Rolisica, Rolisica, kaiju be kind to thee
Nov. 30th, 2004 08:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinA little while ago, we saw the original 1961 Mothra on TV. The Stomp Tokyo review answers some questions I had about this movie's history: particularly, I was wondering if it was greatly modified from its original version for US release (the answer seems to be no).
In tone, Mothra, which lifts a lot of plot from King Kong, serves as a sort of transition between the early, somber Toho monster movies (epitomized by the affecting and tragic 1954 Godzilla) and their goofier successors. What fascinated me was that the movie continues the frankly anti-US attitude of some of its predecessors, but thinly euphemizes it, as if its creators were now banking on a US release from the beginning and didn't want to re-shoot too much. The bad guy who kidnaps the tiny telepathic women and thereby invites the giant bug's wrath is a greedy showman from the country of "Rolisica", a rich country across the Pacific that seems to have lots of wide-open spaces, Anglo-looking white people (though the main villain is swarthy), and a metropolis called "New Kirk City" (though its flag looks sort of Muslim, what with the big crescent and star, and New Kirk seems to be on the west coast).
The version that HBO played was the American dub. The thing that annoyed me about it was that they chose to dub all the Japanese characters as speaking English with thick, fakey quasi-Japanese accents, in the manner of old war movies. What's the point? We know they're Japanese.
In tone, Mothra, which lifts a lot of plot from King Kong, serves as a sort of transition between the early, somber Toho monster movies (epitomized by the affecting and tragic 1954 Godzilla) and their goofier successors. What fascinated me was that the movie continues the frankly anti-US attitude of some of its predecessors, but thinly euphemizes it, as if its creators were now banking on a US release from the beginning and didn't want to re-shoot too much. The bad guy who kidnaps the tiny telepathic women and thereby invites the giant bug's wrath is a greedy showman from the country of "Rolisica", a rich country across the Pacific that seems to have lots of wide-open spaces, Anglo-looking white people (though the main villain is swarthy), and a metropolis called "New Kirk City" (though its flag looks sort of Muslim, what with the big crescent and star, and New Kirk seems to be on the west coast).
The version that HBO played was the American dub. The thing that annoyed me about it was that they chose to dub all the Japanese characters as speaking English with thick, fakey quasi-Japanese accents, in the manner of old war movies. What's the point? We know they're Japanese.
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Date: 2004-11-30 06:42 pm (UTC)