Bittersweet Infamy - #61 - Lost in Translation

Episode Date: January 8, 2023

Josie tells Taylor about the legendary 1954 Japanese film Gojira, and its infamous American adaptation: Godzilla, King of the Monsters! Plus: more translation drama starring the notorious kissing cousins of the Sailor Moon dub.

Welcome to Bitter Sweden. I'm Taylor Basso and I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on and indeed. The strange and the familiar, the tragic and the comic, the bitter and the sweet. It is like a beautifully snowy landscape. Oh. When I was walking home from the blends, it was, you know, stick out your tying big fat whimsical snowflakes falling. Whoa. Nice. Thanks, global warming. If it's global warming, why is there snow, libs? That's what I would say. So true. And then they're like, sir, this is a library. And the libs are your librarians. Okay. Lib is short for librarian in this context. They don't like it when you call them that though. They take it by the. Unfortunately, I didn't get to enjoy

that snow because with snow comes infrastructural challenges. There was a blackout in my home that affected me in about 3000 others, according to the BC Hydro website, and it lasted from three up. Evidently, I was asleep. Okay, three 24am last night until about five something five, 20 something PM today. And so I was a little worried that I wasn't going to be able to get home and record this episode. I know over 12 hours. That's a little rough. Thank God it was freezing fucking cold in my apartment because I left my window open. So I didn't need to worry about my vegetables spoiling. That's great. Yeah, love love that nibbly weather. That is some chilly bones. I'm so sorry. Happy new year.

2023, right? 2022 had me blue, but 2023 will be for me. Okay. Yeah, it feels like 2023 is like a proper maybe like getting out of that gate, finding a new timeline to follow. Okay, 2023 will have you got a wedding, a wedding. Yeah, do you have any thoughts on what you're going to be playing at your wedding music wise? What kind of what kind of mix you're looking at? I don't know. Chuck man, I have a suggestion. Some fucking some fucking Chuck made you've read my mind beautifully. Well, your mind is easy to read these days. You got Chuck on the brain. I've got nothing but Chuck Mangione on the brain. And if you too want to have Chuck Mangione on the brain as you should, friends, you should check out the bittersweet mix tape. Yeah, we

have released our first piece of supporter exclusive content. It's a little over an hour of deleted segments, bloopers, treasured moments with guests, infamous stories that never made it to your ears for whatever reason. And they have been put together with love in a funky package for you. I'm the most beautifully like special effect little package. It's really it's nice little samplings here and there, some song, it'll it'll melt your heart, it'll move your feet. It's a good one. A beautiful, a beautiful recommendation. Shelly Duvall fans specifically. If you are like why have they not covered Shelly Duvall in any capacity, this you you'll want to give us any tiny amount of money that you want. And it's yours to treasure

and cherish and listen to. Forever. K O dash fi dot com slash bittersweet infamy hop on there. Yep. Run through some PayPal, patronage, situations, any amount will get you this beautiful mix tape. We love you. Hop on there and give us anything and we'll shoot you over a copy of the mix tape for you to enjoy and love and fall asleep dance to. Listen to you over and over. Yeah, I love when people tell me that they fall asleep to this podcast. Honestly, I think that's such a compliment. Really? Yeah, I love that. Like like sleep is precious. Sleep is precious and it's hard to find something to go to sleep to lately. I've been do you know what's really been doing it for me? I found an audiobook of and then there were none by Agatha Christie. It's a story that I love,

but it's a story that I have read a million billion Jillian times to the point where like I basically know the next line that's going to come out of a character's mouth. So I can just go to sleep. You know, I don't have to I know what the twist is. I know who the killer is. Yeah, I don't have to pay attention. I can just doze off dozing off to murder. So I love I love the idea that we are that for someone else. Yeah, I like that too. Okay, okay, you've spun it for me. I'm in. I'm on. Let's go with the new year comes some new developments for bittersweet infamy. The podcast moving on up. We are this is a somewhat bittersweet episode of bittersweet infamy because this is going to be our last episode completely independent. Oh, weird when you phrase it like

that. Oh, weird. Yeah. Cool. Oh, weird. You and me did 61 episodes together. Just us and our lovely fans spread the word and the algorithm favoring us whenever it wanted to. Thanks, Al. Thanks, Al. Go rhythm. We've been reached out to buy a podcast network who is interested in dispersing bittersweet infamy. Yeah, which is pretty, it's pretty exciting because it just means like a bigger team to help put these on and get them out a bigger family access to resources. Exactly. I mean, for those who love your indie podcast, I don't think too much will change in terms of content, unprofessional zaniness, all of that will remain. We will continue. We're not wearing suits to record anymore. We red pen that out of the contract right away. The functional

things that it means is that starting next episode, there will be ads. We are going to do our best to make them as cool and as unobtrusive as we possibly can. And we're still figuring out what that's going to look like. So bear with us as that takes shape. It means that there's now going to be a way to support the podcast monetarily without necessarily needing to donate money if that's not within your means. Yeah. Because if you send this podcast to a friend and they listen to it, we will get some amount of ad revenue somewhere down the line. It's not going to be immediate and it's not going to be immediately significant. So we are going to still do things like coffee, campaign, and we would love if you could donate there if it's within your means. But what it does

mean is that if it's not within your means, just send the podcast to a buddy and somewhere, some months from now, we will get a half a cent because you did that or whatever it turns out to. And thank you. Thank you in advance for continuing to listen, hopefully. And thank you for being a huge part of what got us to this point. Yeah. And we will have more information about what podcast network, why are you being so cagey? Well, episode 62, baby, listen to fucking episode 62, the first episode of corporate bittersweet information. Yeah, corporate light. We'll give it a little. Yeah, we'll wear clean underwear, but that's as much as even that, you know. No, not making any promises. That was not in the contract.

We specifically made them write that out of the contract. One last thing, Josie. Taylor. Thank you. Thank you. Taylor. Taylor. Yes. Thank me. Thank you. Oh, wow. I'm proud of you. I'm proud of us. I'm excited for what comes next. Me too. 2023, baby. Yes. And thank you for the umpteenth time. Thanks, listeners. You know. Yeah, you know. Yeah, you know. You are a cozy thing. You know who you are. Oh, you are a mimp of us. Mimp me. Okay. I've been a little bit troubled by the, I don't know, global backslide into fascism. Oh. Oh, interesting. That old thing. Yeah. You know, this is such a broad topic because it affects immigrants, racial minorities, women, queer folks, trans folk, like anybody,

right? Yeah. Anybody and everybody. Well, most people. It's quite far-reaching. Specifically, the thing that has been bumming me out today is we need to pick one issue and get stressed out over that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Spread out the stress. I've been bummed out about don't say gay shit lately. Looking at you, Florida. Looking at you, Florida. Looking at you, Russian Duma, which recently, you know, supported laws being like, you can't positively or even neutrally mention LGBTQ plus shenanigans off the table with like very harsh penalties. I don't know if that law has passed yet. I think it looks like very likely that it's going to. And then, like you say, yeah, Florida, various school boards. I think part of the thing too, with being any kind

of LGBTQ, whatever, is regardless of what some conservative global governments will have you believe, there's gay people everywhere. There's trans people everywhere. It's a fucking roll of the dice. You know what I mean? Fucking straight people. If you hate gay people, stop having kids. You know what I mean? Because you're the ones propagating the species here. Wow. Yeah, think about that fucking liberals. Librarians. You fucking librarians. Put that in your fucking Dewey Decimal System and stack it, bitch. But my point is, there but for the grace of God was I born where I was born, as opposed to Russia, Texas, other places where the laws would not tilt in my favor.

