"Zero Pilot" Goes West

Today we're going to take a look at this somewhat odd VHS release of Toho's 1976 Zero Pilot, originally titled Ozora no Samurai ("Samurai of the Sky"). The reason why I say that this is odd is because the English-dubbed tape pictured above is the only physical release of this movie in the United States. You can get a Japanese DVD for relatively cheap, but if you don't speak any Japanese and want to watch it, your only option is to endure the dub.

So the main thing to know about this movie is that it's based off of the life of former flying ace Saburo Sakai. That this film was (at least at one time) readily available to an English-speaking audience is somewhat apropos, considering that Sakai's life and wartime activities were brought to such an audience in 1957 via Samurai!, an autobiography ghostwritten by Martin Caidin. The reliability of Samurai! has been called into question, and Sakai himself states that the 64 kills Caidin ascribes to him in the book - a number also given on the back of the VHS box - is not an accurate reflection of his actual record. I should emphasize, however, that Zero Pilot isn't based on any specific work by Sakai, but rather a kind of general overview of his life. 

Although we're mostly looking at the overseas release of this movie and not its production history, I would be remiss not to mention that the film was financed by Taikan Productions. Taikan was ostensibly a production company, but really it was a religious organization formed as an offshoot of Tenka Ikka no Kai ("One Family Under Heaven"), a company founded by a dude named Kenichi Uchimura that was absolutely, 100% a pyramid scheme. This kind of thing was getting to be such an issue in Japan in the late 1970s that new laws against pyramid schemes were enacted, resulting in the dissolution of Tenka Ikka no Kai and the jailing of its founder for three years.

Moving swiftly on... despite its incredibly shady financing, the people who worked on the actual movie did their absolute best, and the result is definitely up to Toho's reputation for remarkable special effects. Godzilla fans will recognize the name of Zero Fighter's SFX director, Koichi Kawakita, for whom this was his first time in a directorial role. Toho was really going through it in the 1970s, but even so, no footage or miniatures were reused, and Kawakita's attention to detail is what saves this from being a totally forgettable film. It's also kind of fun to see old Toho regulars like Ren Yamamoto and Yoshio Katsube still sticking it out even while the studio was faltering.

One area where Zero Pilot is unfortunately pretty forgettable, though, is within Akihiko Hirata's filmography. This is one of his "show up, look authoritative, explain some stuff, and then leave" roles, and his cumulative screen time amounts to around three minutes (I did count). His English dubber's vocal style is best described as "drunk and belligerent". The only really notable thing about this role is that it's the only time Hirata and Hiroshi Fujioka - best known by far as Takeshi Hongo AKA Kamen Rider Ichigo - ever crossed paths.

Hirata and Fujioka do share the screen directly in several scenes, which I find more amusing than I probably should. Here is an annotated screenshot that you can use to annoy your friends who don't watch tokusatsu.

Moving even more swiftly on, let me now begin talking about what I actually made this post to talk about: the tape.

So I guess the most pressing issue on my mind here is who exactly is responsible for that dub. Well, ultimately, the answer to that is Toho themselves, considering they exported an English-dubbed version of it in 1984 (trailer here). But in terms of who actually executed the dub, that would be the Matthew Oram/Barry Haigh group, a Hong Kong-based outfit who should be very familiar to Godzilla and Shaw Brothers fans. Among many other roles, Matthew Oram himself dubbed Dr. Mafune in the English version of Terror of Mechagodzilla. In Zero Pilot Oram dubs Hiroshi Fujioka as Saburo Sakai, but for whatever reason the export trailers feature Barry Haigh voicing Sakai instead.

What is very, very strange about this English dub is that it actually features alternate footage. Two entirely separate versions of the film's bookending scenes were shot, with the export version featuring Hiroshi Fujioka sporting a mustache and the Japanese cut having him 'stacheless. This kind of sounds like something I just made up, but you can see it for yourself here.

(...did that say "OBAN International Finance Group"?)

Although the dub itself was commissioned and produced closer to the film's 1976 release, it didn't make its way onto VHS until ten years later, in 1986. (Zero Pilot itself was first released to home media in 1983 with subtitles for the Dutch market.) The Combat Video VHS is what the kids refer to as a "big chungus" (Godzilla, King of the Monsters! for scale):

The 1986 Combat Video VHS release was not, however, the first time the dub was heard on American shores. The film ran throughout March of 1984 and into April at Los Angeles' Kokusai/Crenshaw theater. During this theatrical run it was shown on a double-bill with Nomugi Pass, which also features Hirata in a very small and somewhat silly role (all his character really does is get grossed out by how badly silk-spinning mills smell). I don't technically know for certain that Zero Pilot was shown dubbed, but considering Toho were responsible for exporting it and they'd already had a dubbed version sitting around since the '70s, it seems pretty likely to me that they would have given the dub to American distributors.

