Varan: The Unbelievable Thread

[The Real McCoy]

[MekaGojira3k]

[The Real McCoy]

[MekaGojira3k]

[jellydonut25]

[Giganfan]

I've always had a soft spot for Varan The Unbelievable. I think it's because when I saw the original Japanese version for the first time, I was actually surprised by how it looked, sounded and...smelled like your typical Toho kaiju epic. Having seen the Myron Healy U.S. version back in '93 and not being impressed at all by it even at the young age of 8-years old, Daikaiju Baran looked like one of the best monster movies I'd ever seen! Now, of course, it is far from that, and to be honest, watching it today, I find it a bit dull and uninspired, but there's still some good stuff in there, chief among them is the brilliant score by Akira Ifukube. To my taste, it's his best ever, atleast from what I've heard. Also, I've always thought Varan was a really cool kaiju, both in design and execution. He is my "dark-horse" favorite of Toho's monster gallery, and it's a shame that he never made it into more films. I would have REALLY loved to see him play a more active role in Destroy All Monsters, and I really REALLY wish he had made it into GMK as originally intended.

So no, not the best by any means, but I still think Varan The Unbelievable fits comfortably along-side the rest of Toho's classic fantasy films. Oh, and the "flying-squirrel" bit is really neat, even if it was only a brief shot in the movie. Imagine how cool it might have looked in subsequent flicks!

[MekaGojira3k]

[Giganfan]

Yeah, when I saw the U.S. version, I couldn't believe how unfamiliar everything looked. It was so unlike what I was used to seeing in a Japanese monster movie, especially one produced by Toho. I mean, even the U.S. versions of other movies from the genre still maintained the basic tone and feel of the originals. I read somewhere that there's actually only 15-20 minutes of original footage in the U.S. Varan...TWENTY FRIGGIN' MINUTES!!! And everything else is so laughably awful too, so it's not like they replaced it with anything worthwhile.

[MekaGojira3k]

The U.S. cut is like somebody tried to exclusively rip-off King of the Monsters...and failed.

[tbeasley]

I really like the first half of this movie, before Varan flies off. It's quite spooky and I appreciate the theme of skepticism vs. superstition. It's the first Toho genre movie to feature the trinity of reporter, photographer and scientist, and when the military takes over in the second half I sort of zone out. Varan himself is very elemental and almost a fusion of Toho's earlier prehistoric reptiles - Godzilla, Anguirus and Rodan. It's a unique design and I could easily see him, Anguirus and Rodan fit in the universe set by Legendary.

[Psycho Soldier]

Just finished watching the American cut. Well, they took a painfully dull film and made it painfully dull and frustrating. The biggest problem, of course, is Myron Healey's character. This condescending jackass shows little respect for the islanders near the lake, accepts no responsibility for waking up Varan, and perhaps worst of all, gets all the credit for defeating Varan. Because he's a brilliant white man of science, you see. For the most part, he's also conveniently far away from danger - including the danger of losing his job for waking up a monster, despite being warned what would happen. The script could have gone into some interesting issues around the desalination, but it doesn't. So the American footage ends up aggravating and boring.

The Japanese footage doesn't escape unscathed, either. Ifukube's score has been dumped for some unmemorable stock cues, and Varan's roar has been replaced with quiet dog growls and an ill-fitting hissing scream. He doesn't fly in this version, though I'm not too wounded by that cut being made. Also, the film's title is Varan the Unbelievable, but the characters never actually call the monster Varan. Instead, he's called Obaki. I'd have been fine with the names being used interchangeably. Using only Obaki doesn't make much sense here.

So yeah. I have problems with every version of Varan, but I can safely rank the American cut the lowest. I'd file it away as nothing more than a historical curiosity. I'm not sorry to have watched it - I knew what I was in for - but I doubt I'll be watching it again soon.

[Kailem]

So, nearly two decades after the Media Blasters DVD was released (apparently) and years after I thought it had long since become unavailable, I finally got hold of it and watched Varan for the first time!

I was actually really hyped to watch this, since it was one of the few Ishiro Honda-directed giant monster movies I'd not seen. Plus it's one of the few filmed in black and white, giving it a unique and arguably even more "classic" feel than many others. That and Varan's just a cool-looking monster that I've wanted to see more of ever since his three-second cameo in DAM. But at the same time I was well aware of the problems it faced during its "originally intended for TV but then switched to a theatrical release midway through" production. And it's not like anyone ever lists it as one of their favourite movies or one of the greatest examples of Toho's golden age or anything. So I was also tempering my expectations somewhat.

