The Monster Island Film Vault Posts

Strap in, folks. I have a lot of notes for last week’s episode. And Marchand took way too many notes and didn’t use them all. Of course.

First, here are my notes:

• Correction, Nate: “Joel and the Bots.” I know you love Mike, but the Gamera episodes were Joel’s.
• It’s “Gaos” (“gows”) not “Gyros,” Greg.
• The “Dull surprise!” skit was from the Alien from L.A. episode of MST3K.
• The ridiculously long title of LeMay’s film cuts book is The Big Book of Japanese Giant Monster Movies: The Lost Cuts: Editing Japanese Monsters Volume 1: U.S. Edits (1956-2000). You’re welcome.
• The name of Kondo’s/Cornjob’s’s actor is Kon Ohmura.
• Did you say, “Mao,” Nate? Like the Chinese communist leader? How have you not been fired? Does the Board secretly admire the tyrant?
• It was snow, not a block of ice, Luke.
• Those alien women’s eyes … they haunt my nightmares! It’s why I’m glad I wasn’t around when they tried to kidnap Gamera after the broadcast. It’s a good thing Crystal Lady was around to save the day.
• “Flobella” not “Florbella,” Luke. Although, there is some confusion over this.
• Come on, Nate, have you seen the Xilien women? Hot damn!

• Yes, I am a proud “Plutoist.” I’ve only visited that rock once, but I assure it is still a planet!
• “Ideal”? You meant, “idea,” Luke.
• I know what you mean, Luke, when it comes to navigating city traffic. I grew up in New York City and Japan. I saw the madness of both.
• What’s a “kig,” Nate? (it’s “kids”).
• Gamera vs. Jiger not on MST3K, Nate says. Hahaha! (Click here to see how wrong he is).

Now to fulfill my contractual obligations by posting Marchand’s leftover notes:

The Movie

• Starts with an astronomy lesson. This made Jimmy happy. (Yes, it did, even though some of that info is wrong. –Jimmy)
• Jimmy also felt right at home in the observatory. He’s been there. (Yes, and it is a wonderful place. I would live at an observatory, if I could. –Jimmy)
• Of course the kids see the spaceship before everyone else! It’s Gamera! (I usually see spaceships before everyone else. But I’m also a Gamera kid. –Jimmy)
• Why was the ship sent to earth? (To get to the other side? I don’t know. It’s Gamera. –Jimmy)
• You could cynically say that the monsters and aliens and stuff only exist in the kids’ imaginations.
•  “It’s just a rabbit.” Tell that to Night of the Lepus! (Hear Nate’s appearance on Kaiju Weekly for that here. –Jimmy)
• “They flew here. They’re civilized!” Hahaha! Did you forget the Virasians? (I didn’t. Yeesh! –Jimmy)
• Gamera must have a spider-sense for children in peril.
• Do we need color commentary from the kids? (Is this a rhetorical question? –Jimmy)
• Ah, they have short range transporters. Someone saw Star Trek. We’re leery of teleporters now, though. That’s why your tour guide (Jessica) is out there. (At least you have a sister …. –Jimmy)
• These sets want to compete with the color of Oz.
• Jimmy’s annoyed that this sliding floor is nicer to kids than the anti-grav hallways on the Virasian ship. (So unfair! 😛 –Jimmy)
• Maybe the bad dubs are malfunctioning translator chokers?
• There is some nice subtle acting from the spacewomen.
•  “My son”? Trying to be his mother?
• Jimmy says the American Aerospace Bureau are a bunch of hacks. You can’t believe them when they say flying saucers aren’t real. (Damn straight! –Jimmy)
• Do they really think these kids are that smart? According to Ragone, the actor playing the white kid couldn’t be in the next movie because his grades dropped.
• Their razor looks like a ray gun! And the buzzsaw does, too.
• “Let the monsters fight.” That’s where Ishiro Serizawa got the line.
• Tom calls the Terrans “big sisters”? It’ a Japanese thing that’s weird in translation. (Probably, given what we’ve researched before. –Jimmy)
• The “reverse button.” How these two are smart makes no sense, unlike the last one.
• This is a slow teleporter suddenly.
• Flobella shoots Barbella because a chair fell on her? There’s a word for someone like that. Also, Terrans just disappear when they die? Did they die? (Apparently not. –Jimmy)
• The foam blocks don’t hurt the kids. 😛 But it’s a nice subversion that they don’t escape by shooting the button.
• Gamera has his kid cheerleaders again. They do pretty much nothing aside from accidentally unleash Guiron, who attacks the Terrans, and pushing random buttons that somehow make Guiron go to his room. And even then, Gamera had already retreated underwater! And then they launch a missile that accidentally kills Flobella. At least Masao and Jim did stuff. (Thank you! –Jimmy)
• Gamera can’t touch his legs. I think that’s a problem.
• The kids only launched one missile. Where’d the other one come from? Probably the same place as the second Ghidorah skull in GvK.
• I didn’t realize Gamera was a certified welder. Or that it was magic welding that could make a spaceship airtight again.
• In the end, the adults learn to believe their kids. Is that a good lesson?
• The little girl jokes that Kon (Cornjob) is an alien. (I think he is. –Jimmy)
• Gamera nods at Akio makes his speech. It is Gamera approved.