So it's like a concerning thing, right? And it's a global thing. So it's been kind of on my mind. And what has specifically stuck out to me, because I'm always looking for absurd joy in the minutiae of misery. Yeah, no, I like that as it came out of my mouth. Just kind of how often attempts to hide the fact that gay people exist, specifically from children, I think, how often that just comes out really stupid. I think the most tragic thing about homophobia is that it's so often camp. And that really tears me in half. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. But this is all just kind of set dressing for what got me to where I am, which is today's Mimfamous. Our story begins in the early 90s with one of my personal artistic inspirations,

a Japanese mangaka or manga author artist named Naoko Takeuchi. Okay. Naoko was established at this point as a mangaka of shoujo romance manga, sentimental stories targeting adolescent and young adult women readers. Okay, cool, cool, cool. But for her next project, she wanted to do something more akin to what's on offer in shounen or boys manga, action packed stories full of battles between good and evil. Her editor heard her pitch and said, sure, just put the heroine in a serafuku, the sailor uniform ubiquitous among young Japanese female students. Like Sailor Moon. Like Sailor Moon, Josie. This concept initially took the form of a manga called Code Name is Sailor V, before morphing into a more familiar form, the first

serialized story of Bishoujo Senchi, Sailor Moon, known in the West as Sailor Moon, dropped in 1991 in the shoujo manga magazine, Naoko Yoshi. What do you know about it? Were you ever a Sailor Moon watcher? No, my best friend Chelsea loves Sailor Moon, like a deep abiding passion to Sailor Moon. Oh yeah? But she was really into it in elementary school and we didn't meet till like high school. So I know the iconography of it, a few of the of the details, but that's all. So when I was young, I didn't watch that much of the Sailor Moon dub, which is what most, the English dub, which is what most of the people in our age would have watched because it was kind of what was on in the 90s. Because I think like as a young boy, I had really internalized that it

like that was a show for girls, like that, you know, the toy marketing worked on me. And then later on, when I was a teenager and kind of had a better idea that like, no, anybody can enjoy anything. This is all the bruise. Okay, for the toys. It's all for the toys. It's all a sham. When I was about 16, 17, I downloaded the entire Japanese original like file by file, more or less entirely, like I was missing. I had some gaps here and there because you couldn't find everything. But I used emule, which was like, it wasn't Kazaa, it wasn't Limewire. My theory was, and it ended up being right, if you pick like the third or fourth most popular one, there will always be enough file seeders to get you what you need, but it won't get taken down

by the government because they won't care. Oh, they're going after the big boy. And I was right. I never, as long as I used emule and I used it for a while, I never, you know, no drama, baby, just me. Hey. The other thing I should mention, and when I say that, um, now go Takuichi is an artistic inspiration mine. Specifically, go out and find her Sailor Moon art books, where it's just her cut and loose and drawing all of her characters in like, looks right off the runway standing next to sexy cars under chandeliers. And then she like, you know, colors over them in alcohol marker, a little bit of blow pen, put some beads on there, just a little mixed media moment with these hot bitches in Chanel. It's amazing. Go and look at these art books. There's

some like serious, like you'll, she'll just have like, oh, you know, some casual gold leaf art deco brocade going in the background. She's like a fantastic artist. Wow. Okay. And she's written this world about our heroine Usagi Sukino, an average clumsy, annoying, unmotivated teenage girl based heavily on Naoko's own high school experiences and her band of best friends and crime fighting partners inspired by the planet. So Sailor Mercury, Sailor Mars, and so on. Yeah. Yeah. Says Jessica Lord on Tofugu quote, Sailor Moon was groundbreaking for its time thanks to Naoko's unwillingness to back down and tailored the story to her editor's liking. She mentions in a 2013 interview with Rolla magazine that many older male workers at Nakayoshi magazine

tried to dictate her character's appearances and attributes. In her own words, she exclaimed that she wouldn't let old men decide how a story for young girls should be written. Nice. Sailor Moon, of course, is enormously popular. And one year after its first publication in 1992, Toei Animation released the first episode of the iconic Sailor Moon anime in which a demon disguised as a friend's mother attacks Usagi at a jewelry store. Been there. Done that. Did not get the t-shirt. I regret that. So enormously popular was this anime that it was decided to dub Sailor Moon in English and bring it to the West. In 1995, after heated bidding war, the Western rights went to Deake who contracted Mississauga, Ontario based optimum productions to handle the dub and localization.

Okay. There was only one problem if you want to call it that. Part of Naoko's approach to depicting the many ways in which we can share warm, intimate, supportive friendships with people of the same gender was to frankly acknowledge that, hey, people are gay and that's chill. And it is completely cool to depict same-sex romantic relationships realistically in children's media. Thank you. Not such a popular notion in Japan or America in the 90s and even now as we've discussed, still quite contentious. In Japan, Toei Animation was willing to preserve Naoko's vision and include queer characters, but the forces behind the Western dub were considerably more skittish. At first, it was easy enough to paint over the gay supporting

characters. Two of Queen Barrel's male henchmen are in a romantic relationship, but one of them looks more feminine, so we can just cast a female voice actor and make him a woman in the English dub. Easy peasy. Wow, a racer. So easy. Everyone's gotten a racer lying around. Unfortunately for optimum productions, the Japanese anime was ahead of the dub in the story, and whispers had made their way to North American audiences that the third Japanese season had two important new Sailor Senshi or Sailor Scouts. Their names were Michiru or Sailor Neptune and Haruka or Sailor Uranus. Sailor Neptune was an aloof, icy, feminine musical prodigy who excelled in the violin. Sailor Uranus was tall and jodgenous, even handsome, driving around in a fast car and being

fond over by all the other female characters. They were mysterious, they were cool, they were lesbians, and they were together. Spera thought then for poor optimum productions who now had to localize season three under new bosses cloverway while making sure that children didn't know women could kiss each other. Oh yeah. You must remember it's the late 90s, Jerry Falwell is saying tinky winky from Teletubbies is gay when we all know she's a sapiosexual gender fuck switch. People are getting up in arms, how do we deal with these characters? Sailor Uranus and Neptune who in the Japanese anime are constantly hanging off of one another, flirting, touching one another intimately, making innuendos toward one another. What would you do? I mean we know what you would

do, okay, but like if you had to, if you had to erase these poor lesbians, what would your explanation be? What would you do? Um there's sisters, uh something. You're getting there, you're warm, you're hot. Um cousins? We make them cousins. Oh god. This is what repression looks like. Gone were Haruka and Michiru enigmatic lesbian anti-heroes. In their place we met Amara and Michelle as one character in the cloverway dub exclaims upon seeing them. They're girls and cousins too. Oh my god, oh my god. Indeed barely a scene could go by without a character conspicuously remarking that no, no, I know what you're thinking. These are cousins. Oh god. One character exclaims upon seeing them beautifully dressed. Fantastic, they're the best cousins in the world. Those are