Most everything I've talked about so far is not terribly obscure information, but Combat Video itself is a bit harder to get a bead on. "Combat Video" is in fact not the name of a specific label, but an offshoot/series/arm/??? of a larger outfit called Video City Productions, an Oakland-based distributor active throughout the 1980s (specific dates elude me). Video City was no stranger to Japanese war films, also releasing Toei's Port Arthur (featuring our man as well) and The Imperial Japanese Empire in 1985. Other illustrious titles distributed by the company include Crazy Fat Ethel 2, SS Hell Camp, White Cannibal Queen and The Last Orgy of the Third Reich.

You know... I'm kind of just... starting to wonder if this tape might not actually have been officially licensed by Toho.

What in the who?

In the interest of brevity, and because I originally intended to restrict the scope of this post to just the Combat Video VHS, I'm not going to go over the film's release in other countries, but it actually did make it quite far. Just to give a quick summary: West Germany was the first to receive Zero Pilot a remarkable matter of weeks after its Japanese release, followed by Sweden and Finland the next year, Denmark in 1978, Portugal in 1979, Spain in 1980 and finally Hungary in 1991. I think it's fairly safe to say that despite being a Japanese product, this movie was at least in some way intended to be palatable to an international audience. We can tell that Toho was considering how it would be received overseas by the fact that they catered Hiroshi Fujioka's facial hair to their intended viewers' perceived taste.

On that note, I'll leave you, but before I do, let's just take a nice long look at the German DVD release of Zero Pilot, which for some unknown reason decided to give Akihiko Hirata top billing despite, as mentioned, only having three minutes of screen time.

I won't disclose whether or not I searched this up on eBay and bought a copy.

Hyappatsu Hyakuchu Gaiden: Literally Just The Entire* Previously Unavailable International Export Version

*Technically not the entire dub, since about 10 minutes are missing due to censorship, but as of a few days ago the number of available minutes of this dub was zero, so.

I had basically finished up my research into Ironfinger and its international export versions when I found something interesting: An eBay listing for an Indian VCD claiming to have an English-dubbed version of the film. I knew the original Frontier Enterprises dub was currently considered lost/unavailable, so this caught my eye, but I thought "Nah, why would it be on an Indian VCD? It's probably just an original dub done in-house by the distributor, I’m not gonna spend money on that."

And then I thought "...unless?"

So, anyway, here, available online for the very first time (as far as I'm aware) is the international export version of Ironfinger.

I’m keeping the seller's name off of this because I don't know if he wants to be associated with, ahem, unofficial merchandise. But "DJ", you know who you are.

People who know more about these things than I do have pointed out that it is clearly identifiable as Frontier Enterprises' work by the cast of VAs. Akira Takarada is voiced by Burr Middleton and Susumu Kurobe is voiced by William Ross. I'll add more names as I fill out the full roster (which I hopefully will do). You'll be able to see right away the the dub is in very poor condition and about ten minutes are missing due to censorship, but some people are working right now on a reconstruction using the Japanese print, so it's likely a proper version in decent quality will be available soon.

Edit: The surgery was a success! The reconstruction is complete! Watch the dub in much, much better quality here.

We're actually very lucky that this is from India, because Indian films are required to show their censor certificate (or at least all the ones I've seen have been), and we can glean a great deal from this certificate. Using Google Lens to translate, I was able to find out that the certificate itself was issued in August 1977 with an expiration date of August 1987. This means that the Frontier dub has been kicking around India for close to fifty years while the rest of the world knew nothing. That's... kind of astounding to me, honestly. It's also intriguing that we can see there is English writing in the upper left-hand corner that says "recertification". Was this movie being shown in India even earlier?

We can also see by the big "A" for Adult that this was given India's equivalent of basically a PG-13 or a soft R: it's for adult audiences only, but you still can't show nudity.

Now, lastly, I know what you're all wondering: Does Yumi still call Komori "Mr. Only-Interested-In-Men" in the English dub? The answer is no, she does not; she calls him "Mr. Handsome of Aonuma".

Rodan on CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc)!

Poor Rodan always seems to end up being the subject of some of my weirdest posts.

"What is this thing that kind of looks like a giant floppy disc?" You might ask. This is a CED, or Capacitance Electronic Disc, which I'm continually having to resist calling a "CED disc" because that's like saying "ATM machine". For a better summary of what it is and what it does, check out Techmoan's video, which includes a teardown of a CED machine (or three). For a full list of titles released to the U.S. market on CED, see here. For the U.K. market, see here. (Rodan is listed as "Uncommon", and was not released in the U.K.)

