Saturday Matinee

When you grow up on the periphery of an Empire such as the United States, the kind of consumable culture you are exposed to is not necessarily that which would be considered popular by the Empire's mainstream standards.

So, for example, I grew up watching a lot of what constitutes today's treasure trove of Warner Bros.' banned cartoons. It was so common to see every morning jazz jivin' sambos, looney dwarf-like Hitlers and wascally wabbits dressed in drag on TV that I was actually shocked to learn those cartoons were censored and outright banned here in the U.S.

GOLDILOCKS AND THE JIVIN' BEARS (1944), is part of the now infamous Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies, Censored Eleven. I find it fascinating that the dogs of animation, Harman and Ising, are included in this list, as well as Fritz Freleng, Chuck Jones, Robert Clampett and Tex Avery.

Harman and Ising founded Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes, and became famous for a little sambo-like character called Bosko. They basically translated the minstrel theater of the time into cartoons --and in the process made film and animation history.

I think it is unwise to ban these cultural gems from TV. Forget about the puritanical sensitivities of the political correctness police. I think that contextualized as part of the country's popular culture, they are invaluable tools for the world to understand the cultural development of the United States.

Welcome to our first ever Blog-In theater.

Thanks to the treasure trove of public domain movies I have found on Video.Google, I am going to make it a point for us to have a culturekitchen Saturday Matinée; followed up by a Sunday afternoon chat.

This is the original eco-terrorist and nuclear mutant-freak Godzilla; not the saviour of Japan reinvented in the 1960s. It has a very young Raymond Burr as, Steve Martin (the irony!) the American documentarian of this iguanadonian catastrophe. It oozes post-WW2 cheeziness through each reel hole.

What is most interesting about this first Godzilla is how it was made. There is a 1954 Japanese original. This is the 1956 American adaptation; which may well be the first successful film mashup ever produced in this country:

The adaptation process consisted of filming numerous new scenes featuring Raymond Burr and others, and inserting them into an edited version of the Japanese original to create a new film. The new scenes, written by Al C. Ward and directed by Terry Morse, were photographed by Guy Roe with careful attention to matching the visual tone of the Japanese film, while Burr's on-screen character appeared to interact with the original Japanese cast through intricate cutting and the use of doubles for the Japanese principals, in matching dress, shot from behind in direct interaction with Burr's character. (This same technique was used 29 years later in the film Godzilla 1985, with Raymond Burr reprising his original role of reporter Steve Martin.)