I originally wrote this post to celebrate having had my other blog for a year. I worked really hard on it, but then I decided it was extremely silly and not a good fit for that blog. So I'm shunting it over here instead.
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I've been running this blog for a year now. I must admit I've poured a considerable amount of money and an even more considerable amount of time into it. So it's only appropriate that for my one-year anniversary post, I've done something that involves both money and time: I've bought us a time machine!
"Where'd you get it?" What do you mean, where'd I get it? Yahoo! Auctions, of course, that's where I get everything.
Anyway, you and me are going to go back to 1959 and catch a showing of The Mysterians stateside. Yes, the dub is bad, but we're witnessing history here. We're going to San Francisco's Metro Theatre, because I like San Francisco. It's way too expensive these days, but in 1959 we'll be paying about a dollar for our tickets. We can sneak out before the movie they're double-billing it with comes on.
Here we are, and there's a line out the door! Everybody's scrambling to see The Mysterians and American movie critics in the '50s have a ton of respect for Japanese films and don't think they're a joke in the slightest.[citation needed]
The lobby is nice and air-conditioned, but San Francisco in late spring isn't too hot in the first place. We're here in the last week or two of May, just after the film opened on the 15th. If you look closely, you can see a poster in the back advertising another upcoming imported feature - it's The H-Man, set to release on the 28th! Don't worry, there's enough juice in the time machine for a second trip.
Because I have a guy on the inside, we've got an original pressbook to look through while we're waiting in line. (We may be a bit early; time machine calibration is not an exact science.)
Let's see how they're trying to sell this one to theater owners across the nation:
- "Invaders from space coming to steal our women" is probably the #1 selling point across all the U.S. advertising materials.
- The color and scope are also highly emphasized, but this gets my goat a little, because it's shilled all over as a CinemaScope picture that utilizes Eastmancolor - it's not, it's TohoScope, but we wouldn't know that since the American cut removes the TohoScope logo. The technical specifications of TohoScope are almost identical to CinemaScope, I admit, but... it's just not, okay?
- Space is cool! Everyone loves space! The Mysterians fit in quite well with the mania for atomic/science/space-themed sci-fi films in the 1950s.
- You can order 4,000 "heralds" (small two-page folded pamphlets) for $28.75 - that's about $313 in today's money. (I have of course ordered these to be sent to your house when you get back from our trip.)
- Moguera is hyped up in promotional materials but seen as a bit of a joke by critics, as we'll see shortly.
If we turned on the radio - we do have a radio inside the time machine - we might be able to catch an announcement advertising the film. There were eight different varieties of these for broadcasters to choose from. In the interest of space I won't duplicate every single one here, just the longest (which I've had to reconstruct a bit since the pamphlet I'm looking at is cut off on one side):
"From behind the moon they come - to invade the Earth - to abduct our women and [level] our cities!! They are THE MYSTERIANS... demons from behind the moon, who top our every top secret! MGM now [presents] an enthralling motion picture about a master race that smashed the atom before we even saw the light of day - THE MYSTERIANS! [Aliens] who abduct Earth's women so that they themselves [can breed]... super-sonic war erupts from out of space before your very eyes! [A giant robot]... sheathed in heavy metal... fifty times the size [of a man]! [Crushing every] human being in its path with the dreadful searing rays [from its eyes] - see it all in THE MYSTERIANS! A terrifying, fantastic [feature presented in] giant CinemaScope and Color! THE MYSTERIANS!"
And the shortest:
"MGM presents a first in terror - THE MYSTERIANS - a master race that smashed the atom before we were born! See electronic war erupt from outer space! See THE MYSTERIANS - in Giant Cinemascope and Color!"
Our theater has chosen to spring for all possible advertisement. We're beset by many different sizes of lobby cards, most of which feature lovely (although maybe not quite screen-accurate) original illustrations by Lt. Colonel Robert B. Rigg.
I ask the guy behind the counter selling tickets so nicely if I can buy this one off him but he won't let me:
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| This is actually meant for advertising in newspapers and so probably wouldn't be on display in a theater. Also god damn |
We might even see some kids playing around with a Mysterian trading card from Nu-Card, featuring a tremendously bad pun.
How did all this advertising pay off? Pretty well - the film grossed $975,000 in the American box office. Adjusted for inflation that is $10,607,092. Unfortunately 1959 is also the year that Ben-Hur came out, grossing $74,432,704 in the North American (U.S. and Canada) box office, which, adjusted for inflation, is $809,758,520. That's insane money. I could buy at least two DVDs off YesAsia with that. Still! Almost a million dollars for an imported Japanese feature means the people do like The Mysterians.