In short: it's a dead format several decades and millions of dollars in the making that turned out to be, as one YouTube commenter puts it, "a turkey". The actual video quality is not as bad as I expected - really no worse than some of the VHS tapes I've digitized - but the format has a quite unfortunate problem with stuttering and skipping, rendering a lot of movies flat-out unwatchable. More titles were issued on CED than you may think despite its short lifespan, and the list of U.S. titles includes both Godzilla 1984 and Godzilla, King of the Monsters!. My copy of Rodan is from 1983 and I got it dirt cheap; I have no idea if it's watchable, and don't have any plans to invest in a secondhand CED player to find out. It's mostly just a novelty to display in my room.

We owe Rodan's existence on CED to Vestron Video, who in 1983 put the pedal to the metal and decided to release the movie on every format simultaneously: VHS, Betamax, CED and LaserDisc. Rodan was also issued separately in 1965 on Super 8 as a black-and-white "digest" version, which you can watch here. It's most just an action cut and honestly isn't that bad if you just want to see monster stuff; it's a testament to how good Rodan was that it holds up even in such a condensed format. (Hirata's in the Super 8 version, but only a little, and for some reason looks even nerdier in black-and-white than he did in the original.)

Techmoan's video mentions CED in both the U.S. and the U.K., but having a kaiju movie on this format got me wondering if the format had any lifespan to speak of in the Japanese market. Japan is very good at keeping unusual media formats alive much longer than the rest of the world (cf. Minidisc), so I wanted to do some research to find out if any CEDs ever made it over there.

Short answer: Japan knew about CED but said nah.

Longer, more accurate answer: Japan did want it - or at least some people did - but was too busy at the time with a format war going on between VHD (Video High Density), LaserDisc, and Germany's obscure TeD (Television Electronic Disc), and although Hitachi was looking at commercializing the format for the Japanese market, it ultimately never entered domestic production, and only existed within the country as direct imports by collectors. I'm getting my information from JP Wikipedia, which unfortunately lacks a citation for this particular chapter of RCA's history, so I can't give you sources beyond what's written on the wiki. For a more personal, less objective opinion, I'll cite this blog post, whose author seems to have been entirely unfamiliar with CED. I wouldn't take one blog post as representative of the entire populace's knowledge of CED, though, and it's also worth pointing out that most people in the U.S. and U.K. - CED's actual target markets - probably have never heard of it either.

However, and more interestingly, I also turned up this article in Japanese, which is a pretty comprehensive look at what a CED was and how the format works. It's dated to 1982, so CED was still extant at the moment, although moribund; I don't know why somebody would have gone through the trouble of producing a Japanese-language guide to the format if there was not at least some interest in it within the country. This, also in Japanese, mentions CED as well, but only to make a brief note of its fleeting existence.

So that's some Rodan miscellany for you.

What In The World Was Italy Doing With "Saga of the Vagabonds"?

I swear to god someday I'm gonna turn up a poster for Secret of the Telegian that says "Thaddeo Nakamaru"

I'd like to thank this Letterboxd review for turning me on to this subject. Sometimes I read something online and immediately think "Oh yeah, that's gonna have a whole post written about it."

In 1959, Toho released Sengoku gunto-den, retitled for the English export market as Saga of the Vagabonds. The English title is fairly accurate to the original; a more literal translation could be "Sengoku Bandit Legend", or something like that. But I think Saga of the Vagabonds is just fine. However, when the film reached Italy in 1962, it was retitled Le scimitarre dei Mongoli, or "The Sword of the Mongols". 

So, first of all, yikes. Secondly: yikes. Third: I want to know more.

An Italian censorship visa was given to the film in March of 1962. (If you're wondering what a "censorship visa" is, it's this.) This preceded an official Italian theatrical release in August of that year. Thanks to a website archiving Italy's censorship decisions, we know that when the film was submitted to the censorship board, it was given approval. In practical terms, this means that the board viewed a dubbed version of the film and decided that it was fine for public viewing with no changes necessary. From other sources, I've been able to verify that the film was indeed shown in full, so nothing else was cut from the dub for reasons other than censorship, which is always nice.

Nino Cacace Cinematografica, the Italian distributor of the film - who I assume was responsible for the retitling - appears to only have had two other films credited to them: the Russian film Planet of Storms, which was retitled to The 7 Space Navigators, and the Yugoslavian film Signal Over the City, retitled Assault of the V Battalion. The company does not appear to have done anything other than import these three films.

Some of the lobby cards and posters are actually quite nice, but there's a few posters that I genuinely would not feel comfortable showing on here due to their racism.

