Rodan, Il Mostro Alato

I've had this Rodan poster saved to my computer for a while now and it always makes me laugh. I wasn't even going to post about it because it might be one of those things that's funny to me only. But things kind of got weird. We'll see.

Like, what? Neat poster, but who's Richard?

I know it's fairly common for people the world over to adopt Western-sounding names or nicknames for any number of reasons (remember when Hiroyuki Sanada was called "Duke"?) but I'm 99.9999% certain that is not what's going on here. I can't rule it out completely, of course, but I feel like with all the research I've done for this blog, I would have encountered at least one mention of it somewhere other than an Italian movie poster from 1968. As best I could tell, this seemed like a case of the Italians just deciding they didn't like the name "Akihiko" and assigning him a new one.

But I wondered if this rabbit hole went any deeper. It seems like the only promotional materials that contain this... error? Are the ones from the film's re-release in 1968. The original release in 1958¹ doesn't do it (although they still couldn't quite grok Kenji Sahara's surname). And I do say promotional materials, plural, because there are also lobby cards. All of them are like this.

You can distinguish between the two theatrical runs by the distributor name on the poster. Here I will go into the international history of Rodan to provide some context. A lot of international releases of the film stem from a cut produced by King Brothers. The original 1958 Italian release uses this cut and was distributed by RKO (and hence will have "RKO" on the poster somewhere). The film was re-released in 1968 by Ardin Cinematografica using a different, incredibly sloppy, cobbled-together cut of the film. This re-release seems to be where it all went wrong. 

And it's only this movie, and only this re-release. I've done a lot of research while writing this post and it looks like for every other Toho film imported to Italy where Hirata had a big enough role to appear on the poster, the Italians did spell his name right.

There's tons and tons of these posters and lobby cards. All from the 1968 release. All "Richard Hirata". This one's really good. Dig that random white lady.

"oh heavens me!"

It's also worth noting that I also have no earthly idea who William Scotty or John Garry are. At first I assumed they were part of a dubbing crew, but I've never heard of a dubbed film listing its voice cast on the poster, so I can't explain why those names are there. I'm leaning towards them being made up, honestly. (The English cut of Rodan isn't a King of the Monsters! deal where white actors were inserted into the actual plot, so that wouldn't explain it.)

So who is Ardin Cinematografica? What other movie crimes have they committed, if any? (Completely leaving Sonny Chiba's name off of their poster for Terror Beneath the Sea, for one.)

It would appear that they were a distribution company who handled both domestic Italian films and foreign imports throughout the late 1960s and 70s. I cannot find out much information about them, but one source of unknown reliability claims a connection to a multitude of other Japanese films: Prophecies of Nostradamus, Matango, Battle of the Japan Sea, Bullet Wound, et cetera. I started this post for fun, but I'm gonna be honest, it got a little depressing seeing just how hard they're trying to make these movies look like they have white people in them.

poster for Bullet Wound, starring Yūzō Kayama and Kiwako Taichi, and definitely not either of those people on the poster

At this point, I was about to end this post. I thought I had done all the research I could, and I had become disillusioned with European distribution companies in the process. I'd gotten to the bottom of it: It's Ardin Cinematografica's fault. But then the plot thickened.

I found out Germany was in on it too.

Rodan does not take place in Osaka.

I had so many browser tabs open at this point. You have no idea.

The 1968 German distributor (R.C.S. Filmverleih) seems like the same deal as Ardin; just an importer who handled foreign film releases. King Brothers can't be the source of the error, since they produced earlier cuts that were released with promotional materials that didn't have it.

Spain at least tried. We won't even get into "Inoshiro Honda". That's a whole other can of worms.² (Or perhaps I should say "a whole other can of Meganula".)

So what do we know? In 1968, when Rodan was re-released in Italy and Germany, somebody put "Richard Hirata" on the promo materials. Upon further research, I found that the original posters were drawn by a prolific Italian artist named Mario Piovano, so it appears that Italy released the film first, and Germany copied their lobby cards and posters from them. But who, ultimately, is responsible?

Well.

I'm going to say this tentatively, because I don't want to lay blame on the artist. But Piovano was associated with a studio called Studio Paradiso, who provided posters for both domestic Italian releases and imports - tons of movies, basically. I cannot assign Studio Paradiso sole responsibility, since I don't know if they did typesetting as well or if they just handed the art over to film studios and let their graphic design department handle the typesetting, but the closest thing I can give as an answer to "who did this?" is that it was probably some combination of Studio Paradiso and Ardin Cinematografica's graphic design department (if they had one).

But... why?

Like I said, I started this post for laughs, but going down the rabbit hole of weird-ass foreign posters for Toho movies made me realize beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is literally just racism. I still find this whole situation funny in a pathetic way, but there's something really mean about it. Like, "Sure, we'll take your movies, but we'll scrape you and your names off of the posters first." The United States was no better than Europe about this - do you want to see the least effort anybody has ever put into making a movie poster?

You can tell when someone is trying but is unfamiliar with the Japanese language. That's how we get so many things that say "Akihito Hirata"³. And of course I don't have a problem with people transliterating names into their own language. Not every language has the same phonemes, sometimes substitutions are made. That's just how language works. But this isn't any of that. This sucks.

Let's end on a nicer note. Poland put a cool dinosaur on their Rodan poster for no reason.

______ 

¹ Interesting plot twist here - I've also found an Italian eBay listing for one of the 1958 lobby cards where the cast on the card itself is all correct but the seller's description uses "Richard Hirata". I don't know what this indicates, but I find it quite odd.

^{2 "Inoshiro" is an alternate reading of the kanji used to spell his given name, but it is incorrect - his wife Kimi stated in an interview after his death that he did pronounce it "Ishirō".}

^{3 LIFE Magazine, this is directed at you, specifically. If you need someone to fact-check the fifth reissue of your Godzilla special, you know where to find me.}