Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/07/19/gorath-a-1962-japanese-sci-fi-movie-has-incredible-miniature-sets-and-special-effects.html
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“View here at OKru”
Call me skeptical but I’ll pass on a Russian social media site.
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From what I can tell, this movie isn’t easy to find in English-speaking territories. Any site that you can find it on should appropriately be met with scrutiny. (Cut to about an hour later when someone proves me wrong.)
I’ll still be checking it out - not necessarily that link - because I’m a sucker for these movies.
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Now I’m curious what sort of process plant it was necessary to build to save the world. That chinook heavy lift of the piping section (when there’s cranes all around) is fancy!
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From the internet archive, Japanese language, English subs.
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Not even an hour later, I was proven wrong. I always forget about the internet archive.
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Thank you. Having been raised on Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and Joe 90, I’m a sucker for model destruction.
TOHO SCOPE!!!
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If I’m not mistaken, there are some familiar faces in there. I’ll need to IMDB this later and see.
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I was also struck by the model-making similarity to Supermarionation. I wonder if Gerry and Sylvia were influenced at all by Toho?
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They had to stick in scenes with a giant walrus kaiju because audiences for Toho SF wanted to see a monster. A big planetoid about to destroy the Earth was not scary enough
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Interesting movie. The english subs keep referring to Gorath as a “star” when it’s clearly a planet… And they say if it gets within 400,000km (roughly the distance to the moon) it would destroy the earth, though that seems a bit lenient to me, since they previously said its gravitational pull is 6,000x that of earth!
Also they talk about blowing up Gorath to avoid collision, but they decide that a 6.6 billion megaton atomic bomb could divert the earth away from Gorath’s path. They’re very specific with numbers in this movie.
Edit: and they’re consistent too, later they discover that Gorath is 6,200x earth’s size not 6,000.
I’m really liking this movie. The construction miniature scenes are amazing.
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They’re so calm about it at first, discussing it over dinner like it was rainstorm about to hit. They couldn’t even convince the characters in the movie to be scared, so its no wonder they needed something more for the audience.
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Aha!
Akihiko Hirata – Godzilla 1977, Son of Godzilla, Ultraman, etc.
Kenji Sahara – too many to list, and still going as of 2011
Takashi Shimura – one of Kurosawa’s favorite stock actors
Seizaburô Kawazu – Yojimbo, Mothra, etc.
Well, you get the point.
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I think it would consume all the resources of our world to fuel such gargantuan machines.
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Takashi Shimura was also in the original Gojira
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From what I could tell, he was in everything!
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Probably because the original word was hoshi (星), which can mean either “star” or “planet”.
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They had a 50/50 chance and just flipped a coin…!
Interestingly there’s a lot of English in the movie too, every non-Japanese character in the U.N. scene speaks English with Japanese “side-titles”
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I can’t believe I watched the whole thing.
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