Although the film premiered in Palermo in 1962, it kinda hung around. My best source for the film's Italian half-life in the 1960s is a communist newspaper(!) that shows it having a robust existence as a third-run picture in May of 1963, playing at a total of five theaters: the Boito, the Corallo, the Doria, the Apollo and the Espero. I believe the Boito, Corallo, and Doria are still open, but the Apollo has long since been abandoned, and the Espero became a bingo hall. The newspaper also provides ratings for the films it advertises in its showtimes page; Scimitarre is rated "mediocre" - the meaning is the same in English as in Italian.

Credit to Elizabeth Graziani on fb

IMDb also lists a third Italian run of the film in 1965, which is more difficult to find specific information about. Turning to Google Books, however, did confirm that the film was being screened in the country in 1965. A book published in that year called Di riffe o di raffe (objectively a really good title, no matter what language you speak) by Italian screenwriter Giuseppe Marotta mentions the film briefly: "Damn it. A storm in a teacup; add to that the fact that I have to see a film for you, but the theaters are showing The Scimitars of the Mongols and The Titans Are Coming. What do I do, slit my throat or blow my brains out?"

I don't think Marotta cared for it.

It's pretty easy to conclude that this movie was marketed in Italy as a kind of Hercules-adjacent action picture of the type that were produced domestically on the cheap. Since the film evidently wasn't cut, though, all audiences would have had to do was actually go and see the movie to find out that the sword-and-sandals adventure with shirtless brawny men and damsels in distress vs. looming barbarian hordes they were promised was really just an average Japanese historical drama with an unusual amount of horses. This isn't specific to Italy; a lot of countries (including the U.S.) have historically not seemed to care much about marketing imported Japanese fantasy and historical films as anything other than exactly the same type of schlock they themselves were putting out.

You can spell out "Toshiro Mifune" but Toshio Sugie just gets called "T. Sugie"? Come on, there's only one letter of difference between "Toshiro" and "Toshio".

Actually, I'm going to stay on the topic of marketing for a bit longer, because it seems like the Mongolian connection went further than just an eye-catching title. I've turned up a synopsis for the film which I'm thinking might actually date back to its initial release - I have no way of proving that, but I think it might be a situation like how eiga.com and Kinenote will often use synopses that are from the first run of a film, even if said film is 70+ years old. Anyway, translated, it reads thusly:

"There is the hand of the great Akira Kurosawa, author of the script, in this compelling and well-shot war fresco. Protagonist Toshiro Mufune[sic], a Mongolian prince who turns into a sort of Robin Hood of the steppes, making raids to steal from the rich and redistribute the loot among the most humble populations. Released in Europe under the title 'Saga of the Vagabonds'."

So they really doubled down on that, huh? (Note, also, that this synopsis is different from what you'll find on the back of the DVD box; this is part of why I believe it may be original to the initial release.)

The film is still going by its Scimitarre title within Italy today but, as indicated by that Letterboxd review, it seems like people these days find it more baffling than anything else, given the total absence of either Mongolians or curved swords in the film. However, the Italian dub of the film is definitely still extant and available on DVD, although it seems to be out of stock in most places I’ve looked. And...

...yeah, that is absolutely, 100% a screenshot from Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster on the back cover.

We're talking strictly about the Italian release here, but in the interest of completeness I'll mention that Saga of the Vagabonds did get exported to quite a few different overseas markets as well. In Spanish it was retitled Los Diablos Rojos, which is actually a more accurate translation of the roving band of thieves' moniker than what the English subtitles provide. This Spanish release is relevant to the Italian release, because the Italian DVD cover is just the Spanish poster with some extra art added and the Italian title slapped on.

The film also got a Cuban release under a direct Spanish translation of the English title and, my dear friends, I am delighted to inform you that the Cuban poster slaps.

It slaps so much, I actually decided to print it out and put it in a frame on my wall.

As a last, ephemeral footnote, I've also found a listing in a TV guide for the film from 1981, so it was shown on television in Italy at some point as well. I'm not sure if it was cut for television broadcast.

So, no real point to this post, I just found something that I thought was a true oddity and decided to explore it a little further. I'm very curious about that Italian dub - I'd really like to know if there's any dialogue where the characters refer to themselves or each other as Mongolians or if that was purely a marketing decision. If you have a copy of the dub or happen to have seen it, I'd appreciate it a lot if you dropped me a line.

From Odo Island to the Big Island: 70 Years of Godzilla in Hawai'i

Last year, we celebrated 70 years of the first Godzilla film, and next year, we'll celebrate 70 years of its American recut, Godzilla! King of the Monsters. But this year was the 70th anniversary of something that, I would argue, is even more interesting: the opening of the Hawaiian run of the original Godzilla. The newspaper clippings I'm going to present below are the very first English-language reviews of the film, and the version of it that critics were watching was uncut, un-Raymond-Burred, and English-subtitled. 

