Last Saturday
out of boredom from the heat and seeing if there was the scheduled race on the
television, I ran into this.
Not a
connoisseur of crappy monster movies, I have seen my share and knew right away
what this Japanese film from 1967 was all about. I sort of came into the middle
but the theme didn’t take long to catch up to.
Handsome guy
and pretty girl trying to save the world from guys in rubber chicken suits
stomping on model train decorations and tearing down balsa wood buildings.
There were the usual bathtub splashes of bombs missing the monsters and the
same faces staring up and then running away. The post-war military was
omnipresent as if Japan had won the war and the firecrackers looked impressive
with the explosion soundtrack. The same bad stiff acting and terrible script
was the same but suddenly something stood out.
It seems the
plot of this particular bad movie was some reporter ventured to an unknown
island and found this baby monster and decided to adopt it and take it home
with them. Of course that pissed off the parents who followed and all sorts of
bad things happened.
The pretty
typical reaction incurred as you can witness here:
But what
caught my attention was this kid. The movie cast listed him as ‘Saki’ (not the British
writer or the rice wine). He was supposed to be this native child of the
mysterious island jungle who just tagged along with the baby monster back to
Japan.
What got me
was this was a Japanese kid in black
face.
Was this
movie so cheap they could not hire a (what was the term in 1967?) black kid to
play the part? Was the standard of acting too much for the available actors or
did the producer not want to us a person-of-color in this movie about rubber
monsters who breathed blue special effects to burn up model planes on strings?
Not that the
kid did a bad job of wanting to save the baby GAPPA (though through translation
I don’t think the vocal reflection might have matched what they were looking
for from a jungle native) but the bad makeup and the nappy wig were obvious
that Saki was not going to the Oscars.
Then I think
of films like “King Kong” or “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and how much I was exposed to
the fakery.
I’d read all
the books and heard all the stories and wondered why other people seemed
subservient to people I knew and hung around with and they weren’t part of our
gang? The Jim Crow propaganda tried to explain it but it didn’t match with what
the Sunday sermon preached.
Don’t go
online and search for this movie for it is not worth the time, but if you must
wonder about ‘black face’ go to “The
Birth of A Nation”.
Hopefully my
generation and perhaps the next will take these stereotypes to the grave but
the library will remain.
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