Yuku free message boards

Interesting. It's funny how much stuff is subject to Toho's approval and how similar it must be when dealing with Celestial for the Shaw Brothers. One could probably have a contest to determine which company has more "subject to licensors approval" provisions. Still good to read they are coming out and it's nice that Toho is letting them do a Blu-ray release ahead of their own. I wonder if Toho is planning to restart their Blu-ray releases around the same time as MB's scheduled release?

gorgozilla wrote:

---

I really hope Toho lets them use the AIP dub for DESTROY ALL MONSTERS this time out.
I still don't understand why the R1 DVD of RODAN has the American dub, but THE MYSTERIANS doesn't. They're both RKO releases of Toho movies. Why did one get permission to use the original American dub and the other didn't? I normally watch Japanese movies in English, but the anime nerd voice actors in MB's DVD of THE MYSTERIANS are so bad that I make an exception in that case.

I think that one of the problems with The Mysterians is that no good elements exist of the English dub.

Rodan was released by DCA and not RKO. I also think it helps that Rodan was owned by UPA (who acquired it at some point after it's original release) and that elements have existed for it. Granted, judging by the version aired on TCM yesterday the elements are the same used back in the 1980s for Vestron Video!

DougGorius wrote:

---

I think it's hilarious that they put in the effort to create a new dub of THE MYSTERIANS when there are at least three pristine 35mm prints of the original dubbed version out there... If you don't believe me, Baradagi85 has one. I'm sure he wouldn't mind posting stills from it.

Except the American version is edited differently (meaning they would need to create a new American version), they would have had to contact one of those people with the 3 prints, and MB would have needed Toho to clear it.

Uchujin65 wrote:

---

They could easily do a "reconstruction" with the Japanese print and just use the credits from a lesser source.

Another thing they could have done pretty easily with some man hours is just reedit the audio from the US version to match the Japanese print and use the Japanese print's audio for the footage left out, a lot of the old bootleg tapes of Japanese movies in the analogue era used to do this.

Once again you would have needed to have Toho's permission. There is a very good chance they would not allow for lower quality material to be used (like happened with Varan).

Goji wrote:

---

gfanikf wrote:

---

Goji wrote:

---

Is that really the reason that VARAN THE UNBELIEVABLE wasn't included on the MB's disk? That sucks..

I don't want it to sound like it was Toho's fault. I think it was a combination of Toho not being fully sure of the rights to the US version (not that they didn't own Baran), there was no desire to recreate the US version (or good materials), and thus Toho wouldn't approve using anything Varan related, IIRC.

That's really too bad. I heard rumblings that there was an effort to also include the international dub of VARAN as well, but for whatever reason, it wasn't included. I didn't even know an export version of VARAN existed until a few years ago, and it's also listed in Toho's 1967 sales brochure. (posted by Baradagi and August in various places over the years).

Yeah, I've seen that sales brochure. Toho could never find any English langauge material. Varan (1958) was before most of the films started having dubs done (Atragon/Matango being some early ones in 62 and 63), so I suspect a Varan dub may have been mis-cataloged or even junked. Still Toho is actually pretty good with providing licencees with English language materials. I think Varan is kind of an odd exception to the rule that Toho keeps good care of their own English language material.