I'm going to do my best to cover some of Hawai'i's rich theater heritage in this post, but for a wider exploration of the subject, you absolutely must read Lowell Angell's Theaters of Hawai'i.

Part I: Hawaii Times

On October 3rd, the first rumblings began... a tiny ad on the second page of the paper indicated that something unusual was on its way. In recent years, Hawaii Times had reviewed contemporary American sci-fi and horror movies: Creature from the Black Lagoon, Invaders from Mars, etc, but the Japanese films that were being shown at the three theaters covered by the paper's film department (the Kokusai/International, the Toyo, and the Nippon) were markedly different. Mother dramas were overwhelmingly popular, as were musical comedies starring the likes of Hibari Misora and Chiemi Eri, and if there was any hint of genre fare, it was in the form of kaidan films; many starring Takako Irie, all jidaigeki. This was the first modern Japanese monster movie, set in modern times, and it must have come as a shock.

On opening night, Hawaii Times previewed the film. In both the preview and the review from a few days later, the face of the film is Takashi Shimura, the only member of the cast who Hawaiian audiences would have been familiar with. HT's film reviewer, James T. Hamada, conjectures that the film's cast of young unknowns may have contributed to the theater being fairly empty during the premiere. (If I may interject, Hamada had seen Akihiko Hirata three months earlier in Itsuko and Her Mother, and Hamada's review marks the first time Hirata's name appeared in an English-language publication.)

Us Godzilla fans tend to have great respect for Raymond Burr for reprising his Steve Martin role in Godzilla 1985 because he genuinely cared for Godzilla, despite warnings that it would be bad for his image, and I don't think it would be too much of a reach to say we could probably feel the same way about Takashi Shimura. I don't know Shimura's personal feelings about being in the movie, but without a recognizable actor like him, Godzilla's initial appeal in the West may have been even lower.

Hamada's review of the film appeared in the October 6th edition, in a much longer column than was usually given to film reviews. It is fascinating. Hamada had some qualms about the movie's realism in practical terms, but praised its special effects right off the bat.

The most interesting thing to me here is that Hamada seems to understand that the film intends to present Godzilla as one of a species, and accordingly he uses the word "godzilla" without capitalization and as a plural, the way one would say "dogs" or "cats". Hamada comes away from the movie with the idea that "a godzilla" is something like a made-up species of dinosaur. The takeaway: Godzilla is not a character yet. Godzilla is just a big animal.

As someone who has not infrequently been the only person seeing a movie, when Hamada says "70 or 80 persons" attended the screening, that sounds like a fair amount to me. But the Kokusai could seat 1,200 people. Announced in 1939 and opening officially in 1941 with design by Hego Fuchino, it was one of many theaters in Honolulu, sitting in the 'A'ala Park district right next door to the Toyo, which also showed Japanese films, including some produced by Toho. After and during the war the theater was often referred to as the "International", the English translation of its name.

photo courtesy of Edna Kijinami, from the flickr account of Chie Gondo

The Kokusai, at its opening, was owned by Sanji Abe, president of Kokusai Kogyō. In September of 1942, Abe was arrested and placed into an internment camp for allegedly owning a Japanese flag. He was transferred between three different internment camps until being paroled in 1944 and released from parole in February of 1945. He would return to promoting and importing Japanese films after the war.

Part II: Honolulu Star-Advertiser

I include this as it does fit the scope of this article, but I should note that the balloon was not a strictly Hawaiian story. The above clipping was actually taken from the October 19th, 1954 edition of The Plain Speaker, published in Hazleton, Pennsylvania; Honolulu Star-Bulletin re-ran it in December of that year. You will notice that the publication date is several weeks before even the first limited-release screenings of Godzilla within Japan. This means that Americans were aware of Godzilla from the very, very beginning. Photos of the balloon must have made their way from Tokyo to American newspaper offices within days.

As for Honolulu Star-Advertiser's coverage of the film itself, it was fairly extensive. William W. Davenport writes about the film after having seen a showing at the Kokusai, the same theater featured above. This clipping is from the October 7th, 1955 edition.

Although this article feels more sensational than Hamada's, several takeaways can be made. Davenport, for whatever reason, does not seem to be aware of the Romanized spelling "Godzilla" and uses "Gojira" throughout his review. He baldly spoils the film's ending but refuses to describe the Oxygen Destroyer in detail. We also learn that an advertising short film played after Godzilla: a "musical documentary on the soft drink industry" produced by your friend and mine Bireley's. I have to say, I can't really tell what the critic makes of the film itself, but he seems impressed with Godzilla as a monster.

