Crazy Big Explosion II: 2 Crazy 2 Explosion

A friend of mine is hosting a screening of Crazy Big Explosion that will be, as far as I can tell, its first screening on U.S. soil! (Boogie on down to Flicker Bar on May 14th if you're local.) I wrote about this movie a year and change ago, but I want to revisit it so that I can talk about its background some more. I also just found out that Ayumi Ishida passed away in March of this year, so this is a good time to write about this film again.

I spent several hours searching newspapers from areas with theaters that showed Japanese films to determine if the film got a U.S. release at all. I looked through several months of theater ads in the Hawaii Times and can say with fair certainty that the film did not play at the Toyo, Kokusai or Nippon theaters. I tend to pay special attention to Hawaii Times because the archives are not searchable and do not have OCR, meaning they will contain things that you can't find with a text search. In any case, no dice. However, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin briefly mentions the film in July of 1969 in a column about news in the Japanese film industry.

As far as I can tell, that is the singular mention of the film in print anywhere in the U.S. during its initial Japanese theater run. I am honestly very surprised; a good many Crazy Cats movies did get U.S. showings.

Continuing on the topic of English-language publications, this film got a brief mention in Stuart Galbraith's article on Crazy Cats. Galbraith doesn't seem to have been aware that Hirata was in the film but does mention him elsewhere, again, very briefly, referring to him as "the tormented scientist in Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" which is about as much as you could expect any American in 1998 to know about him.

Some very wacky English translations of film titles going on in this article

The film was also mentioned under yet another weird English title in the academic publication Persistently Postwar: Media and the Politics of Memory in Japan, in the chapter entitled Collective Remorse for the Past: Japanese Film and TV Representations of the 1960s Student Movement by Katsuyuki Hidaka.

I have no earthly idea where the author got the title "A Romp by Crazy Cats" from and this is the only time I've ever seen it referred to as such

We in America might not readily recognize this movie, but in Japan it's not obscure at all: I've found multiple instances of people on Twitter retweeting news stories about explosions caused by someone lighting a cigarette near a gas leak with clips from this movie.

Double-billed with Shachō enmachō

As I said in my original post, you can get a physical copy of this with English subtitles if you know where to look. I own the Japanese DVD release, which, like all Toho's Crazy Cats DVDs, comes with a nice booklet. Here are scans of the booklet, along with a translation of the introduction, which was written by one Hiroyuki Suzuki. There are a few things in the introduction that require more explanation and context so I've included some footnotes at the bottom of the post.

I didn't edit these scans, it's just in black and white

"On July 21st, 1969, Apollo 11 successfully landed, and Commander Armstrong and his crew became the first humans to set foot on the moon. Everyone was glued to their TVs hoping to catch a glimpse of this historic moment. This film, which was released three months earlier during Golden Week in the spring, was billed as an "Ultra Apollo Comedy" in the trailer, where the Crazy gang finally went into space.

This film made full use of special effects for the first time since Crazy Big Adventure (1965). Screenwriter Yasuo Tanami also took on the role of producer from this film onwards. This was because Watanabe Productions was making great strides at the moment, and president Shin Watanabe was no longer able to directly participate in film production. In Crazy Big Adventure, the "god of special effects", Eiji Tsuburaya, served as special effects director, but this time, the special effects director is Teruyoshi Nakano, who was an assistant director at Tsuburaya Productions. After this film, Nakano served as special effects director on many films, including the Godzilla series in the 1970s and Japan Sinks (1973). Nakano played an active role as the leading figure in Toho special effects after the death of Eiji Tsuburaya. Nakano himself talks about interesting anecdotes, such as his interactions with director Kengo Furusawa, in the audio commentary. 

This was Furusawa's 12th Crazy Cats film. The previous two year's Crazy Cats films, which were released during Golden Week, were single-feature films shot overseas, but from this year onwards, they were reverted to the usual double-feature format. This film was shown alongside The Drifters! All Assault, starring Watanabe Productions' band The Drifters, which seemed to be a work symbolizing the changing of generations, but the popularity of Crazy Cats had not yet waned. During filming, it was not possible to coordinate the schedules of all the band members, so some scenes that had been in the script were cut. The only Crazy movie Furusawa made after this was Japan's #1 Yakuza Man (1970), starring Hitoshi Ueki, meaning that Crazy Big Explosion was the last Furusawa film to feature all the members of Crazy Cats. Furusawa left the rest to director Takashi Tsuboshima.