And enough about us, who already know and love this movie. What do the critics say? Before I picked you up in this time machine I went to a couple newsstands and grabbed some old papers and periodicals. Here's the May 23 issue of Harrison's Reports:
"From the production point of view, this Japanese-made science-fiction thriller, which is enhanced by CinemaScope and Eastmancolor, is far better than most America-made pictures of its type." Wow! That's much nicer than what most American critics of Japanese films had to say.
Now let's look at Boxoffice. Dear reader - I mean, time machine companion - I hate this one.
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| Americans in the 1950s would go see a Japanese movie and be like "aw man there's Japanese people in this" |
Emphasizing that "the cast means nothing" not once but twice within a one-paragraph review, describing Kenji Sahara and Yumi Shirakawa as having "only a slightly Oriental cast of features and [almost resembling] American teenagers"... oh boy. I forgot we were still in the 1950s for a moment.
Let's move on to Variety. Oh, it doesn't look good already. "As corny as it is furious, The Mysterians is red-blooded phantasmagoria - made in Japan and dedicated to those undiscerning enough to be taken in by its hokum."
I've got a review from the New York Times as well, but I won't repeat it here since it's much of the same wisecracking and actually goes so far as to refer to it as a "mess". I do appreciate this quote, however: "It has to do with a huge, globular fortress that plops to earth 'from the fifth planet' (wherever that is), envelops a group of glamour girls and is finally destroyed by a brave young Galahad."
Hmm. Well, while the critics seem intent on dismissing the Japanese cast altogether, the people in the Metro with us today who have more "highbrow" tastes will definitely recognize Takashi Shimura from the Kurosawa films that have been playing stateside since Rashomon in the early '50s. People have also seen Yoshio Tsuchiya if they've seen Seven Samurai, but they probably wouldn't recognize him here, as his face is covered in The Mysterians and he is dubbed over. Anybody who's seen Godzilla, King of the Monsters! will (theoretically) recognize both Momoko Kōchi and Akihiko Hirata, and a very select few might have seen Hirata in other things - possibly one of Inagaki's Samurai films, or even Itsuko and Her Mother, although the chances of that being the thing they know him from are vanishingly slim since, as far as I know, that film only screened in Hawaii. And, of course, anybody here who's seen Rodan could recognize him, Kenji Sahara, and Yumi Shirakawa. We'll be seeing them all again quite soon in The H-Man as well.
So the cast means nothing to Americans, huh? It's debatable how much anybody actually cared, but to say that none of the cast of The Mysterians would have been familiar to American audiences is just not true.
I'll leave this alone in a minute, I promise, but stick with me a little longer here. I've always been curious about how much American audiences were actually paying attention to the cast of the imported Japanese films they were watching. I looked up Variety's review of The H-Man, which is credited to the same person who reviewed The Mysterians, and...
...this critic appears to have mixed up Kenji Sahara and Akihiko Hirata's roles in the film, which means he presumably was not recognizing people who were in the same movie he'd just watched a week or two prior (or at least not bothering to put names to faces). So the answer to "how much did Americans care?" is probably not very much.
Alright, the movie's about to start. We're in our seats, and you've endured me lecturing you for this long, time to get down to business. For a more extensive overview of how the American cut differs from the Japanese original, I'll turn it over to our friend Brian Culver at The History Vortex. One of the more notable losses in the American cut - which is fairly good as far as these things go - is Ifukube's formidable score, which appears to have been distorted into something more like the eerie, theremin-soaked sci-fi soundtracks Americans were used to. The second Moguera is also cut out entirely, which is a shame, because I screened The Mysterians to a small audience myself back in the present day and that moment got some big laughs.
The Metro is a stadium-style theater that has only one single screen but a massive seating capacity - 856 seats by the time of its closure, but probably a bit less when we're here. We're sitting in the front row, naturally. Can you see us? We're right down there.
85 minutes later (the U.S. cut shaves down some special effects scenes, removing three minutes of runtime), we're ready to get out of here before Watusi starts and go back home.
Thank you for accompanying me on this journey. I'm not talking about the time machine anymore, I'm talking about this blog. It's a lonely business running a fansite for an actor who most people in the English-speaking world only know for one role, but I genuinely enjoy writing these posts very much. I think it is worth doing and I hope you think it is worth reading.
Even if you don't, there will still be more posts.
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Note:
In this post I've embellished a few details to give a fictionalized idea of what it would be like to sit down and see The Mysterians in a U.S. theater during its initial run. While I have no proof that The Mysterians ever played at the Metro Theater specifically, it very well could have. However, everything else is factual and is taken from reliable primary sources. The photo of the theater interior I've used is not the Metro Theater but the Bagdad Theater in Portland, Oregon; I've chosen it for its ambiance and the size of its screen. You can find more information about the Metro Theater here.
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Image credits:
Metro Theater exterior: from Jack Tillmany collection
Metro Theater lobby: photo by Ted Newman, from Jack Tillmany collection
Bagdad Theater interior: photo by Kathleen Nyman
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