Part III: Hawaii Tribune-Herald

The first Hawaii Tribune-Herald mention of the film is used on Wikipedia to claim that the earliest English usage of the name "Godzilla" occurred on November 20th, 1955, which, as we have seen from the Hawaii Times material above, is not true at all.

Not to get personal or anything, but when I read "Walked home afterward under comforting stars, never so big and brilliant. Hua caught up with me presently. 'I saw Godzilla, too,' he said." I wanted to cry. Imagine walking home under the beautiful night sky in Hawai'i with your friend after being one of the first people to watch Godzilla outside of Japan.

This second mention is vanishingly small, only an ad, but it introduces us to our next theater. I want to mention the Mooheau Theater because it only existed for a scant six years after showing Godzilla and was then destroyed in a tsunami. As this ad is from November 5th, either the writer of the above review saw the film in another theater, or was recollecting his experience after the film had left local theaters. The author would not have seen it at the Kokusai as this paper was published in Hilo, not Honolulu.

Because the theater was destroyed such a long time ago, most information I have about it is anecdotal. It apparently existed as far back as the late 1910s, and it seems that it began showing Filipino and Japanese imports sometime around the 1940s. One Lawrence Akutagawa writes in a Google Groups post (that I'm really not even sure should be public) that the Mooheau catered to "more formal Japanese dance" and was, like the Kokusai, situated on a street with several other theaters.

Wreckage of Mooheau Street, credit to Craig Miyamoto

Part IV: Further Historical Context

Most theaters during this time were single-screen. Movies rotated in and out of Hawaii's theaters relatively quickly, since, basically, if you can't show a bunch of movies at the same time, you have to show a bunch of movies in rapid succession instead. From my own research, I found that some films would become massively popular (such as Hideo Ōba's Always in My Heart, which was evidently a smash success) and be held over or return for several repeat runs, but this was fairly rare during the 1953-1955 years that my research focused on. It's frustrating that we can't get a clear picture of attendance for Godzilla during its original run, and anything I come up with would be total conjecture, but if we assume that attendance was low at the Kokusai and probably much lower at the Mooheau (Hilo circa 1950 had some 200,000+ less people living there than Honolulu), allowing for a week-long run in both theaters would give us numbers perhaps in the low- to mid-thousands.

I unfortunately couldn't drag up any interior photos of either the Kokusai or the Mooheau, but this is the Waikiki Theater, which sat 1,353 people, and so would have been a roughly similar size to the Kokusai.

The interior of Honolulu's Toyo theater. From State Historic Preservation Office.

Another solution to not having multiple screens within one theater was to just have a lot of theaters. It may seem odd to us today to think of a street with several movie theaters on it, sometimes right next door to each other, but again, we have to consider that these theaters were single-screen and often specific film companies would have vested interest in them - so one theater would specialize in Daiei films and rarely show anything else, or another theater would frequently host traditional dance performances along with movies, et cetera.

(I am, out of necessity, focusing on theaters that showed Japanese films mostly or exclusively, but I don't want to make it sound like these were the only theaters in Hawai'i; due to its incredibly diverse population, theaters showed imported films in a multitude of languages, as well as your usual run-of-the-mill American oaters and sweeping melodramas.)

Another early Japanese theater, the Honolulu-za, ca. late 1930s-early 1940s. From Hawai'i State Archives.

One last thing to consider is that the concept of a movie having English subtitles was, at least in this specific time and place, fairly new. From context it seems like the bulk of the audience for imported Japanese features during the early- to mid-1950s were people who could actually understand Japanese - unlike today, when it's easy for anybody who doesn't speak a lick of the language to see subtitled features in a theater. The following is an article from mid-1954 concerning the recent introduction of English subtitles to the Japanese features playing at the Nippon Theater, and it takes possibly the most logical tack towards subtitles that I've ever heard: if you don't need 'em, don't read 'em.

Therefore, despite what may seem like a very small and limited run, Godzilla arrived at a time where the odds were actually more in its favor in terms of reaching a larger audience than they may have been just a few years prior, when it would not have been subtitled.

Conclusions

I know this was a boring one. Thanks for reading. I have to go to bed now.

No, really. The popular opinion of the Godzilla series in America has historically been a matter of clueless Westerners poking fun at the sweaty guys in rubber suits bonking each other around while ineffectual miniature planes on visible wires fly overhead. We have held that opinion because what of Godzilla that has reached our shores has largely been an adulterated form of the original work: ever since Godzilla, King of the Monsters! we've been fed recuts and bad dubs, pan-and-scans and late-nite TV reruns. We are of course in the kaiju renaissance now: "tokusatsu" is a word in the dictionary, Minus One won an Oscar, Eiji Tsuburaya has been inducted into the Special Effects Hall of Fame, there is a vague sense within academia that Japanese monster movies may be worth looking at closely.