my favorite cousins I've ever seen. Hashtag cousin goals. Like it's ridiculous. There is a YouTube video called I think it's just called cousins or weir cousins in quotation marks and it's just a clip of all of the conspicuous mentions of these two being cousins in the in this dub. At one point we see a flashback of Michelle's first kiss with a silhouetted form that looks a lot like her cousin although she's very clear that it was actually Brad the cutest boy at school. Oh, Brad. Brad. It was Brad says Princess Weeks writing for the Mary Sue. Even before I picked up the manga or knew anything about dub versus sub I was absolutely sure that there was no way those two women were cousins because I have cousins and I have never affectionately stroked their fingers gazed longingly

into their eyes nor constantly called them my cousin to people who already knew that. So as you might imagine based on the fact that I'm talking about it but also based on all the shit I just told you this dub is somewhat infamous especially among queer audiences who were puzzled by the implication that this bizarre pseudo incest was in some way preferable to a straightforward relationship between two young women. It's probably for the best that the powers that be in the West balked at even attempting a translation of the fifth and final season Sailor Stars which features male pop singers one of whom is a romantic interest for Usagi transforming into female superheroes. Cute! How many cousins could they go through? Try and explain

that, you know? Yeah, that's a lot of cousins. In 2019 that season along with others was redubbed in a new English edition that restored the relationship between Sailor's Uranus and Neptune when one supplemental booklet mistakenly referred to them as friends Viz media released a tweet clarifying. The team here at Viz was very excited to take on the honor of localizing Sailor Moon especially acknowledging that Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus are not friends but in fact partners. One step forward for more equitable depictions of queer characters and media for young audiences. Two big steps backwards for hot gay cousins who fuck. That's true. That's true. Where is their representation? When is their time? Thank you.

When do we see them? In the 90s if they had their moment in the third season of the Sailor Moon English dub. Stroking each other's hands. Yeah, and being like... Closing wastes. Let's go play tennis cousin. It's quite absurd. Look at those cousins go. Quite an absurd choice. Look at those cousins ride that motorbike together. You know. Wow. She's one mysterious cousin. It's terrible. It's so bad. Cousin! Hogtown, The Six or Toronto. Whatever you call it you can fly non-stop to Toronto on Porter Airlines. When you fly Porter you'll enjoy free fast Wi-Fi and beer, wine and premium snacks included with every fare. You'll also love that our planes have no middle seats. Discover why

Porter has been Eastern Canada's favorite airline for the last 16 years. Visit flyporter.com. Porter actually enjoy economy. Many adults may not know that simply being over 50 puts them at increased risk for shingles. Help prevent shingles in patients over 50 with shingricks. Shingricks is indicated for the prevention of herpes zoster, HZ, or shingles in adults 50 years of age or older. Consult the product monograph at gsk.ca.shinricks.bm for contraindications, warnings and precautions, adverse reactions, interactions, dosing and administration information. To request a product monograph or to report an adverse event please call 1-800-387-374. Learn more at thinkshinricks.ca. It's pretty crazy that you brought a story.

We've done it again haven't we? We have the cousins of stories. Okay. Not like the hidden lesbian couple. Like they're actually cousins. Wow. You wrote a story about a translation from Japanese media into American and that process being kind of shady and rude. I as well am bringing a story about Japanese media translated to American culture that's a bit shady and weird and a little bit rude. How good. Oh, we've done it beautiful. It was a happy new year. Yeah. So you brought some 90s nostalgia, cartoon, lovin, Saturday morning vibes. I'm going to take it back a little bit further. We're going back to the 1950s with perhaps maybe the first instance in modern Japanese

and American culture where this exchange, this translation has occurred. Before we get there, I'm going to roll it back just to set the scene. We need some placemats. Okay. So if we're to understand any type of American and Japanese relationship in the 1950s, what do you think we might also need to understand Taylor? Is it World War II? Yeah. How about it? Okay. How about end atomic warfare by America on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Yes. So August 6th, 1945, the US detonated the first of two atomic bombs. The first Taylor's right, Hiroshima, killing 129,000 people. And then only three days later, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing 226,000 people. They were primarily civilians as of yet. It has been the

only... Not as of yet. Yeah. Well, yeah. The only two instances where nuclear weapons have been deployed in wartime and pretty tragically... Right. Absolutely. We've talked a bit about the Peace Museum in Hiroshima in episode 47, I think, Okunishima, Rabbit Island. Yeah. We talk a bit about a similar subject there. Go and listen. The takeaway is war sucks, folks. War is hell, and let's not do atomic bombs. Let's not do them. Yeah. That is not the only casualties caused by nuclear fission fusion power in general. So the testing of various atomic and hydrogen bombs, even when every imaginable attempt at mitigating disaster has led to some type of issue. It included in those, when we think on a global scale, the US's Three Mile Island accident

in 1979, Russia's Chernobyl disaster in 1986, Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, even now with the threat of attacks on nuclear plants in war-torn Ukraine. That's always kind of looming and what disaster that could entail. These are all examples of devastating mishaps surrounding nuclear plant infrastructure. So what is meant to contain all of that raw power fails in some way. And then when we think about nuclear power as well, we can even go back to the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who coined the term radioactivity and was able to isolate and thereby discover a new element that was even more radioactive than anything else imaginable. At the time, Marie Curie, she eventually died from her prolonged exposure to radium. Very scary to me.

I mean, to most, I would imagine. To most. I don't think I'm special in that regard. No. So when it comes to nuclear power radioactivity, the existential reckoning with this new technology, the way that nuclear reactions can produce so-called clean energy, but also destroy life in the form of the atomic bomb or the hydrogen bomb, even how radiotherapy can destroy cancerous cells, like a chemotherapy. In the name of healing. Yeah, but that same technology can also cause malignant growths if it's not monitored. It's this push and pull of this technology and its uses. I don't like it. And how that has come to define the 20th century in some way, shape, or form. And especially when we're thinking about radioactivity or nuclear power, considering the

half-life on this shit lasts a very, very long, long time. Oh, yeah. Yes. Oh, yeah. It will probably be something that we reckon with well beyond 20th, 21st century, perhaps even millennia, right? If we got them, yeah. If we got them. It's a fun episode. It's a lighthearted episode, folks. Happy new year. Yeah, happy new year. Kiss your cousin. Everything's turning up easy. One of the earliest and in my opinion, I'll say most sincere reckonings with this nearly undefinable power can be found in the 1954 Japanese Kaiju film directed by Hishiro with special effects by Soboraya IG produced and distributed by Toho Company Limited,

