Zero Pilot Gaiden: The German Dub

Guten tag!

As it happens, I did in fact acquire a German DVD of Zero Pilot as mentioned at the end of my post about it, and I’ve uploaded the entire German dub to Internet Archive here. This DVD was such a nightmare to get a hold of that I wanted to make it worth my while by turning it into a whole post, so let's find out more about the German release of this movie together.

(This German dub isn't particularly rare - it's available on Amazon Prime and Apple TV in Germany, but you can't watch those if you don't have a German account.)

As I've said, Zero Pilot's German release came startlingly quick on the heels of its Japanese premiere: while Japanese audiences first saw it on October 2nd of 1976, Germans got it just weeks later on October 26th, under the title Sturzflug in die Hölle (literally "Nosedive/Free Fall Into Hell"). Oddly enough I can't really find any information about this initial German run, because I haven't been able to turn up any German newspaper articles or other media relating to the film. I even ran through some old issues of Der Spiegel looking for mentions of it, which was... fun? I think? I don't really know what it was.

Very interestingly, I've also found evidence that Germany MIGHT have had the earliest home media release of the film in addition to the earliest theatrical run: an issue of Weltluftfahrt seems to indicate that the movie was available as of 1982 - one year earlier than its Dutch VHS release - from ITT Schaub-Lorenz in Pforzheim. I'm not amending this to my previous post about the film, because I'm not entirely sure if I'm interpreting my sources right - from everything I can find out about ITT Schaub-Lorenz, they manufactured radios and televisions and whatnot, and I don't see any indication that they distributed films. If they were selling Zero Pilot, though, they had an entirely different cut from any of the others featured on German home media, because the publication gives its length as 92 minutes, which, as we'll see, is much longer than the DVD releases.

You can see some of the original German lobby cards for the film here (scroll down a bit). Most of the lobby cards have pictures of airplanes or Hiroshi Fujioka as Saburo Sakai, but our man did make it onto one, albeit from the back:

On right, in foreground. (Look, just trust me on this.)

In addition to its theatrical run in Germany itself, the film was also shown a few times in Liechtenstein, first in January and February of 1978 and then again in October of that year. During the latter run, the same publications that were advertising Zero Pilot were also advertising some weird movie I've never heard of called Star Wars. Too bad that one didn't make any lasting impression!

As far as I can tell, Zero Pilot was first released to DVD in 2008 under its Sturzflug in die Hölle title, followed by another DVD release in 2009 as Kampfgeschwader Totenkopf ("Skull-and-Crossbones Bomber Wing") and one as Samurai Kamikaze in 2015. It also seems to frequently be packaged with other war movies in cheap 3-film DVD sets, some of which have shoved it alongside Umberto Lenzi's The Biggest Battle, Giuseppe Vari's A Place in Hell, Bitto Albertini's The War Devils and a movie I can't find anything out about called Operation Barbarossa. While the DVD I have says "Samurai Kamikaze" on the cover, as you'll see, the title card in the actual video file reads "Kampfgeschwader Totenkopf".

Multiple different severely truncated versions of the movie have been featured on these various DVD releases, with the 2008 one being the worst, at 78 minutes, and our 2015 version only barely better at 82. This seems to be the version used by Amazon and Apple Video, since they both give a running time of 81 minutes. You can find a list of the German voice cast here.

White guys on the cover of your Japanese movie about a Japanese pilot in the Japanese army is certainly a choice.

Now, for the thing about all of this that is really funny to me: for whatever reason, the 2015 DVD release (this is the one I've gotten my hands on) associates the movie very strongly with Akihiko Hirata, despite - I will stress this again - his being in the movie for under three minutes. It's not even like his name is first in the cast alphabetically or anything.

Poland does this too, on possibly the ugliest poster ever featured on this blog:

At first I thought "Well, maybe he was popular in Germany?" but finding that Polish poster has made me lean more towards believing that the reasoning behind this is because people don't know what he looks like (or at least can't put a name to a face). Maybe, once one distributor slapped his name first in the cast for whatever reason, everybody else went "yeah, his name is first, that means he must be the guy who plays the dude" and just rolled with it.

Anyway, I've gotten off the rails and did not even really intend to make a full post about this in the first place, so I'll leave things there. It's unfortunate to see how this movie has been treated in Germany (packaged with random war movies and sold for incredibly cheap), because even though it's not a particularly memorable picture, Koichi Kawakita's work on it deserves more respect than it's getting. Hiroshi Fujioka wore that fake mustache for you, Western audience! You could at least appreciate the film!