American re-edits

Varan (1958)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)

Also discussed: Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), Gigantis, the Fire Monster (1959), Varan the Unbelievable (1962), King Kong vs Godzilla (US, 1963), Godzilla 1985 (1985).

The time has come to talk of the American re-edits of Shōwa era Japanese kaiju eiga. Varan presents an excellent opportunity for this, as it was affected perhaps more than any other movie in its transition from source material to US cinematic release, and under particularly unusual circumstances.

It started as a co-production between Toho and American Broadcasting-Paramount Theatres (AB-PT); readers may recall that this company was originally planning to handle the US release of the first Godzilla sequel but ran into financial trouble... well, right around the time Varan was being filmed. The intention was to make Varan as a three-part serialised film for TV, in black and white and with a fast turnaround. When the American side of the production fell through, Toho pivoted to try to get a cinematic film out of the project, cutting the completed scenes together with new footage and cropping the picture for cinema screens. The result is honestly better than you might expect from this description, but that’s a low bar to clear – it looks cheap and uneven.

An academic expedition looking for rare butterflies in a remote village ends in the deaths of two students. The villagers, who are portrayed as superstitious, backwards and living in squalour, blame the deaths on their monstrous god Baradagi. A motley party of students and journalists explores the area and, sure enough, sees Baradagi rising from a misty lake in the woods nearby. It tramples the village and returns to the lake.

Dr Sugimoto, the students’ biology lecturer, renames the creature Varan on the basis that it’s clearly a member of the long-extinct Varanopode species. (Note: this species is entirely fictional. Dr Sugimoto might have meant the Varanidae family, of which monitor lizards are the only currently extant genus. Then again, perhaps this scene was intended as a parody of the standard “I recognise that dinosaur” scene from other movies of our acquaintance.) Varan is a large, quadripedal reptile with spines all over its head and down its back and broad webbing down each side joining arms to legs. Morphologically, it looks more like a flying squirrel than any known dinosaur. It doesn’t look very much like a lake monster.

The JSDF rolls into the village area and tries to use chemical explosives against Varan, but this plan backfires. Varan climbs the nearest mountain, spreads its webbing and glides off towards Tokyo. As is usually the case, it’s impervious to conventional weaponry. The JSDF is stumped until a Dr Fujimura comes forward with an experimental explosive that could destroy Varan from the inside. (The scientist with the experimental weapon is, naturally, played by Hirata Akihiko, aka Dr Serizawa in Godzilla (1954). Also recognisable is Tsuchiya Yoshio, the air commander in Godzilla Raids Again (1955), playing one of the JSDF officers.) As luck would have it, Varan is attracted to flares to the extent that it will swallow them whole. Following a daring exercise to corral Varan, the JSDF succeeds in attaching the explosive material to a series of flares and dropping them into its mouth, sealing its fate.

A couple of years later, two American companies – Dallas Productions and Cory Productions – took on the project of preparing the movie for a US release, which was sold on to Crown International Pictures for distribution in cinemas. The Dallas/Cory co-production team retained only a third of the original content. For the rest, they filmed new scenes with an American cast, led by Myron Healey as a US Navy commander, and intercut these with Toho’s effects shots and some of the Japanese characters to create a broadly similar story. Varan the Unbelievable (1962), directed by Jerry A Baerwitz, looks even choppier than Varan. There seem to have been problems in particular with the cinematic aspect ratio – it’s been suggested that Dallas/Cory couldn’t get hold of the source footage and had to work from Toho’s final print.

The major changes made to the story, apart from the overhaul of the cast, are that the village is relocated from a rural area near Tokyo to an island, that the monster is not deliberately attacked at the lake but is disturbed by a perfectly innocent series of desalination experiments, and that all scenes of Varan flying are cut. Also, and for no readily apparent reason, Varan is referred to throughout as "Obake”.

This extreme change to the material, creating a second, ostensibly distinct feature, was nothing new. It was in keeping with what Jewell Enterprises had done several years earlier when they produced the American version of Godzilla (1954).

Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956) is shorter than Godzilla but only retains about an hour of its source film. The other quarter of the American version consists of new scenes starring Raymond Burr as Steve Martin, a journalist visiting his “old college friend” Dr Serizawa who finds himself trapped in Tokyo with the scoop of the century. Apparently the American producers felt unable to present their audience with a straight, dubbed, foreign film and decided to add Burr in to make it more marketable. (Burr was a known film actor but not a big name star – he hadn’t yet made his TV breakthrough playing stoic detectives, first in a series based on the Perry Mason stories of Erle Stanley Gardner which ran for a decade, then in the original series Ironside which ran for most of the decade following that.) Burr’s scenes were filmed with Japanese American actors “translating” some of the original dialogue for him, or with the camera shooting over an extra’s shoulder while Burr talked to them. These could then be intercut with close-up shots of the original cast, with the dialogue mistranslated or dubbed over as necessary, to give a convincing impression that journalist Steve Martin was in the thick of the action.

Godzilla, King of the Monsters! is an effective movie in its own right, but subtly different in tone from Godzilla. When we first see ships being destroyed, we also hear Godzilla’s roar, which wasn’t the case in Godzilla – this puts the fictional action at a further remove from the real-world events that inspired it. Dr Yamane still suggests that H-bomb tests are to blame for Godzilla’s appearance, but he doesn’t specifically talk about the kaiju’s deep-sea habitat being disturbed, and as the Soviet Union had by now tested a hydrogen bomb (in 1955, over land in what is now Kazakhstan), viewers might assume the blame is being spread further afield than the US-controlled Marshall Islands. Crucially, Yamane’s final dire pronouncement that more nuclear tests will mean more monsters is replaced with an upbeat voiceover from Martin to the effect that the crisis is over and the world can “wake up and live again”. On the positive side, making Martin and Serizawa old pals gives Martin an excellent reason to know about Serizawa’s research and to be involved in the plot’s denouement, although it affects the dynamics of the relationship between Serizawa, Emiko and Ogata. And most of the key scenes are kept in, including the horrors of the aftermath of Godzilla’s Tokyo rampage, giving the movie some impact.

