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A note about the May POTM
🕑 Added 2019-05-29 03:29:49 +0000 UTCThe May Pic of the Month is finally finished! And I'll post it just after I post this.
But I wanted to say a few words about the inspiration for the POTM. I felt, though, that if I put this in the picture's post It would make the post too long. So I'm posting this separately so that those who are interested in my inspirations and my thought processes can read this and (I hope) gain an even deeper appreciation for the POTM; and those who just want to ogle the pic can skip this post.
So:
It is my contention that the 1964 movie Godzilla vs. The Thing is quite possibly the most deceptively marketed motion picture ever released.
"Whut? What's that have to do with the Pic of the Month?" You'll see.
To be clear, Toho Studios was not responsible for the overseas advertising campaign, which seemed determined to hide the fact that "The Thing" that Godzilla would face in this film was actually Mothra, the star of her own 1961 movie. That's on the foreign distributors like American International Pictures (AIP), the US distributor of an English-language adaptation of the original Mosura tai Gojira (literally "Mothra vs. Godzilla"). One of the lobby cards used to promote the movie pretended it was necessary to "censor" the appearance of "The Thing" to protect "those who cannot take the full horror":
Ah, but it gets better:
Aren't you curious about what that monster behind the "censored" card actually looked like? Well, take a look at the Italian poster (which inexplicably renames the movie Watang! Nel Favoloso Impero Dei Monstri):
And there you have it: inspiration for this month's POTM! Imagine Tetsuko tangling with that creature (or something very similar)...
And BTW: how disappointed were the moviegoers of '64, going to see this movie because the posters promised a heart-stoppingly frightening monster, only to find out that "The Thing" was... a giant moth?
Comments
John Rikhter
>which inexplicably renames the movie Watang! Nel Favoloso Impero Dei Monstri I'm Italian and I can say that unfortunately back in the 60s-70s it was very common in my country to rename foreign movies and other kinds of entertainment (including books aimed at the general public) with something entirely different from the original title. It was a bad habit mostly derived from the previous fascism era (from the 1920s to the late 1940s) in which everything foreign had to be renamed to make it sound more Italian and clearer to a culture that's historically averse to learning foreign words and languages (even today everything we see on TV and in theaters is dubbed). But it was also due to Italian publishers which seemed desperately bent on putting their own arbitrary twist on titles to make products [allegedly] more marketable. Nowadays it's rare but it still happens sometimes, one of the most infamous example in the modern era is the excellent Jim Carrey's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" which has been called "Se Mi Lasci Ti Cancello" ("If you break up with me I'll erase you") in Italy.
David C. Matthews
Well, if she does fight a giant moth, it won't be Mothra. Putting aside the fact I wouldn't be allowed to use Mothra in my stories, I see Tetsuko and Mothra teaming up to fight another monster.
Gwahar
Mothra is my favorite Kaiju. Now I am imagining Tetsuko fighting a giant moth