Thankfully though I've got to say I really enjoyed it! Certainly it has its flaws, but overall I thought it was a very solid and kinda "distilled down to its essence" giant monster movie. It's got lots of scenes and structure both reminiscent of the original Godzilla, but also the various other films that came after it, so it was really cool finally getting to see one of the earliest of those films, before everyone involved became way more proficient with them in the 60's.

I loved the atmosphere at the beginning especially. I'm a sucker for these movies starting off with 'explorer travelling to some remote, hidden location, preferably with lots of jungles or forests to investigate something mysterious. The Kitagami forest area actually reminded me of the original '33 Kong's Skull Island with how dense it was (along with also being in black and white, obviously), which was great. And seeing Varan rising up out o the lake and destroying the village was really cool.

The pacing definitely took some hits in the back half when the military showed up though, along with the characters disappearing into the background for long stretches. So again, certainly not a film without its flaws. But I was honestly impressed with how well it all came together despite the problems Honda and crew encountered during production. You could tell the smaller-scale destruction scenes were a result of the smaller budget, and with that in mind I wasn't expecting any glorious rampages through Tokyo like we've been afforded in many other films. But for what there was it was still enjoyable, with a couple of shots being really impressive. Even on a budget, Tsuburaya's effects were still a joy to behold. Watching it I'd also completely forgotten that Varan can fly, so that scene was a really cool "oh yeah, of course!" moment when it happened.

So yes, I found it to be a solidly enjoyable film, and one I'm very pleased to have finally, belatedly seen! I'll likely check out the "restored broadcast version" tonight, though it's a shame there's seemingly no text to go along with it to give a bit of backstory as to what it is. I assume this is a version that played on Japanese TV back in the day or something?

[lhb412]

^ Man, just you going over the Mediablasters disc reminds me that I need to rewatch all of those releases (Varan included). A few of those I haven't watched in, like, 15 years?! The fact they actually ported over some of the Japanese extras still kinda amazes me.

[Benjamin Haines]

Yeah, Varan is a movie that I really like but it's not one that I would ever recommend to non-fans as a great example of the kaiju genre. It is a more rudimentary and generic take on tropes that Toho had already established with Godzilla and Rodan, and Varan himself is essentially an amalgamation of those two monsters, but this movie has a lot to enjoy for kaiju fans. Varan is a cool monster and he gets plenty of screentime throughout the film, a stark contrast to his fleeting appearances in Destroy All Monsters. Even with the limited budget, Varan rampages through a number of different settings, a great showcase of Eiji Tsuburaya's effects work. Akira Ifukube's score is fantastic and it's wild to hear this early rendition of the motif that later became more famously associated with Rodan and Godzilla. The cast doesn't have much to do in this movie but it's nice to see Akihiko Hirata, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Yoshibumi Tajima and Hisaya Ito in bit parts. The only part of the movie that drags badly for me is when the villager kid goes running after his dog in the first act. The lengthy military assembly scenes do go on too long but I don't mind that.

The 54-minute "restored television broadcast version" on the DVD seems to be an audio reconstruction of what the second and third parts of the finished TV film would have been had the American TV producers not backed out of the project and it had been completed as originally scripted. The TV film was meant to be divided into three parts, each about 27 minutes long with its own opening credit sequence, and this feature is a recreation of the second and third parts, which was done for Toho's Japanese DVD release around 2001. The audio is complete and the video is edited together from the same transfer as the main feature. There are quite a few moments throughout where the audio keeps playing but the video cuts to a black screen with the text "Sound Only" in Japanese, and those moments presumably all represent shots that were included in the original TV movie's script but not filmed for the finished movie. I'm also guessing that the reason why this reconstruction doesn't cover the first part of the would-be TV movie is because the first act is what got the most substantially rewritten when Toho salvaged the production as a Japanese theatrical feature. This reconstruction of the TV movie does barely include the main trio of characters, while the finished film doesn't focus on them very much after the first act, so maybe those three characters weren't part of the script at all until it became a Japanese theatrical feature. Where did this supposedly complete audio track for this incomplete-video reconstruction of the TV movie come from? I don't know, but wherever it came from, apparently Toho's 2022 blu-ray disc release of Varan jettisoned this incomplete-video reconstruction and instead included what's listed as a "reconstructed soundtrack" of the original TV movie.