King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) got similar treatment but for different and, I think, more entertaining reasons. (I’ll be covering King Kong vs Godzilla in a couple or three weeks and don’t want to steal too much of my own thunder, but here goes.) Willis O’Brien, creator of the stop-motion effects in King Kong (1933), had an idea for a sequel that would team Kong up with a monster created by a descendant of Dr/Baron Frankenstein.

Pause for a moment to let that nugget sink in.

By this time – the end of the 1950s – RKO Pictures had stopped producing its own films and its intellectual assets were being handled by Universal Pictures, who had produced several Frankenstein movies in the 30s and 40s, so there was at least a behind-the-scenes connection. Producer John Beck took O’Brien’s King Kong vs Frankenstein concept, commissioned a script based on it and touted it around, but was unable to get a US studio to back it. He ended up taking the script to Japan and offering it to Toho Studios. Toho decided instead to team Kong up with Godzilla and leased the character of Kong from RKO. John Beck nonetheless remained in charge of producing a version of the film for release in the US, with Universal distributing King Kong vs Godzilla (US, 1963).

Like Jewell Enterprises before him, Beck decided the movie would need significant changes before it could be shown to an American audience, including the insertion of several new scenes with American characters (played by actors you’re unlikely to have heard of). These scenes are set on board a space station (borrowed from the effects footage of a Toho space adventure) that is the base of operations for a United Nations news channel, monitoring and reporting on the events as they unfold.

Pause and let that one sink in, too – an orbital newsroom owned and run by the UN. In a scene added on the front of the story, the UN anchorman presents a good news story about the UN helping to clear up after an earthquake in Chile. In the next bulletin, it turns out that the nuclear submarine that accidentally wakes Godzilla up is not under the direction of the US, as in the Japanese original, but of the UN. This whole arrangement looks like the wet dream of a “New World Order” conspiracy theorist, except that I think it must have played differently in 1963.

Most of the comedy of the original, which was played for laughs, is gone, although the movie retains the slapstick shenanigans of Mr Tako, the marketing director of Pacific Pharmaceutical who wants to exploit Kong. The scenario is rewritten as if it were the first time anyone had ever seen Godzilla or Kong, even though somehow everyone already knows both their names. One major change, and I plan to expand on this in the King Kong vs Godzilla blog post, is that the kaiju are figuratively reduced from being barely comprehensible forces of nature to merely gigantic animals. The main reason for this seems to be so that, when the two are brought together, UN News’ guest correspondent on natural history can talk down Godzilla as having a brain the size of a berry while giving better odds on “thinking animal” Kong (not coincidentally, the American-made monster). The original leaves open the possibility that either kaiju might return, but the US version insinuates that Godzilla is gone forever and only Kong survives.

King Kong vs Godzilla feels like a rather mean-spirited retelling of King Kong vs Godzilla.

The changes made to Godzilla Raids Again were of a different nature. No new scenes with an American leading man were added in – only a new shot or two of extras in an “international” bar – but the name of Godzilla was removed entirely for the movie’s US release. This time Paul Schreibman was the producer – eventually – taking over from the defunct AB-PT. Schreibman was understandably loath to present an obvious sequel to something that had been released by someone else. Consequently, Godzilla was renamed Gigantis, although Anguirus was fortunate enough to keep his own name. (In an unnecessary extra twist of confusion, Gigantis is said to be another member of Anguirus’ species, despite the visible differences.) The biggest change had to be made to the scene in which Dr Yamane briefed a room full of officials by showing them special effects shots from Godzilla. These shots were replaced with a cobbled-together mess of cosmological and dinosaur effects shots from other films, covering every style from claymation to puppets to stuntmen in costumes. The result is that, in Gigantis, the Fire Monster (1959), directed by Hugo Grimaldi and ultimately distributed by Warner Brothers, Dr Yamane gives the terrified authorities a lecture on the history of our planet and the age of dinosaurs that’s only glancingly relevant to the crisis in that it tries to explain Gigantis’ fiery breath as being somehow connected to the Earth’s volcanic activity.

Watching these radically altered versions of the movies is a perplexing experience. They have their own merits, sometimes improving the pacing of sections of the plot, sometimes conveying what’s going on more clearly, sometimes adding a pleasing new turn of phrase to a scene. Sometimes, though, they feel awfully close to desecrating the original creators’ work.

Most Japanese kaiju movies screened in America were subjected to some alteration – usually redubbed dialogue that changed the meaning of scenes, shots moved around in the edit to present the action in a way better suited to American audiences, and sometimes re-editing to change the implication of the action. None were quite so violently reconstructed as these early examples... until The Return of Godzilla (1984). This movie was intended to relaunch the Godzilla series in the new cultural milieu of the late Cold War. Gone was the baggage of the Shōwa era movies, with the sole exception of the 1954 original. When New World Pictures got their hands on the US rights for this, just for old times’ sake they filmed a raft of new scenes with Raymond Burr reprising his role from Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, although this time he was stuck in one room reporting on the plot. (Burr was now tremendously famous, and at around this very same time he got the offer to star in a relaunch of Perry Mason that would run for another decade.) RJ Kizer directed these scenes and they were edited into selections from the Toho movie as Godzilla 1985 (1985). New World also made sure to re-edit certain scenes so that the Soviet characters looked more villainous.