Gohira. Oh, Gohira. Gohira. Oh, Gohira. See. See. See as they say in Japan. Gohira. Gojir over here. Yeah, fantastic film. Also known as Godzilla from the 1956 Americanized remake Godzilla, King of Monsters exclamation point. Fantastic film. Fantastic. So, okay, from this first movie, Godzilla has since become, according to the Guinness World Book of Records, the world's longest running movie franchise of all time. Good for him. Yeah. Sure. I think there's a few ladies that have come through. There's, you know what? All of them. We need, we need every giant moth. We need every very tall man. We need any and every insect and lizard and hairy, maybe some flying everything. All of them. 38 movies, 38 films. Yes. 33 are produced by Toho, the original

production company. One is produced by TriStar Pictures and four produced by Legendary Pictures, so more American leading. And that's not, that 38 is not including the North Korean knockoff Godzilla movie Pugasari. You've heard of this. Is that a story for another day? That's exactly what I wrote in here. Calm up, but that's another story. Dot, dot, dot. Yeah. Oh yeah. This is a, this is a very, I don't know the full, if you ever want to give me this story, I don't know the full full story, but I know of it. I'll give you the, the bite size right now. Please, please, please, please. The film tells the tale of a monster, not on my Godzilla, who grows to massive size by eating iron and helps a poor village rebel against their ruthless emperor. So there's these long

extended scenes of a big monster like crashing down traditional Korean overthrowing. Yes, yes. So there's all these like Marxist and communist ideas coming in, but then he can only eat iron, like tools and. Yeah. Okay. That's what I was wondering, like nail files and shit. Yeah, like nail files. Okay. Let's, let's go get some like empty your pockets. Yes. Let's, let's go. Okay. All of the villagers end up having to give the monster their rakes and their holes in their wheel. All the tools that can make their lives go, they have to sacrifice them to this monster. But the monster knows better. We need the monster to defeat the emperor. The monster is different from the emperor. That's very important. That is very important. And I'm sure the producer would

want you to think that because it's produced by Kim Jong-il and directed by a kidnapped South Korean filmmaker. Yes, there was a bit of kidnapping going on. Shinshin Oak. Yes. Again, a story for another time because him and his wife, who was also, she was a famous South Korean actress, she was first abducted to North Korea and then him, then they made this movie. They were in Venice showcasing some other movie and they escaped their North Korean security and ran to their embassy and pled freedom and escaped. All's well that ends well. Yeah. Again. Thank goodness for that. Story for another time. Story for another day. Anyway, you have a story about Godzilla that we've gotten well away from. Right. And I have, I have a little caveat here too. And it is this,

I am not an expert on Godzilla or this franchise whatsoever in any shape. There are experts and there are many of them. Yes. Kaiju Maniacs. And I hope they are not listening to this podcast. Oh no. That's the people who click on the thing that says Godzilla. I know. Well, you're welcome to be here. And I love you all. I'm just saying it might not be as deep of a dive as you want. Yeah, that's, dude, that's fair enough. I have my own views. So. That's fair enough. You have your own views. You think Godzilla is, it's a conspiracy by the government. Godzilla is a cousin. Okay. Wow. Godzilla. Godzilla is really lesbian and they've all been trying to hide it. I find that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. No, I think what I'm mainly interested in is this first Japanese

film and the subsequent Americanized remake. That's really what I mean to say is that I'm not going to unpeel the entire franchise. I'm just interested in this like early iteration of Godzilla. It's a bit more thematically rich, the early work. Yes. As opposed to the fun romp of the later work. Yes. Yes, exactly. I think that the translation between the two films, first the Japanese Gojira into Godzilla, King of Monsters, I think the conversation between the two is really interesting and it seems to me that the relationship between all the subsequent Japanese versions into American back into Japanese into American back into like that kind of ping-ponging back and forth mirrors this initial translation that happens in the first Gojira to Godzilla. Right.

And it just kind of depends on the milieu of the times and how that translates and what themes kind of bop in. But this first translation is where I'm going to concentrate. And I think translation is kind of a useful term here because there is a lot of editing and like literal translation dubbing that happens. It's not translated very well or it's translated with a very specific audience in mind, which is like, oh, this is a very different world from the world we live in now. Mm-hmm. There was a song that was a hit in the 1960s. And in Japanese it was called I Look Up As I Walk or the Japanese Equivalent. Yeah. When it came out in the West, they just called it sukiyaki, which is like a some sort of Japanese dish. Okay. It's a hot pot dish with cooked beef.

The word does not appear in the song's lyrics, nor does it have any connection to them. It was only used because it was short, catchy, recognizably Japanese and more familiar to English speakers. A Newsweek columnist compared this retitling to issuing Moon River in Japan under the title Beef Stew. That's according to the Wikipedia page for sukiyaki. So that's, it's kind of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's American enough. It's Japanese enough. They'll get that it's some kind of Japanese something because they recognize that from a menu. Yeah. Yeah. So Taylor, what do you know of Godzilla? You've seen both of these films? You've seen one? What have you seen? I've seen the original. I saw the Japanese one. Okay. Yeah. I watched the first Godzilla with my brother.

Really enjoyed it. There were little bits of it that I would, you know, tweak here and there, but in general, interesting, like centered around nuclear war and a reaction to nuclear war to the absolute nth, as I'm sure you will say, like, like very much so. Very clearly anti-nuclear. Very clearly. And it's so funny because I hadn't seen the Japanese version, nor that initial Americanized version. Yeah. I hadn't seen them until like two weeks ago. And my impression of Godzilla was kind of like B movie, monster movie, the genesis of the like screaming woman, you know, kind of the King Kong vibe, but like extended King Kong was in 1933. This is the 50s, but like an extension of that into kind of this Japanese culture

vibe where it has like the bad dubbing and it has like the B movie kind of vibes of like poor body doubling and like weird, weird screams and kind of hopey effects. The mouths don't match what is being said and that will kind of end up being used in a racist way to parody Japanese movies and people down the line. Exactly. And that was just kind of my impressions. And then I watched the Japanese one first and I was like, geez, Louise, this is very strong and clear, anti-nuclear. It's a good movie. Yes. And I would call it propaganda because it just has such a clear political motive. Yeah, very obvious message. And a very flimsy love subplot as well if you want that. So it has everything. It's yeah. So before we get to the full on Godzilla,

the occupied era of Japan starts shortly after the second atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki. Emperor Hirohito surrendered August 15th, which was only about six days after Nagasaki. And all the paperwork was signed, sealed by September 2nd. So September 2nd started the occupation era. War hostilities were halted, so war had officially ended. And what had started was a six year period where allied forces were pretty much in control of Japan. And it was mainly the US that was there. They were more involved in the Pacific theater than a lot of the European allied forces. Occupation efforts concentrated on de-centering the imperial structure of government and putting in place democratic systems. Well, and of course, demilitarization, like all the steps that would

be involved at the end of war. Of course, the Japanese as a population were exhausted by the war, like everybody else. They were emotionally, financially in all types of ways that you could think of, just exhausted. Also, they didn't fucking win. That's a tough one. That's a tough pill to swallow. The general vibe in occupied Japan. A little sedated. A little sedated. Not super high spirited. Yeah. So what do you do when the population's vibe isn't doing well? Make art. Take him to the movies. There you go. Ticket sales always go up during depressions, war times. People have a movie. Interesting. And Hollywood showed up in a big way in Japan. Strangely enough, the Japanese didn't hate it. There was, of course, like any population, some people who were not about

these victorious foreigners. Nuke having motherfuckers. Yes. Yeah. Please know and thank you. But then there were other moviegoers who were excited by the storylines, were excited by the film stars, and kind of the big Hollywood production from this era. Of course, Hollywood wasn't being 100% altruistic with their efforts in Japan. Is that so? According to author Hiroshi Kitamura, in his book Screening Enlightenment, Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan, he says, Hollywood's arrival in defeated Japan did not happen overnight. As the access threat to two continents expanded into a global war, US studios joined forces to support their country's war effort. During the second half of the war, Hollywood developed close ties with the State

