#shintoho

Celebrating episode 300, your deadicated hosts travel to Japan for Nobuo Nakagawa's masterpiece JIGOKU (1960)! The film stars Shigeru Amachi, Yoichi Numata and Utako Mitsuya.

Your hosts discuss nihilism, Buddhism, gore and more in this landmark episode.

EVIL BRAIN FROM OUTER SPACE

Three episodes of Japanese SUPER GIANT series from 1958 / 59 -- The Space Mutant Appears, The Devil's Incarnation and Kingdom of the Poison Moth -- edited together for US TV featuring Sūpā Jaiantsu aka Giant of Steel aka Starman aka Spaceman.

Kinuyo Tanaka on the set of Love Letter (1953) in Eiga Fan, January 1954.

The Golden Age of Tokusatsu was the period of time in which Eiji Tsuburaya and his team experimented with and codified the techniques and methods of special effects filmography that, to this day, separate Japanese genre film making from that of any other country.  It runs through the 1960s and into the 1970s and covers the first major Monster Boom and into the Henshin Boom that followed.  Japan’s Film industry at the time was dominated by four major studios who all had some tokusatsu output at the time.  The first and most well known was Toho.

Toho was founded in 1932 and, during the 1960s was producing the Godzilla series with Eiji Tsuburaya and his team handling the special effects.  They also produced a number of other fantasy, science fiction and horror films including: Dogora, Gorath and Matango.

The rival offshoot of Toho known as Shintoho, which was created in a bitter strike during the American Occuption in 1947 that required military intervention, went bankrupt in 1961 and folded.

Shintoho, though short-lived, did leave its mark with the Super Giant a.k.a Starman series of film serials featuring one of the earliest big screen tokusatsu heroes (who was created as a rival to the other big cinematic heroes of the time Planet Prince and Gekko Kamen).

One of the older of the big studios during this period was Nikkatsu, which was founded in 1912. 

This studio was not well known for Tokusatsu productions though they did make the rather lackluster kaiju film Gappa in 1967. They folded in the 1990s but have come back as the producers of the low-budget horror offerings from Sushi Typhoon.

The oldest film studio in Japan though was (and still is) Shochiku, which was founded in 1895 though at the time it was primarily a producer of kabuki theater productions.

They were a bit late to the tokusatsu bandwagon but manged to produce one of the strangest entries in the first kaiju boom, Giant Space Monster Guilala a.k.a. The X From Outer Space as well as a few more horror themed but still impressive movies like Goke: Bodysnatcher from Hell and The Living Skeleton.

They still exist today and are one of the main theatrical distributors for the current Ultraman movies.

Founded in 1942, Daiei was the new kid on the block though they made a name for themselves with some critical acclaim for films such as Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon.

They were a fairly prolific producer of tokusatsu features as well with their Gamera, Daimajin and the more traditional monster featured in the Youkai series.

Daiei suffered in the late 1960s and even working with Nikkatsu on co-productions didn’t help so they went into bankruptcy in 1971. The company changed hands several times with all of their assets currently being held by Kadokawa. The final big player in the Golden Age of Tokusatsu needs no real introduction and that is Toei.

Founded in 1938, Toei made a name for themselves in the Post-War years with a series of Period dramas and yakuza films including the famous Battles Without Honor and Humanity series. They became one of the leading names in tokusatsu with films like Planet Prince, Gekko Kamen and Decisive Battle of the Giant Magic Dragon a.k.a The Magic Serpent.

Toei would go on to help kick-start the Henshin Boom on TV with shows like Kamen Rider and Android Kikaider, further speeding the decline of motion picture attendance that spelled the doom for smaller studios like Daiei and would lead to the almost decade-long hiatus for Toho’s venerable Godzilla series.