The Commentary by David Kalat

• He defends the child actors by saying they are part of a sliver of the population of people who want to be an actor, are good at acting, and are children.
• Yuasa focused less on the dialogue with the kids and let them “play act” the scene.
•  (Kalat can’t pronounce half of the Japanese names right).
• (Says he knows only one sentence in Japanese: “My whole family loves baseball.” He says one day he will go to japan, say this, and presumably starve).
• Argues that the gory death of Space Gyaos wasn’t intended to be taken seriously. Compared it to Loony Tunes.
• A kid once said a kid told him that Tsuburaya told him he shouldn’t have such gruesome violence in the Gamera movies. He wasn’t sure the kid was telling the truth because he thought they’d be kindred and introduced more silliness to the Godzilla films. They never met.
• Compares the effects in this film to a Mickie Mouse cartoon and Kermit the Frog. It looks pleasing, not believable.
• Yuasa actually asked Toho to let him watch prints of Godzilla films to make Gamera, which they said no. Tsuburaya Productions (I think) let me watch them. He didn’t see Toho as competition but as an older brother he could learn from.
• Daiei owed Nisan Takahashi more money than anyone else in 1971. Supposedly, he was given the rights to Gamera as payment. He was confused when the heisei trilogy was made, but he did publish a novel titled, Gamera vs. Phoenix.
• Yuasa: “Watch many movies. Praise what you like about them.” (Words to live by. You hear that, internet? –Jimmy)

Intro by Ragone

• The composer, Shunsuke Kikuchi, went on to make music for many anime, including Dragon Ball Z.
• Kids didn’t like the Space Gyaos death, and Yuasa regretted it.

Arrow Booklet

• Films were churned out annually. Drama scenes filmed in four weeks and the special effects done in two months.
• Guiron is art director Akira Inoue’s personal favorite monster.

LeMay

• Yuasa was given another tine budget (20 million yen). They decided to set it on an alien planet to save money and tap into children’s fears of being lost from home.
• Reiko Kasahara, who played the kind older sister in Gyaos, is one of the alien villainesses.
• Guiron was considered for Gamera 2, and is rumored to have inspired Legion’s pointy head.

Galbraith

• Says the dub is so bad, the lines could’ve been read by a cocktail waitress or gas station attendant.

Toku Topic: The First “Traffic War” in Japan

• Due to all of this growth, key traffic problems included overloading and speeding by dump trucks and gravel trucks and reckless driving by taxi drivers, which were frequently criticized by newspapers and other media. “Most media accounts built a consensus that the main victims of accidents were children, the aged, pedestrians, and cyclists, while the main offenders were professional drivers.”
  • “The situation is very different in Japan. More young (less than 16 years old) and old (more than 54 years old) non-car users are killed in traffic accidents than are car users.”
  • 75% of Japan is mountainous, so population density is high. Since most roads go through highly populated urban areas, it’s difficult to isolate pedestrians and cyclists, who are constitute 60% of auto accidents in Japan.
•  “…collisions with other vehicles in the US constitute a higher proportion of fatal accidents, whereas collisions with pedestrians play a larger role in Japan. The percentage of fatal vehicle accidents involving collisions with pedestrians is larger in Japan than in the US (28.5 vs. 18.2%). The percentages of traffic accident deaths among non car-users are also larger in Japan than in the US (motorcyclists: 18.6 vs. 6%, bicyclists: 12.3 vs. 2%, pedestrians: 27.7 vs. 14.1%). This results in nearly 60% of Japanese traffic-accident deaths being among non-car users, compared 20% in the US (ITARDA, 1997).”
•  “In Japan, accident death rates for 16–24 years old increased during the late 1970s and 1980s (MCA, 1997b), even though most high school students were prohibited from having drivers’ licenses by internal school rules (Koshi, 1988).”
• A few of the aforementioned policies:
  • Japan solutions are focused more on law enforcement and education that engineering (i.e. airbags). It seemed to work as traffic deaths dropped by half from 1970-1980.

Marchand talks about this movie more than Akio talks about traffic accidents. The Stockholm Syndrome really is settling in!

Next week Nate finishes his series of mini-sodes on Toho classics with one of my favorite Toho films, Sayonara Jupiter. It’s a film by the author of Submersion of Japan and the director of Return of Godzilla. It should be … interesting, to say the least. What Nate’s doing after that, I don’t know. Then his friend Ben Avery, the ruler of a mighty podcast empire, returns for the next chapter in the “Year of Gamera” with Gamera vs. Jiger. She got the moves.

Until then, remember: #WeShallOvercome

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