Department and founded the Motion Picture Export Association, MPEA, in 1945. The legal cartel would spearhead the industry's post-war trade in Japan and in many other countries. Say what you want about the Americans. You know how to make a movie. Yes. Hollywood could probably churn out some pretty good propaganda. And they ship it over? Can you guess the first Hollywood film to show up on Japanese screens? Can you give me a year? It came to Japan in 1946. It was made in 1943, though. Was it like a Western? Like a John Wayne? No. No, it wasn't. Okay. February 28, 1946, Japanese audiences lined up around the block for Madam Curie, a sentimental biopic about the scientist who discovered radio activity. Yes, my friend, Mary Keali appears on Japanese screens as

one of the first Hollywood imports. Let that just, like, blow your mind. Blow your mind. The nerve. I know. Who, what? I'm speechless. I know. I'm speechless. I think that's a very good, the nerve. The nerve. How dare you. How dare you. Yes. But people went and liked it, huh? People did. Rejected by Mervyn Leroy. It stars Greer Garson and Walter Pigeon. They appear in many films together. They're kind of like an on-screen power couple during this time. And they are launched to kind of start them in Japan. People really, their faces appear on magazines and it's a big motherfucking deal. And the film itself, and I watched it the other night, it's a pretty standard biopic Hollywood, you know, version. Not my genre. Not my genre. Yeah,

that makes sense. Airplane movies, I call them. Yeah. You put it on because you're like, well, I sure as fuck wasn't going to watch Lincoln in any other context, but I got three hours to burn. Joseph Gordon Levitt is in this apparently. Let's go. No, I do like the just like half a tear under romantic comedies. Like those are my good airplane movies. I wouldn't touch Lincoln. Oh, no, I did. I mentioned Lincoln because I did touch it and I regretted it. We're talking cinema. We're going to the movies. We're going to the movies. It's fine. Madame Curie, it's the Hollywood version concentrates on this altruistic nature of Marie Curie's scientific practice. Immediately she wants radium to be used for healing purposes.

It's a very humanistic approach to technology. Now listen, Japan, we know you've had some bad experiences with radiation in the past. You're right. But we want you to know that it's good actually. There's some good stuff happening. Yeah. Yeah. If you would open your stop being so closed minded. Yeah. And come watch this film. In her real life biography, Madame Curie did open up the Curie Institute for Health that was focused on medical research. She opened one in Paris, she opened one in Warsaw. She never patented any of her discoveries. So, you know, in some ways, wonderful share the technology, let it be used in all these different ways. In other ways, perhaps if you're an altruistic scientist, that doesn't mean that somebody else

is using it for altruistic means. That's a really interesting ethical question. Right? If you asked me prior to your saying that sentence, I would be like, it is always ethically right to make all science open source. You can't patent science, it's ridiculous. And I still do feel that way. Right. Yeah. Like you say, this is the one time we're like, you know, I kind of wish. But then also, now what? Now every person in the Curie line is responsible for like ethically policing scientific discovery. Yeah. I don't know. That's a tough one. It is a big tough one. Yeah. She lived through World War One and did actually a lot in terms of medical science during World War One, including making X-ray technology more available

for field medical stations. Super helpful. Great thumbs up. But she never lived past World War One, so she didn't see all of that work going to the atomic bomb. She didn't see Hiroshima Nagasaki. Okay. So six years of Allied occupation in Japan, they come, they go. We're at 1952. And Japan steps out onto the international scene again. Very aware, as a governmental entity, and kind of as a culture, very aware that they want to reintroduce themselves to the world in a light that is befitting their ancient cultures, but also their new modern identities in the post-World War Two landscape. One area they spend considerable time concentrating on is films, Japanese films on the international scene. So there's a very famous director,

Kurosawa, who in the 1950s made some like big stellars of Japanese cinema, Rashomon, Seven Samurai, instant classics. They hit Japan. People love them. They get exported. People love them even more. When I say that people love them, one of them won like a Venice film festival, another one can. I think like a foreign film, Oscar. But these particular films are about Japan's imperial identity, which is much older than the now westernized post-occupation Japan. A government decision after a lot of debate is made about how they can bring more modernity to Japanese film that is exported abroad. How can we tell current stories as opposed to relying on the long-established mythology of our history? Exactly. So Godzilla came on the scene in

1954, massive hit in Japan. Just immediately people responded, lined up, paid the tickets, paid for the tickets again, like just boomed in the box office. It's a big lizard telling you not to drop nukes. What else do you need? It's great. It's wonderful. So it becomes a really big hit and then Japanese government, cultural officials are like, this might be the one that we export. One, it does represent a full understanding of like a modern Japan. We get kind of small town, rural community, rural island kind of fishing village, also Tokyo. So a very urban center. You see buildings, you see trams, you know, you see people dressed in finery. Little baby toy trams is very cute. Yeah, it is very cute. The graphics, the effects are phenomenal. Like

for that time and era. Like I was just making a little joke about a little baby toy tram. There are things that you can pick out how the effect was done, not to jump ahead, but that movie is never more fun than when Godzilla is destroying Tokyo. Oh, the best riveting. You can't turn away. And I mean, you can tell the effect, you can tell that it's miniaturized, you can tell what's happening, but there's so much artistry to it. Yes, they're good little mini dioramas. I love looking at dioramas. I love looking at like little toy trains, spinny spinnies, like get me in, get me on. So the effects are fantastic for being a monster film. It does represent a modern slice of Japan. And because it's not kind of a heavy imperial drama, like

Seven Samurai or Rashomon, it can be dubbed. And that was a really big concern because Japanese moviegoers were fine reading subtitles. No big deal. But foreign audiences, in particular American audiences, Japanese and Hollywood executives were like, no one's gonna fucking read. You need to put a voice over. And having a dub and like a really serious imperial drama just felt weird and wrong. But Godzilla doesn't speak. Like all those fun effects that you see, you don't need them. It's fine. Those are universal. Yeah. And there's this an understanding of the atomic situation and the atomic era that we're in. Japan was not the first to create a monster from an atomic event. In 1953, there is a film out of the US called The Beast from 2000 Fathoms.

It's based on a Ray Bradbury short story called Foghorn. Interesting. And it's kind of a similar vibe to Godzilla, I got to say. It's done with like really artful stop animation. This artist.com or he was the director, but he kind of moved through all of this really cool stop animation stuff. His name is Ray Harryhausen. The monster is Redosaurus. And he moves through a city. The final scene is him in like a burning roller coaster. Whoa. Look that shit, my veins. That sounds dope. I thought of you. That thank you. That is a very Taylor Basso set piece roller coaster on fire. It'll be very big, very evocative. Put a dinosaur from the depths of the ocean, atomicized in the middle. Exactly. It's all a metaphor. There's a

sad little girl. Perfect. I love it. Yeah. So that movie came out in 1953. And then Godzilla came out 54. In fact, one of the first drafts for Gojira, you know, a working title for it was the giant monster from 20,000 miles beneath the sea, which the American film based on the Ray Bradbury short story is The Beast from 2000 Fathoms. So already there was a translation happening between this American film to a Japanese film. What happens in the, with Gojira, it has influences from American filmmaking. Hollywood has exposed itself to Japan. We'll say that. Jesus. In every sense of the word. The influence is there. But Gojira is pretty amazing in how it keeps a very Japanese flavor throughout. That same year that Gojira came out, there were

