite of this, visuals from the export version still exist. A VCD of Indian theatrical print poorly dubbed into Bengali without proper M&E stems from a Hindi version gained attention in 2016, which contained standard Toho International made English visuals from the "lost" export version. Unfortunately, the distributor seems to have physically spliced the title card from the print.