I am, as ever, utterly delighted to bring you brand new English subtitles for a movie featuring Akihiko Hirata that had not previously been available with subtitles. As with many things I talk about on here, there's really no reason why this shouldn't have been subbed a long time ago - it's a funny, charming, well-made film that I think will appeal to a wide audience. In this post I'm not going to spend much (if any) time on the plot, I just want to provide some supplemental information about the film itself.
Watch it for yourself here. I'll be linking back to this page on archive.org as well, so if you're coming from there: hi, hello, yes I am like this all the time.
The first thing to note about Young Season is that it features every member of the band Crazy Cats but is not itself technically A Crazy Cats Movie. At this point, the band was still kind of getting the hang of doing movies as an ensemble, so you'll notice that compared to much grander features like Mexican Free-For-All, the bandmembers are all just kind of... there. They are not in particularly important roles, they just happen to be part of the cast. Kengo Furusawa directs; he would later become prolific within the Crazy Cats series, but did a lot of other features for Toho as well.
The film version of Young Season we're looking at today was based on a popular NHK television drama by the same name, which ran from 1961 to 1964. It was a musical workplace comedy, one of those wonderful genre hybrids that either no one bothers to make anymore or, if they do, they suck. The cast is largely the same as in the film, although Kiyoshi Atsumi had a role in the TV drama but was absent from the film. The crew is much the same as well, with Isamu Onoda having an "original work" credit as well as a co-screenwriting credit. (We have talked about this Onoda on here before; he is of no relation to one Akihiko Onoda.) Hirata did not appear in the TV version, which I believe was due to his exclusive contract at the time. There was also a sequel film produced two years later.
The theme song (which is sung by a chorus in the film version) was originally sung by The Peanuts; listen to it here.
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| Some of the cast of the Young Season TV series. |
According to the film's Wikipedia page, it was obscure for a long time after its initial release until it was aired on television in 1986 and subsequently released on laserdisc. It was then issued on DVD twice in 2008 and 2014; I own the 2014 edition, which is where I sourced the file that I subtitled from. Young Season was released simultaneously with Yamaneko sakusen (English title "Operation Enemy Fort"), another film in which Hirata had a very small role (and a bad fake beard).
As for its stateside release, Hawaiian theaters got the first movie with English subtitles in November of 1964 (surprisingly late, considering how popular Kyu Sakamoto was; I'm betting there was an earlier release I'm not aware of). The first film had another theater run in January of 1965, and its sequel ran a few months later in July. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser describes the first film as "a musical comedy with Kyu Sakamoto, Hitoshi Ueki and Reiko Dan heading an all-star cast of funsters." (Interestingly, different theaters seemed to flip-flop on advertising the film as starring Kyu Sakamoto and Hitoshi Ueki or Kyu Sakamoto and Hajime Hana.) I have not been able to find English-language reviews of the film from its original run.
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| More of the cast from the TV drama who also appear in the films. |
Something that I can also do in this post is talk about translation specifics that I couldn't convey within the subtitles. Since I'm not a fluent speaker, a lot of my fansubbing work just comes down to doing a whole hell of a lot of research. One fun ("fun") thing I discovered was that a line I was having a ridiculous amount of trouble with was not difficult because I wasn't hearing it right - I was hearing it fine, it was just actual, literal made-up nonsense words; kind of a Showa-era meme. (My translation of these lines had to be very indirect in order to convey the meaning of the dialogue.) There are a few other "localizations" that I had to do as well, most of which is too insignificant to really warrant mention1 - for example, Japanese has the phrase "sly as a monkey" whereas we have "sly as a fox", but I went with "sly as a fox" because I felt like it sounded more familiar to an English-speaking audience.
I also had no real way to convey that a lot of the character names in this movie play off of their actors' real names. For example, Ichiro Arashima plays a character named "Arima"; Shinchou Kokontei III plays a character named Chota Shindo, nicknamed "Shinchou"; and Jerry Fujio plays a character named, uh, Fujio Fujio2. Usually with these Crazy Cats movies, the bandmembers' characters get names that relate to their real ones (so Hitoshi Ueki can play "Ueda", Kei Tani can play "Tanida", etc), but here, the writers didn't bother. They're just Ueki, Hana, Inuzuka, and so on.
This leads us into talking about Hirata's character Minamikawa, who is actually an exception to the name wordplay; "Minamikawa" has nothing to do with his real name either phonetically or with the kanji used to write it. If I had to guess, I’d say that roles for the “guest stars” (Shinchou, Fujio, etc) were probably written with those specific actors in mind, and the rest of the roles were just filled out with Toho’s usual cast of players.
Minamikawa fits exactly the kind of smug, arrogant so-and-so archetype that Hirata was so good at playing. It's implied that Minamikawa is taking care of the financial aspect of the scam Tres Bien is trying to pull, but otherwise he doesn't have that much of a role in the proceedings. He doesn't really do anything solo, he's usually part of a group of people scheming and plotting in a room together. We do, at one point, get to see Jerry Fujio go undercover on an intel-gathering operation targeting Minamikawa and the other saboteurs which for some reason involves Fujio giving him a massage and lighting his cigarettes for him. (IMHO, Fujio Fujio deserved everything he got for that godawful "Indian Twist" song.)
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| He smokes A LOT in this movie, even for him. Also I guess Minamikawa is married. |
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| Yeah okay I just liked these shots |
The last we see of Minamikawa, he and a Tres Bien executive he was colluding with are getting the hell out of Dodge under threat of physical violence from Kenji Sahara. Minamikawa does not appear in the sequel.
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| I've never worked an office job, is this typical? |
I'll wrap up by saying that I really had a lot of fun subtitling this one, and I'm very heartened to see so many Crazy Cats and Crazy Cats-adjacent movies getting subtitled these past few years. There is, of course, also the sequel to Young Season, which does not currently have subtitles; I may not be the person for that job, but I do hope it gets done someday. In the meantime I'm sure I'll pick up other projects along the way but for now I need to get some sleep. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
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| translation: "[squirming]" |
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Footnotes:
1 One that I do want to explain is the "Liquistick"/"ick" pun. In the original Japanese, the proposed name is "Ekibeni", which sounds like "Ekiben", a boxed lunch you can buy at train stations. ("Ekiben" is also slang for having sex standing up, but I don't believe the term was in usage in that capacity ca. 1962.) Other puns I considered include "Liquistick"/"Bisquick" to retain the sense that the pun was referring to a food item, but I was not sure everybody watching the movie would know what Bisquick is.
2 Written 藤尾富士男. I assume nobody has this name in real life, but if they do, my condolences.
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