reports throughout Japan. It was really big news when a Japanese fishing tuna boat with a crew of 23 men was contaminated by nuclear fallout. How awful. I know. They were right on an outline of danger area that the US had made as they were testing a hydrogen bomb. So around Bikini Atoll. Do you know that the bikini is named after Bikini Atoll because it was going to be like an explosive new. Oh. I think what surprised me when I looked up this small tidbit was that Bikini Atoll testing happened 1954, nine years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two, the bombs ever dropped on Japan were atomic bombs, which uses a certain type of nuclear power, like a fission, where it breaks apart. The hydrogen bomb uses fission and fusion to make an explosion much

larger. Yes. Yes. It is insane. And of course, what they had anticipated to be the blast radius and this like danger zone was much smaller than what actually happened. So this tuna fishing boat called Lucky Dragon 5 is what it translates to was where it should have been. It was keeping to the rules and the perimeters. But the perimeter was wrong. The wind speeds were totally miscalculated. Of course. Looking back, it's easy to be like wind speed, currents, the transfer between cold water and hot. Like there's all kinds of shit. Yeah. But it's also 1950, whatever. And you've got this like insanely destructive and dangerous new toy that you're testing out. Yeah. And so 23 people on the crew, 23 people suffered acute radiation syndrome for a number of weeks after they were

exposed. There's accounts of them traveling back on the boat and skin rushes about three days into their journey home. Everybody's hair falls out. Oh, absolutely terrifying stuff. How awful. All recovered except for one crew member Kuboyama Aichichi, the boat's chief radio man. He died about six months later. That's a shame. So this was big in the news, the boat itself. And then there was worries about contaminated tuna in the fish market. And so Japanese during this time, they stopped eating fish, which is kind of, that's a huge cultural shift. They're an island nation. Yes, exactly. So it was not lost on anybody when Gojira comes on the screen. And all of a sudden what you see is lights lighting up beneath ocean water and a boat traveling through it

and disintegrating in that light. Not a lot of Americans knew about the Bikini Atoll testing or certainly not Lucky Dragon number five. And so that imagery is what opens the Japanese Gojira. But in the translation to the US film, it opens with the decimated streets of Tokyo, which an American audience would probably recognize as photographs or images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You've seen the Japanese film, but I'll give kind of a brief, a brief overview. We open with the sea creature. All these boats keep missing. Families are very concerned. They've informed the Japanese equivalent of the Coast Guard and it kind of, it scales up. More and more fishermen are disappearing and no one can find them. We get to Odo Island and all the fishermen there are reporting that

all the fish have vanished. There's nothing that is coming up in the nets. Where'd they go? Something has eaten all the fish. That same evening, a huge storm strikes the island and houses are crushed. We as an audience know that like this ain't no storm. This is Gojira over here. We haven't seen the entirety of the monster up till now. It's just like, what does it look like? When will it actually come? It's a bit of a suspense play. Yeah, and so officials come to the village the next day. One sexual official is a paleontologist who's one of our main characters and he leads the investigation and he finds a trial bite in this huge footprint. And this trial bite, he says like, oh, this is ancient. Like this is

from prehistoric times. They also have a Geiger counter reading everything. The Geiger counter is terrifying in this film. I like, yeah, that shit awful. Government officials are there. They know that there's some type of large entity from deep within the earth from ancient times and it's radioactive and then boom, we see Godzilla. He appears on the other side of the hill side. Kind of crests the island. It's a really interesting image because all the monster movies that I've seen, like you see it more kind of like lurking or you see it in like a huge terrifying entity, but this was kind of just like a head. It's still scary. I'll give you that, but a different a different type of scary, I thought. You ever been walking up a fucking hill and a head comes out

over it? You'd shit yourself. I would. That scene ends and then testimonies by experts are being given and they estimate that Godzilla is 50 meters, 164 feet. That's tall. In the American version, it's said that he's over 400 feet tall. They juiced him. They thought American audiences would be like, oh, he's 50 meters. That's not that tall. Not that big. Over? Oh, whoa, that's big. That is instantly the most American thing. Oh, right there. I love it. I love it. Never be satisfied. And it's also expert witnesses given that Godzilla was disturbed by underwater hydrogen bomb testing. Yes. Which that remains in the Gojira version, the first one, and in the American one. I thought that it would get more watered down. No pun intended. No pun intended, right. The paleontologist is

like, we need to study this motherfucker. Everybody else is like, we need to take it down. We need to kill it. Paleontologists daughter, Emiko, who's my favorite? I thought she was the most flimsy. Just the middest. Yeah, I did want more for her, for sure. I would have written her differently. I was way more into the neurotic scientist dude who was like full of regret and anger. I liked him. Oh, he's quite good. Yeah, Sarazawa is his name. The main thing with Sarazawa, as you mentioned, ethically torn scientist with an eye patch. He gets the meaty role here. He gets the best fucking role. Dark troubled, conflicted figure with an eye patch. Like, come on, Oscar, viddecky, like, as they say in Japan. Yeah. In this scene, he divulges the secret of his work

to Emiko, which is that he has invented what he calls the oxygen destroyer. It is a bomb that when it's set off in water separates water into hydrogen and oxygen and essentially kills anything that is in the water. As we say, Sarazawa, doctor with an eye patch, very conflicted moody son. He's like, don't tell anybody, Emiko. This is a secret. I don't want this getting into the wrong hands. So of course, the next scene is this protracted destruction of Tokyo because Godzilla emerges from Tokyo Bay and just crush, crush, walks right through the electrified fence that the Japanese self-defense forces have constructed. So it's already not going well. It is not going well. Fucking amazing sequence, amazing. Another effect that is developed for

Gojira is called suit mission, like animation, but it's suit. So there were two actors who wore a rubberized suit and walk around with these models of buildings and stuff. What a riot. I would love to do that. Perhaps rescinded when I think about how well a rubber lizard suit from the 1950s would breathe. I imagine that was probably a pretty sweaty exercise in building crushing, but fun nonetheless. Super fun. One of the actors who played Godzilla in the early years, Nakajima Harua, he spent an entire day at the Tokyo Zoo watching animal movements to learn how to move inside of this monster suit. Fun. So Godzilla comes through not only is Godzilla this huge monster that can crush buildings, but his breath

is radioactive. The laser breath, I remember now, yes. The plates on his back, his little stegosaurus kind of vibes. They like electrify when he breathes out this radioactive breath. What a guy, what a stud. Utter destruction. A lot of people are killed. There's radiation everywhere. And the sequence that follows might be my favorite part because it's the most sentimental and the most surprising to me. What happens is there's all this destruction. It's terrifying. This is where we get the scenes that opened up the American version, where it's just like desolation and atomic bomb has gone off here. Which means something a lot different invoked by Americans for an American audience than it does a director for a Japanese

audience. You know what I mean? It's an interesting pick. It is. It really... Interesting as euphemism. Yes. The next scene, Emiko tells her boyfriend about Sarazawa's oxygen destroyer. So what she was meant to keep secret, she tells because she's like, this might be what can kill Godzilla. Exphyxiation in the water. Godzilla lives in the water. Boom. Sarazawa, the eye patch moody doctor is like, no, I can't divulge this information because this incredible power, I don't know who will get their hands on it. And it could take care of Godzilla and get rid of him and keep people safe. But I have an obligation and ethical responsibility to make sure that this technology does not get to the wider world where it could be used for nefarious reasons. The Marie Curie question.

