Digi-Schlock: GAMERA THE GIANT MONSTER (Shout! Factory DVD)

One of the nicest things about the DVD for­mat is that it has allowed mate­r­ial that had pre­vi­ously been dis­missed as kid­die fare — Warner Brothers car­toons, Three Stooges shorts, etc. — to receive new treat­ments on home video that not only improve the A/V qual­ity but also treat them as cul­tural arti­facts that are wor­thy of respect and seri­ous crit­i­cal thought.

The Japanese giant-monster sub­genre of sci-fi, known to its fans via the home­grown name of kaiju-eiga, has ben­e­fit­ted greatly from this trend, with films like Godzilla and The Mysterians get­ting the kind of treat­ment that the subgenre’s devoted fan­base has always yearned for.  The lat­est clas­sic kaiju-eiga to get the royal treat­ment is Gamera The Giant Monster, which just received a hand­some DVD release through Shout! Factory.

For the trans­fer, the com­pany went back to the vault ele­ments to cre­ate an HD mas­ter that is pre­sented anamor­phi­cally in its orig­i­nal scope-format.  The results look fan­tas­tic, with a nice level of detail and tex­ture in how it presents the film’s moody black-and-white cin­e­matog­ra­phy.  It sticks with the orig­i­nal Japanese ver­sion of the film so view­ers do not see the addi­tional scenes that were shot for the American ver­sion of the film with actors Brian Donlevy and Albert Dekker.  Seeing those scenes would have been fun but the film actu­ally plays bet­ter with­out them.

This disc also uses the orig­i­nal Japanese mono sound­track and includes English sub­ti­tles.  It has been mas­tered well and the subs are easy to read.  Fans of MST3k ver­sion of Gamera will no doubt miss its awful English dub but its omis­sion suits the seri­ous treat­ment this disc gives to the film.

Finally, the Shout! Factory disc offers some note­wor­thy bonus fea­tures.  The orig­i­nal Japanese trailer is included (with English subs) and a talking-heads ret­ro­spec­tive video seg­ment that inter­views direc­tor Noriaki Yuasa and sev­eral of the crew­men involved in the pro­duc­tion.  Everyone involved in this seg­ment  approaches the film in a hum­ble, unpre­ten­tious style and it is inter­est­ing to hear their behind-the-scenes tales (Yuasa, always quick with a child­like grin, admits he got the job to direct Gamera The Giant Monster because no other direc­tor at Daiei wanted to do it).

However, the most note­wor­thy of the extras is a sub­stan­tial com­men­tary track from author/kaiju-eiga his­to­rian August Ragone.  He estab­lishes a blis­ter­ing pace in the track’s open­ing min­utes, fir­ing off stats for every actor who appears on screen and fill­ing every nook and cranny of the run­ning time with appro­pri­ate kaiju-eiga lore.  Ragone even notes the dif­fer­ences between the script and the film, right down to point­ing out how scenes from the script were restruc­tured in the edit­ing.  He also throws in a ton of amus­ing trivia, like how the child actor who played Toshio went on to a pro­fes­sional singing career and how staffers drew lots to deter­mine who would wear the Gamera suit on a par­tic­u­lar day.  However, the best bit is an expla­na­tion of how the use of a tur­tle for the film’s cen­tral mon­ster reflects its sta­tus as a sym­bol of strength and longevity in Japanese soci­ety.  All in all, this track is likely to give you a brand-new per­spec­tive on the film.

The care used in pro­duc­ing this disc also extends to the pack­ag­ing.  For instance, the see-through inte­rior of the case allows the buyer to see a mock-scientific dia­gram of Gamera.  There’s also an excel­lent, full-color insert book­let included that fea­tures an English trans­la­tion of an essay on the film by direc­tor Yuasa and biogra­phies for the film’s major characters.

In short, this disc rep­re­sents the intel­li­gent, infor­ma­tive treat­ment of this prop­erty that kaiju-eiga fans have been wait­ing for and is hope­fully a har­bin­ger of good things to come for Shout! Factory’s future Gamera releases.  If you like this sub­genre, it’s a must.

For extra his­tor­i­cal detail and DVD infor­ma­tion, it is rec­om­mended that you read this excel­lent DVD Talk review penned by Japanese film his­to­rian Stuart Galbraith IV: http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/42231/gamera-the-giant-monster/

Gamera: The Giant Monster When a plane car­ry­ing an atomic bomb crashes over the Arctic Ocean, the explo­sion unleashes Gamera, a 200-foot-long fire-eating tur­tle. He is hun­gry for destruc­tion and not about to be stopped, until he reaches Tokyo, where a small boy forms an odd con­nec­tion with him, allow­ing author­i­ties to unleash ?Plan Z.? FormatAspect RatioLanguageSubtitles NTSC, Region 1, B/W1.85:1 (Widescreen)JapaneseEnglish Run TimeRatingNo. DiscsOrig. Release 78 minutesNR11965 Download Desktop Wallpaper: