"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, Zero Pilot didn't make its way onto VHS until ten years later, in 1986. It 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.

伊津子とその母 / Itsuko to sono haha / Itsuko and Her Mother (1954)

Release date: February 17, 1954

Director: Seiji Maruyama (adapted from a story by Shigeko Yuki)

Studio: Toho

Cast: Yaeko Mizutani, Ineko Arima, Rentarō Mikuni, Nobuo Kaneko, Akihiko Hirata, Kyoko Koyama et al.

Availability: No known DVD or VHS release; no internet availability; no known recent screenings. 

___

We're going pre-Godzilla for our first post, looking at a film that I haven't seen and probably never will.

Itsuko and Her Mother was directed by Seiji Maruyama, who, to me, is a director synonymous with war movies. In actuality, however, it just happens that those of his works that have been subtitled and have any kind of name recognition outside of Japan are war movies; Maruyama didn't direct his first war film until 1964 with Retreat from Kiska. Prior to that, he seems to have just done whatever films were assigned to him.

The script for this film was written by prolific writer Toshirō Ide (we'll be seeing him frequently here) and adapted from a story by Shigeko Yuki called Haha no Shakaika, which translates roughly to "Mother's Social Studies". This source material seems to be vanishingly obscure as it isn't even mentioned on Yuki's Wikipedia page. The film was produced, as most things were, by Tomoyuki Tanaka.

Although this film is so little-known that no one has even reviewed it on Kinenote, we do have a plot summary, which I'll give you the CliffsNotes version of: The main character Itsuko (Ineko Arima) lives with her mother Nobuko (Yaeko Mizutani). Both of them run a business renting out rooms and they also work at a bookstore on the side, but the bookstore is on the verge of failure and hasn't made any money in months. When Itsuko receives a marriage proposal from a young man who works at a brewing company in Nagoya, her mother picks that moment to tell Itsuko that she is not her biological daughter. While this is a huge blow to Itsuko at first, she realizes that the love they have for each other outweighs their lack of biological ties. Much of the plot revolves around Itsuko's mother trying to find a good marriage partner for her, but at least one of these potential suitors, Funahashi (Nobuo Kaneko), leaves her after finding out that Itsuko was the product of an affair. Another young man named Sugi (Rentarō Mikuni) who had been in the background for a while becomes the most appealing marriage prospect after this incident, but Itsuko is at first too torn up over the loss of Funahashi to accept his proposals, although she does care for him. The synopsis does not spoil the end of the film, but implies that Nobuko arranges her daughter's marriage to Sugi.

Ineko Arima and Rentarō Mikuni

Okay, okay. But where is Akihiko Hirata in all this. Well, we'll see later on in the post, but the only information I have about his role is that he was one of the men who rejected Itsuko. His role must have been very brief as he is not even mentioned in the synopsis.

One of the only other sources of pictorial information we have for this film is a pamphlet for its double-bill release with another film called Wakai hitomi ("Young Eyes").

(verso: Young Eyes; recto: Itsuko and Her Mother.)

Here is an advertising spread for this movie and several others. The right-hand side shows a film called Mother's Diary, and Young Eyes below it. On the left-hand side we have not just one but three movies Hirata had a role in! Farewell Rabaul at the top, and Tonight for One Night and Itsuko and Her Mother on the bottom.

Now for the entire reason why I wanted to post about this movie.

In trying to find more information, I dug up a few articles in Hawaiian newspapers from 1955. It would appear that this film screened at the Toyo Theater in Honolulu. The first article talks about the film after it's been released and issues some corrections to the previous article, which came out three days before.

From the date range of papers that ads for the film were featured in, I can deduce that it was shown in Hawaii from roughly early July to late August, 1955. Although Godzilla did have a limited theatrical run in Hawaii before it was recut into Godzilla, King of the Monsters! and released more widely, this happened in October, a few months after Itsuko and Her Mother. Additionally, the first film in Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai trilogy got its U.S. release in November of 1955. So this makes Itsuko and Her Mother, as far as I can figure, the first of Hirata's films to get U.S. distribution. I'm virtually certain that the above clippings are the first time his name appeared in an English-language publication. (I went through Hawaii Times issues from the one above back to February 1953 just to be sure, which was honestly not the world's most exciting task.)

And here's something even more interesting: the film expanded to multiple theaters, not just the Toyo. I have records of it running at the Palace Theater in Hilo (a beautiful movie house that is still in operation today) through August.

Plausibly - not probably, but plausibly - there could have been people in the audience watching Godzilla for the very first time and thinking "Hey, it's that guy from the thing with Ineko Arima that we just watched."