The Marie Curie question, what maybe the Manhattan Project should have been dealing with a little bit more up in New Mexico. You know, a very interesting ethical view of technology and warfare and responsibility and to hear it in this context of a Japanese film. It was very surprising to me. Again, because I thought Gojira was like monster mayhem. For how campy some of the later offerings would become in the public imagination where Godzilla's back and this time there's three little Godzilla's or there's a Mothra. I fucking love Mothra. You know. And I don't mean to diminish these movies as works of art in their own right, but what I mean to say is like contrary to that reputation, the movie Gojira is quite a high-minded and serious film. Before Tokyo is destroyed,

there's a scene where we see a young woman on a tram and she's talking in a crowd and she says, I barely survived Nagasaki. What happens now with Godzilla? That is chilling. I don't know. Maybe because as an American, I'm not taught to think of that question from the Japanese point of view. I'm taught to think of it from the American point of view. I think that World War II in the history that has been written by the victors or whatever is very black and white, good versus evil. Oh yeah. Serizawa was like, this cannot happen. I can't let this technology out. They look at a TV in his laboratory and then we get pulled into scenes of the destruction of Tokyo, including this massive girls choir that sings the most beautiful song in their sailor suit uniforms. I will remind you.

And these series of scenes, it's a protracted situation. There's the girls singing. There's doctors carrying in young children. There's more Geiger counter. It's very emotional, very intense. Serizawa says, okay, we can use it. I will detonate the oxygen destroyer, but I'm going to burn all of my notes. None of my research will be released. This is it. One shot. Just because there's like a giant lizard killing everybody. Otherwise, no. Because this is the only way out. Kids are dying. Geiger counter. They all get on a boat in Tokyo Bay. Serizawa and Ogata, Emiko's boyfriend. Anyway, the two dudes, not Emiko, they get into these like diving suits, like the old diving bell vibes, descend down, detonate the oxygen destroyer. Ogita gets the

good word to go up, but Serizawa stays down below with Godzilla. Classic Serizawa. Classic Serizawa. Cuts his oxygen tube. He's done. He's down there. The oxygen destroyer, that technology, that weaponry, dies with him and Godzilla for now. Actually, that's not the end because there's a final scene with the paleontologist, Emiko's dad, and he says this line very clearly, straight into the camera. If atomic bombs are continued to be used, then Godzilla will happen again. Somewhere, someday, Godzilla will happen again. We radiated one lizard. We can do it again. Doesn't mean that there aren't more down there. Oh, baby. And this time we're not going to have the oxygen destroyer. Exactly. We need to fucking fix up and look sharp. Honda had no intention of

creating sequels. It doesn't need a sequel. It makes its point a million times better without any sequels, and yet I suspect there was money to be made. Yeah. The original intent was not focused on profit, but it was a sincere protest against nuclear destruction. Two years later, though, Godzilla, the king of monsters, exclamation point comes out in the US. Right. I forgot. That was the point. Yes, yes. Have you seen this film? No, I only know it by reputation. Oh my god, Taylor. It is the wildest exercise in... Oh, dear. Intended audience shifting narrative. It is interesting and kind of gross all at the same time. Okay. So first off, Gojira gets romanized into Godzilla, which the original name Gojira is a combination of two Japanese words,

Gorira, meaning gorilla, and Kujira, meaning whale. I guess because he's from the ocean. But Donkey Kong, not a donkey. So we hit, you know, there you go. We were talking about how Japanese government officials and cultural leaders were interested in exporting Japanese film in particular. And Godzilla was this perfect little nugget to do that because it was modern. It had a monster. It was hitting on all these bells. And I'm sure Americans had thoughts about nuclear war as well. They were probably, that's pretty scary overall. Gojira is a huge thing in Japan and then it gets released internationally and becomes its own really big hit. But it is not the same movie. It is a very different movie because when they dub it and two,

they bring in an entirely new character played by an actor named Raymond Burr, this big kind of like X football player kind of looking guy. He's from Vancouver, you know. No way. Born Raymond, William Stacey Burr, New West Minster, British Columbia, Canada. He's from New West. He's from New West, New West Zone, Raymond Burr. No way. Take your way down Kingsway. Get yourself to downtown. What? That's what I'm saying. Dude's secret Canadians everywhere. Y'all are sneaky motherfuckers. I remember definitely sneaks into this film. His character's name is Steve Martin, which got me every time. American newspaper man arrives in Japan to see his good old college bud, Dr. Sarah Zawa. And this American film takes the footage from Gojira, rearranges it, edits it,

slices it in. So our dude, Raymond Burr, is like standing on the hillside with some Japanese villagers. What? Looking up at Godzilla. Okay. And then it cuts to a scene that you recognize from the original. It's a paleontologist and the doctor with his Geiger counter. Oh, but then there's Raymond Burr with his like strangely friend slash assigned translator. And there's one part where he like elbows the guy and he's like, my Japanese is a little rusty. What is that guy saying? And then this poor character who is only there to be his tag along translator because again, no subtitles. American audiences can't handle it. Everything has to be dubbed or translated. They play the Japanese. There's no subtitle for the Japanese. It's just Japanese. And then this

random character translates it. For Raymond Burr. For the Canadian. Yeah. Oh, wow. What a choice. It is so wild. I had no idea. He becomes the American audience proxy. Yeah, I got that. And we watch him walk. Hey, say she's pretty what she's saying. There's a lovely mix of of that. There's a lovely mix of really horrible dubbing. Like no wonder it gets made fun of. But but it is not the Japanese film that does that. It is the Americanization of the Japanese film that does that. Do not get that confused. And then some really horrible body doubles. So like there's a scene where Raymond Burr, he's in the hospital after the Godzilla attack. And Emiko is there talking to him. But all we see is Emiko is back

and her hair is in like a handkerchief. That's not Emiko. That's a large white lady pretending to be here, isn't it? Yes. There's a scene where one of the doctors is meant to be talking to Raymond Burr. But the actor who plays the doctor, we just see the back of his head. He's not even looking up at Raymond Burr because Raymond Burr is a large man. Yeah, he's just like looking at his chest. I don't know. It's so strange. It's so funny. Oh dear. So that in and of itself is so strange and so funny. But then the way that the story gets retold, all of the elements are there. But we just don't focus on the same things. So the long protracted, moody, really torn Dr. Sarazawa scene where he's like this technology cannot get out, that gets chopped down to a quick

minute where he's just like, I don't know if that would be good. I don't know. We better do it. That's the whole climax of the film is this character's moral dilemma about using this horrible invention that he's come up with. Yes, I know. The whole beautiful long scene of the girl's choir, the destruction, the Geiger counter, all of that. That's a bummer. Americans won't like that. That gets chopped up so that some of that's the beginning when we see the destroyed Tokyo, some of that gets put into the middle, shortened for sure. Does the film Godzilla King of Monsters? Exclamation point. Thank you. Does it give any good reason for Raymond Burr to be the vessel through which we consume this story other than we are presumably white and English speaking and so

is he? No. Okay, cool. We see him on a plane. He gets to smoke on a plane and we get the explanation that he's an old college bud there to report and because he's a news reporter, he does fit this character motivation of watching everything. He's everywhere where we need to be and then he has scenes where he gets on the telephone in the newsroom and reports back to the head editor back in New York and says, oh god, there's a huge monster here and essentially narrates. Recaps what has just happened. So in case you missed it, wow, interesting. You can say a lot about the Netflixization of media and the way that we consume it. I don't know. Oh, it's a little sensible to be wary of these bajillion-dollar corporate monopolies, whatever.