But I want us to remember that there has always been an undercurrent of admiration for these films. From the very earliest days, there have been people appreciating Godzilla films. I want us to know that before the SNL skits and the MST3k episodes there were people like James T. Hamada who saw that something respectable was being done - that the effects were, in fact, good. I want us to think about walking home under the stars in the late autumn cool, talking to our friends about the giant lizard we just saw level Tokyo, the paleontologist and his empathy for the creature, the star-crossed lovers, the scientist fighting with his own conscience, and what it all meant.

青島要塞爆撃命令 / Chintao yōsai bakugeki meirei / Siege of Fort Bismarck [1963]: Another Very Special Post

Release date: May 29th, 1963
Studio: Toho
Director: Kengo Furusawa
Cast: Ryō Ikebe, Jun Tazaki, Yosuke Natsuki, Makoto Sato, Tōru Ibuki, Yūzō Kayama, Akihiko Hirata, Mie Hama, Susumu Fujita, Bokuzen Hidari, Yasuhisa Tsutsumi et al.
Availability: Unsubtitled Japanese DVD available via Toho. English dub available online. English-subtitled Blu-Ray also available.

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I come to you once again with another movie that I subtitled (check out the last one too). 

I first watched this unsubtitled several years ago, and although my Japanese skills were worse then than they are now, I still enjoyed it for its many explosions. In fact, the film's remarkable tokusatsu was something that I remembered very clearly even years later. The effects were done by Eiji Tsuburaya, who had previously created miniatures for propaganda films that were so realistic they fooled the U.S. government into thinking they were real, and other recognizable names populate the effects department too: Sadamasa Arikawa was in charge of photography, and a young Teruyoshi Nakano served as assistant director of special effects, uncredited.

This is a plane nerd movie. The film takes place in the second year of WWI, when naval aviation in Japan was still in its infancy and airplanes were starting to be used in battle worldwide for what was essentially the first time. It is set in the time leading up to and during what is known in the West as the "Siege of Tsingtao", a joint Japanese-British operation against the German port of Qingdao within the Jiaozhou Bay Leased Territory, a section of China that Germany had acquired following political tensions at the turn of the century. Japanese troops massively outnumbered the Germans (24,500 to 3,750) and also took far greater losses. While the film is much more character-driven and doesn't focus too much on historical background apart from the opening narration, it is accurate that the Japanese Navy at this time did indeed have exactly two airplanes, one of which was destroyed. Read more about the event in its Wikipedia article here. Notably, British presence in the operation is entirely absent from Siege of Fort Bismarck.

There are incredibly detailed miniature replicas of planes...

...and there are extremely impressive full-scale models of planes.

That’s a real human on top of it, not a model.

The two types of plane featured in the film are the French-imported Farman MF.11 Shorthorn (whose engine was produced domestically in Japan under the "Re-type" name, and the aircraft itself produced under the name "Mo-type") and the Rumpler Taube, the latter of which is just a gorgeous machine, although it doesn't have as much screentime. Even the smaller model planes in Fort Bismarck had a wingspan of over one meter (3.2 feet), and the full-scale models were suspended from a helicopter for filming. (The full-scale models had functional rotors, but presumably could not actually get airborne.)

I also have to emphasize that, again, the explosions in this movie are unparalleled. The final ten minutes of this movie features a chain-reaction explosion sequence that is more intense than pretty much any other Toho movie of this era - that includes Godzilla films.

We're now going to move outside of Japan to talk about the movie's English dub. It was dubbed in Hong Kong by Axis International in the same year as its Japanese release and available for TV syndication through Westhampton Film Corporation. The dub is fully extant and you can grab the audio online here; for some reason, it's also available as an optional track on the Italian DVD release of the film. It's... certainly a '60s Hong Kong dub, that's about all I can say. Our patron saint of obscure Toho MSpaceHunter has the dub credits on YouTube, so you can watch them below.

As with most Japanese releases from this era, Hawai'i got the movie first. The film played throughout May and June of 1965. Unfortunately I can give no further information on the Hawaiian run other than that it happened; after June the movie disappears from the papers.

Moving on to Los Angeles, the film has more of a presence.

