An excellent transfer of the original Toho release of this film, widescreen and English-subtitled, is available from Video Daikaiju (videodaikaiju.com), $15. Vastly superior to the dubbed, pan & scan US edition from Columbia. Great picture and sound on an all-region disc, no special DVD player needed.
Yumi Shirakawa is gorgeous!
Thanks. I might just have to get it, for I have the U.S. version of the film. How is Yumi Shirakawa's singing in the Japanese version?
shareShe's singing in English -- of course, a dubbed American song which she had clearly learned to lip-sync. (It's been years since I've seen the US version so don't really remember, but I assume it's the same American voice and song heard in the Columbia dubbed edition.) That sort of thing -- singers singing in English -- was big in many foreign countries in that era (probably still is), and especially in Japan. But I hadn't been expecting it.
It also still amazes me how sexy Yumi is, and how scantily-clad the showgirls are, for a 1958 film (and science fiction, no less!) from Japan, which was still a bit prudish back then itself.
Also, it occurred to me that a big criticism of the US version concerns the subplot of gangsters and showgirls, which reviewers say is extraneous to the main plot of the film. But when you see the original, you realize that this aspect really isn't tangential at all, but a significant part of the plot's development. The Japanese version stresses the love angle (between Yumi and her gangster boyfriend who's become an H-Man) almost equally to the sci-fi aspect, very different from the Americanized film. I think the Japanese title -- "Bijo to Ekitainingen" -- "Beauty and the Liquid Man" -- shows that the filmmakers saw this in part as a sort of sci-fi love story, similar to the "Beauty and the Beast" subtext of the original "King Kong".
I really liked this movie much more than I'd remembered it from the US edition.
(By the way, a Japanese waitress from my favorite [Japanese] restaurant saw me with the DVD and said she'd seen the film as a kid in Japan, and remembered being very scared by it!)
Awesome, thanks for the information. I had thought that Yumi's singing in the Japanese version was in Japanese, so I thought whomever dubbed her singing in the U.S. version did a very good job because it appeared it was Yumi singing it in English. So, it makes more sense now that that you mentioned Yumi actually lip-syncs the song in English in the original version.
I will see if I can get a copy of the original version of this film. Cool story about you in the Japanese restaurant!
Glad to help out!
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Thank you very much. I have waited forever for Amazon to offer this on DVD and I expected no better than the English dubbed version. I've seen this a couple of times as a child on TV and it was always my favorite Toho releases. Now I will be able to see the unadulterated version. As a child we had a black and white tele, so I have never seen this in color. So once again thank you hobnob53. Thank you.
shareYou're most welcome! Hope you enjoy it (and by the way the color is excellent too).
I was put onto videodaikaiju by other people on IMDb sites and feel duty-bound to spread the word! They have many other original, vintage Japanese sci-fi films (I've posted a few reviews on other sites) and are a good outfit to do business with, and I was very pleased to learn about them myself.
Thank you for your kind words.