Yeah, yeah. Keep your shoes on. Don't get too comfy. One thing that I do appreciate about, I guess, the globalization of our media consumption, let's say, is that through things like Netflix and Peacock and Hulu and whatever, YouTube. YouTube's a big one. Yeah, TikTok. All of these venues through which we are introduced to other cultures and content in other languages and stories that highlight different perspectives. I like that I can watch a reality show from Nigeria and a soap opera from Colombia and see stories about Colombian people, by Colombian people, in their language and shit like that. And if I can put on the subtitles I want them, etc., Sweden the same, Japan the same. I'm grateful that that is the landscape now as opposed to like we have this

really beautiful anti-war piece of art that is wonderfully put together, but we're convinced that our audiences won't accept these characters because they don't look like them or speak their language, won't accept this lizard because it's not tall enough, damn it. And you know who this needs? Raymond Burr. And let's change those names, let's change those cultural identifiers. Yeah. It's a shoddy approach to cultural exchange, I think. I agree, yeah. Yeah, and so I think that that's, again, it's kind of a bummer that a movie with such a powerful capacity to really effectively tell a really meaningful story, you know, probably really needed in a post-war situation where everybody still thinks that whoever was on the other side is an

evil non-human monster who only thinks about killing them. Right. It had a powerful potential to be that, but it sounds like instead it was a vehicle for a much more diluted message. Yes, yes, much more diluted. And to the point that I was surprised by the original Gujira, how direct it was in its anti-nuclear messaging, but then also how subtle it was in that very torn idea of like the Madame Curie situation of the ethics of what do you do with this technology? What do you do with this information? And what's the ethical responsibility as we tell these stories? If they're meant to inspire and exercise empathy, then what happens when you change the point of view so that it favors and centralizes a whiteness? It does a powerful disservice. My knowledge of

Godzilla, again, prior to watching the original, was that, yeah, I guess kind of somewhat cheesy monster move. There's always a little bit of degradation into farce, the long granny franchise goes on, so I understood that the first film in the franchise was likely more sincere than the ones that followed. But yes, I still thought about it as like Miles badly flapping out of sync to a very substandard English dub, you know? And then when I watched the original, I don't think I had that surprise as much as my new understanding of the film quietly supplanted the misconception that I was like, okay, so yeah, it's perhaps a deeper film than I gave it credit for, but I don't think that I, one, I didn't know how radically different the two were. I thought it was just a

dub. I didn't know that the raven bird had been digitally inserted or whatever past is digitally inserted into various scenarios. And then two, I guess I didn't think to question how I could have such a radically different conception between the two and what that might say about the translation and its meaning. I just didn't think to interrogate it, so I'm really glad that you've brought this story in this way because it's a really interesting question. The other angle of this too is that Godzilla King of Monsters' exclamation point is also a beloved film. Like Steven Spielberg credits it as inspiration for the Jurassic Park series. You know, like, certainly. Its roots go very, very deep into modern American cinema, and then you kind of pair it with Gojira and it's like,

what? But even Spielberg says, no, no, no, I like Godzilla King of Monsters more. Did he like it or did he like how life was when he was watching it? There's, yeah, I mean Spielberg. He's a bit, he's a nostalgia baby, so. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah. But like at the same time, other than, like I say, I think the dilution of the anti-imperialist and anti-war messages of this film do it a great disservice as a piece of art generally, putting that aside. You know, I like a little bit of camp, I like a little bit of schlock. Oh yeah. I love an actor poorly inserted into a scene he clearly doesn't belong into. That sounds like a lot of fun. Vancouverite? Hey. Raymond Burr? Heck yeah. Of the New Westminster Burrs. Yeah. Geez. Exactly, exactly.

We were able to watch Gojira on HBO Max. Nice. In Canada, that's probably Crave. I don't know, you know, I don't know all my shit, but I think that's probably Crave in Canada. I will leave you with this last nugget. Gojira, the 1954 film, was not widely available to North American audiences as in like, oh, let's go and look at, let's rent it from blockbuster, let's, you know, blah, blah, blah. Not until 2004. Huh. Interesting. Yeah. I don't know, there's, there's something about not being able to watch this like fantastic anti-war, anti-nuclear classic and yet thinking that it's all just monster movie mayhem, you know? Yeah, which it is a bit. It is. It's using genre to tell a story that is not tethered to genre. Dude, my favorite. That's

my fave. What's your favorite Godzilla sequel? I don't, I haven't seen any of the Godzilla sequels, but I'd like to because I'm, yeah, I do think it's kind of interesting that this like very potent anti-nuclear war metaphor just kind of continued on as just this big mascot who like fought a series of increasingly ridiculous foes. A bit of a protagonist, you know? At a certain point we are rooting for how many motherfucking movies have we spent with this lizard? We're clearly attached. Yeah. So, so I do think that that's kind of interesting to you again in that bittersweet infamy way where like you just can't predict what something's legacy is going to be. You really can't. No, the world is absurd. Just enjoy. Thanks for listening. If you want more infamy,

we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweetinfamy.com. Or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our coffee account at ko-fi.com forward slash bittersweetinfamy. But no pressure. Bittersweet infamy is free, baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing, leaving a review, following us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy, or just pass the podcast along to a friend who you think would dig it. Stay sweet. My sources for this week's Minfamous were Sailor Moon, positive female role model since 1992 by Jessica Lorde on Tofugu, May 5th, 2014. The long complicated history of Sailor Moon dubbing

by Brianna Cevallos for Nerdbot, January 2nd, 2021. Revisiting straightwashing in Sailor Moon is embarrassing. By Princess Weeks for the Mary Sue, December 6th, 2018, I also consulted the Wikipedia page for Naoko Takeuchi and Sailor Moon. And our interstitial music this week was Moonlight Densets by Ai Yuki. The articles that I used for this episode included an article written by Kate Brown, entitled Marie Curie's Fingerprint, Nuclear Spelunking in the Chernobyl Zone, published in the 2017 book Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Ghosts of the Anthropocene. I read selections from the book In Godzilla's Footsteps, Japanese pop culture icons on the global stage, edited by W. Tsutsi M. Ito, published by Powell Grove McMillan, 2016. I read an article

by Hiroshi Kitamura, Screening Enlightenment, Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan, published by Cornell University Press, 2011. I watched the trailer for Pogusari, the North Korean ripoff of Godzilla, on YouTube, posted by Frank White, April 16th, 2009. I watched the film Gujira, directed by Ishiro Honda, produced by Toho Limited, released November 3rd, 1954. I watched the film Godzilla, King of Monsters, exclamation point, directed by Ishiro Honda and Terry O. Morse, released April 27th, 1956. And lastly, I watched the film Madame Curie, directed by Mervyn Lee Roy, and it came out in 1943. The song that you are listening to now is Tea Street by Brian Steele.