Looking at the cast, the supporting cast includes eccentric actor Arihiro Fujimura as the Chief Cabinet Secretary and Mikky Yasukawa as the university professor, and while the unique characters leave a strong impression, it's especially nice to see Toru Yuri in good health. His role as the building manager, who appears singing the then-popular "365 Steps March", is superb. Furusawa especially liked to use Yuri, and he is one of the most indispensable supporting actors in Crazy Cats movies next to Akira Hitomi. He appeared as early as the first Toho Crazy Cats movie, Irresponsible Age of Japan (1962), and was then a semi-regular. From the president of a client company to a security guard, he plays a wide variety of roles in each film.

Akihiko Hirata, Andrew Hughes, and Nadao Kirino, who play the executives of the secret society GIB, are familiar faces from Toho's special effects films. It is interesting to see the fusion of Crazy Cats movies and special effects films, not only in terms of technique but also in terms of casting. Andrew Hughes is a Turkish[-born Australian] actor who has appeared in many Crazy Cats films, playing roles that include Hitler in Crazy Big Adventure, Kid Gold in Mexican Free-For-All (1967), Monsieur Zivaco (1967) and I'll Be Fooled (1971).

Ayumi Ishida, who sang "Love is a Gentle Breeze" in the Hibiya Cinema District, was at the height of her popularity when her "Blue Light Yokohama", released at the end of 1968, became a big hit just after the New Year. This was the B-side for the next song, "Walking in the Tears", and it is truly a masterpiece. Her performances in the Toho films Where Are You Going? starring Yuzo Kayama and Typhoon and Pomegranate starring Yuriko Hoshi (both 1967) are memorable. Both films were youth stories based on original novels by Yōjirō Ishizaka.

Perhaps due to the director's preference, Kiyoko Mizuzenji's songs stand out, but at the time, other female singers were also prominent: Carmen Maki's "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child", Kahoru Senga's "Midnight Guitar", Keiko Fuji's "Shinjuku Woman", and so on. When you look at the hit songs lined up together like this, you can see the social climate of the time. The Record Award was also given to Naomi Sara's decadent "If You're Happy, That's All That Matters".

The somewhat broken worldview of this film seems to reflect the atmosphere of the era as the '60s changed to the '70s. Popular phrases such as "Happa fumifumi"¹ and "Oh! Moretsu"² that were born from commercials were also prominent but full of emptiness. It was also symbolic that Hajime Hana, dressed as a hippie, delivered the line "Ah, Tamegoro! What a surprise!"³ on Geba Geba 90 Minutes!! on Nippon Television, which began in the fall of that year. Meanwhile, in 1970, the year after the Osaka Expo, the Crazy Cats celebrated the 15th anniversary of their formation."

credit to @1955_crazycats on twitter

I'm going to cut off this infodump here, but I've saved one of my favorite finds for last: an artist on pixiv has basically cornered the market on awesome Crazy Cats fanart, including a drawing of one of the song-and-dance scenes from this film. Take a look at this fanart of Senri Sakurai and Kei Tani and Hitoshi Ueki if he was in Pokemon.

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1 "Happa fumifumi" was a phrase from a commercial for a Pilot brand fountain pen that featured the poet Kyosen Ōhashi using the pen to compose tanka. "Happa fumifumi" is a shortened version of the full phrase used by Ōhashi, the meaning of which is unknown since Ōhashi apparently ad-libbed it on set. One commentator speculated that the author's intended meaning was - I'm pasting this directly from a machine translation, so it sounds awkward - "If you take off the short cap, you can write sentences quickly and smoothly." Tanka don't translate well.

2 "Oh! Moretsu" is a phrase from a commercial for Maruzen motor oil. The commercial became very famous for featuring a model named Rosa Ogawa having her miniskirt blown up a la Marilyn Monroe by the wind from a passing car as she says the catchphrase "Oh! Moretsu!". ("Moretsu" was a slang term at the time that meant something like "fierce/furious/too much/radical".) There was uproar at the time about how "raunchy" the commercial was, but it certainly garnered brand recognition.

3 "Ah, Tamegoro! What a surprise!" is a gag that Hajime Hana performed on the long (very long)-running variety show Geba Geba 90 Minutes!! The name "Tamegoro" refers to a character from a traditional folk song about Jirocho of Shimizu. The gag involved Hana, dressed as a hippie, being surprised to see the newest modern TV set; it was intended to create a contrast between the old (the hippie) and the new (the TV). I do not know exactly what this phrase means but considering it comes from a folk song I would guess it serves to further reinforce Hana's character as being stuck in the past in contrast with the hot new TV.