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The American Version

It’s clobberin’ time!

In May of 1964, it was announced that Henry G. Saperstein – remember that name; it’ll be more important later in the series – had acquired the U.S. rights to Mothra vs. Godzilla, and was going to release it as “Godzilla vs. the Giant Moth.” This didn’t last. Saperstein sold the rights to American International Pictures, where it came under the stewardship of James Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff. Nicholson renamed the film “Godzilla vs. the Thing.” (Which latter character presumably came from the Place, where it lived side-by-side with the Persons.) Perhaps he thought the giant-moth idea wouldn’t play in Peoria; perhaps he was concerned about copyright, as another company had released Mothra in the U.S. Whatever his reasoning was, AIP’s massive marketing campaign played off of the ambiguity of the new title, tempting audiences with the mysterious identity of Godzilla’s opponent. The dubbing for this version was done by Titra Studios, an organization which provided supplemental income for numerous struggling actors. Said actors’ attitude toward these movies ranged, predictably, from enthusiasm to outright disdain. The dubbed film debuted on a double bill with Voyage to the End of the Universe. It has been reported that many of the children who went to see the bill were really only there for the Godzilla picture.

The American version of Mothra vs. Godzilla is far and away the most respectful of any such version to date. The music is intact; the translation is excellent. Very few scenes are taken out, and most of them are extremely trivial. The dubbing is mostly very good, though some of the characters have extremely lame Asian accents, as if we are meant to believe that all these Japanese people are speaking English, as a second language, amongst themselves all the time. Mothra is referred to by her real name the first couple of times we hear of her, but then she starts getting called “the Thing,” and this about half the time, apparently at random. Why would the Shobijin call her “the Thing”? Or the Infant Islanders? Other renamings occur – Infant Island becomes Mothra Island, and Junko becomes Yuka, or Yoka, or something like that. But these are fairly minor points in an otherwise first-rate ‘americanization.’ And they are quite offset by a unique event: The U.S. version has a short sequence, shot by Toho Studios, of American warships attacking Godzilla. This was actually a holdover from the original script of the film, in which these were to be ‘Rolisicans’ doing the attacking; this was scrapped, but then reattached, for international release. It’s a pretty good scene, with some great shots of Godzilla emerging from smoky explosions. More importantly, it doesn’t exist in the Japanese version, possibly because it was felt that Japanese audiences would be a little nervous about the depiction of the U.S. military firing missiles toward Japan. But why would that be?

Did you know: In the 1960s, some advertising would deliberately mislead its audience!

The DVD

Mothra vs. Godzilla has been released at least three times on DVD in America. The first two times were bare-bones, dubbed-version-only releases. Scorn them! For the third is glorious, being as it is from Classic Media’s recent line of Godzilla DVDs.

The Classic Media DVD contains excellent prints of both the Japanese and American versions of the film, as well as the untranslated, two-minute long trailer for the Japanese version. There is also a ‘Poster Slide Show,’ with introductory text; many of these posters come from reissues of the film, in Japan, in 1970 and 1988. And Mothra looks so badass in some of them.

Purchase it! In the name of all that is holy!

There is also an “Akira Ifukube Biography with Tribute from Shogo Tomiyama.” This featurette, which is all about the first and greatest of the composers for the series, is produced and narrated by Ed Godziszewski, as usual. And as usual, his reading is a bit dry, but the depth of his knowledge beyond reproach. And if he is responsible for the vast array of still images over which he reads, then he deserves greater credit still. This lasts for about eight minutes, and is followed by five minutes of text, the translation of some remarks by producer Shogo Tomiyama on the topic of Ifukube. And five minutes of text is a lot of minutes of text, but you still learn from it that “no one could compare with (Ifukube) in a tuxedo,” and that kind of deep, personal knowledge is worth the effort.

Finally, there is the commentary. As with Godzilla Raids Again, it is only on the American version, which is fine. Better still to have commentaries on both, but presumably DVD space does not allow this, and if you’re going to have one, put it on the dub, so you can talk about both versions. And as with Gojira, the commentary is provided by Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski, and two more knowledgeable sources would be hard to imagine. They know the histories of each and every actor. They know how every special effect is created. They are able to provide audio from interviews with Henry Saperstein and the dubbing cast! As with seemingly all Godzilla scholars, they are absolutely bananas for this film, and they do therefore run the risk of overselling it a bit. Though this is not to say that they do not criticize it at times. They seem to have taken pains to refrain from talking over one another, and to insure that each gets about as much time on the track. Which all is good, but leads to a rehearsed quality that is, shall we say, unspectacular. But what are you gonna do, complain? These people are the best! So good, in fact, that it is very nearly tempting to take their word that this is the best of the Godzilla sequels. But there are movies a lot more fun, yet to come.

Movie:
U.S. Version:
DVD: 1/2

Updated acknowledgments and bibliography

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 7:00 am and is filed under Godzilla Project. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.