According to TV guides from the Los Angeles area, the film began airing on television in the middle of August 1966. This is a bit unusual because it actually precedes the Los Angeles theatrical release of the film by two years. In March 1968, the film opened at the Toho La Brea. Here's the full review, cobbled together from an OCR'd newspaper page:

'Fort Bismarck' Opens at the Toho La Brea 

BY KEVIN THOMAS Times Staff Writer 

Just before the outbreak of World War I, the Germans built a fortress on the Chinese peninsula of Liaotung. Siding with the Allies, Japan sent out military and naval forces to put down the Huns. She also provided two fragile-looking planes, a pair of Farmans imported from France. "Siege of Fort Bismarck," an old-fashioned action-packed war picture (at the Toho La Brea) focuses on the exploits of the four men who piloted the Farmans. It's the perfect entertainment for small boys. In fact, with its episodic plot and strong doses of service comedy, it resembles nothing so much as a condensation of an old serial, complete with cliffhangers.

The novelty, of course, is that the Japanese are fighting the Germans this time instead of us fighting them both. Most adults, however, are likely to consider this picture the way they consider such World War I airborne adventures as "Hell's Angels" [...] great in the sky, silly on the ground. (Believe it or not, our four heroes even run afoul of a Chinese Mata Hari.) "Siege at[sic] Fort Bismarck," nonetheless, is strong in production values and special effects. Its director, Kengo Furusawa, supplies plenty of verve.

That "great in the sky, silly on the ground" thing is a point I noticed while I was subtitling the film as well: I didn't catch any of the comedy the first time around, but after having to translate every single line, I realized that it is very goofy. The pilots are mostly a bunch of chuckleheads who sometimes end up having to be towed across the Chinese peninsula by oxen, although in their defense nobody really knew how to fly an airplane yet.

We will now take a deep dive to look at the film outside of both the U.S. and Japan. We'll start off with the film's Thai release and its corresponding poster. Mie Hama-sploitation aside, this is a surprisingly well-made poster; a real human artist had to spend a lot of time on those portraits and they do look pretty nice. (The tagline says "See battles from World War I like you've never seen them before!")

She was wearing much more clothing in the scene this was based off of.

Italy put in less effort, and was also slow to acquire the film, releasing it in 1972. The poster art they used looks like it was recycled from a pulp magazine for boys. This also reflects the troubling Italian tradition of putting a big picture of a white guy and a bunch of random Western-sounding names on a poster for reasons that I can only assume have to do with wanting to avoid making it too obvious that the movie is Japanese.

I can't lay the blame solely on Italy for that artwork, though, because Greece's earlier release of the film seems to be the source of it. Or at least I think that's the case; I can't determine whether Greece got the film in 1963 or whether the website I found this poster on was just listing the original Japanese release date. Aesthetically, though, this flyer does look older than 1972. The art itself looks like it could date back to the 1940s (or even '30s, honestly.)

Mia Xama!

Mexico was just a little bit behind, receiving the film in 1978. This is the sole record I have of a Spanish-language release, and I don't know whether the film was shown subtitled or dubbed. At least viewers knew it was in Eastmancolor! (It wasn't, it was in Tohoscope, which has basically the same specs, but it still bothers me when people call them the same.)

credit @grajallywood on insta

The film was apparently shown in Brazil in 1964 at Cine Jóia, a Japanese theater in Sao Pãolo that was later turned into a concert hall. Or at least I assume it was; the paper only says that a trailer for it was shown, but that would lead me to believe that the full film did come some time later.

The main feature was Kigeki ekimae chagama ("Station Front Comedy: Teakettle"), starring Frankie Sakai.

Totally off-topic, but man, check out this picture of Cine Jóia with a huge marquee of Akira Takarada on it.

I hope you've enjoyed our little excursion around the world, but now we're going back to Japan to talk about the star of the show. Akihiko Hirata plays Navy Captain Yoshikawa. He is in full dress uniform for the entirety of his screentime (which isn't much) and boy does he have a mustache. He does quite a lot of shouting in the last act of the film, but that aside, it's always nice to subtitle him because he usually enunciates very clearly, unlike SOME people I know (Tatsuya Mihashi).

"Maybe I will grow a mustache." -Lieutenant Nakazawa (Submarine E-57 Will Not Surrender)

That's a 2.5mb png, baby!

The thing that I remembered most from the first time I watched this movie is that there's a scene where Yoshikawa jumps into the ocean with all his clothes on. Which is disgusting, because this was probably filmed on Toho's Big Pool set and that thing was a cesspit.

The last thing I'll say about this one is that it happens to be the one and only time that Hirata and Masahiko Naruse appeared in the same film together - this is significant because Naruse voiced Dr. Serizawa in the 1954 radio play version of Godzilla, making Siege of Fort Bismarck the only movie that has a cast of not just one but two Serizawas. I have mentioned this before because I think it is neato. (Naruse plays the Chinese spy who attempts to blow up the Japanese ship using a junk boat set on fire.)

I gotta say I enjoyed this one more the second time around. It's a fun movie. I can see why it was exported for the U.S. market. More importantly, I hope YOU enjoy it when you see it with subtitles.