[Kailem]

"The fact they actually ported over some of the Japanese extras still kinda amazes me."

For real! I couldn't believe it when I saw they've actually got Japanese cast and crew commentaries and other features from the Japanese discs on these releases! This has always been the dream when it comes to these movies, and it's so rare when it actually happens that I'm kinda amazed at how each of these Media Blasters releases seems to have a pretty great selection of stuff (at least by typical tokusatsu standards) ported over from the Japanese versions! Is Toho just more lax about allowing stuff from their non-Godzilla films to be re-released on discs in the west? I feel like I can count on one hand the amount of actual Japanese extras we've ever gotten on the western releases of any of those films.

I swear I checked to see about importing films like Varan, Space Amoeba etc. years ago, but it looked like they were all out of print and unavailable unless I wanted to settle for paying exceptionally high prices or picking up fan-pressed discs, so I just kinda stopped looking and hoped one day we might get an announcement of new Blu-rays for these films (Criterion I'm looking in your direction). But after Benjamin's mention of the Media Blasters Varan disc the other week I went and checked the US Amazon, and there they were, all readily available at good prices (at least for discs released almost 20 years ago)! So now after many years, I'm finally getting to watch all these non-Godzilla Ishiro Honda classics that most of which up until now I'd only read about; and with Japanese extras too!

"Akira Ifukube's score is fantastic and it's wild to hear this early rendition of the motif that later became more famously associated with Rodan and Godzilla."

Oh yeah, I forgot to say it was crazy hearing "Rodan's" theme in this; though I guess it's really been Varan's all along! Not to mention an early version of what would eventually go on to become Megalon's roar, which I realised back when I watched Ultra Q got a *lot* of use for various monsters before that point.

I love going back and watching some of these earlier movies and shows after years of watching ones that came later and realising certain themes, sound effects, features etc. actually originated a lot earlier than I realised. It definitely adds an extra layer of coolness to both these movies and the others retroactively.

That makes sense that the "restored television broadcast version" is mostly as close of a recreation of parts 2 and 3 of what it was originally intended to be as they could get. I was surprised when I watched it how quickly they just skimmed past the first 20-odd minutes of the film to the point where it's basically just "So Varan appeared in a remote area of Japan and trampled a village, and now the military is here." So it stands to reason that this is the part that was reworked the most, like you say. To be honest though, even with the film's shortcomings and Honda's noted disapproval of how it all came together, I still thought they did a good job of salvaging the TV version and turning it into a film. With everything I'd read about the film's origins before I saw it, I was fearing a much worse effort than what we got, which again I think it a testament to the talents of those involved.

[lhb412]

[quote="Kailem"]"The fact they actually ported over some of the Japanese extras still kinda amazes me."

For real! I couldn't believe it when I saw they've actually got Japanese cast and crew commentaries and other features from the Japanese discs on these releases! This has always been the dream when it comes to these movies, and it's so rare when it actually happens that I'm kinda amazed at how each of these Media Blasters releases seems to have a pretty great selection of stuff (at least by typical tokusatsu standards) ported over from the Japanese versions! Is Toho just more lax about allowing stuff from their non-Godzilla films to be re-released on discs in the west? I feel like I can count on one hand the amount of actual Japanese extras we've ever gotten on the western releases of any of those films.[/quote]

You just made me take the stack of MB releases off the shelf and I looked at all the back covers and hot damn had I forgotten just how many amazing extras there are! I remembered the Higuchi/Kawakita commentary for Mysterians, but I don't know if I ever listened to Sadamasa Arikawa's one for Frankenstein CTW?! Featurettes, interviews... I don't know how or why Toho allowed this to happen, but I'm not complaining.

[Benjamin Haines]

The Media Blasters DVDs of Varan, Matango, Latitude Zero, Space Amoeba and the "Oops Edition" of Godzilla vs. Megalon all have lengthy featurettes. I made a thread a few years ago going over the details of each of them: https://www.scifijapan.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=22232

In most cases, the licensing deals that MB struck with Toho entailed porting over the exact contents of Toho's own region-2 Japanese DVD releases. Back in those days, there was a segment of fans who complained that MB was just using transfers of the movies provided by Toho instead of doing their own film print transfers (some things never change), but the upside to that was all of the Toho-supplied special features that MB got to include.

The subtitled audio commentaries are great! Varan has Keizo Murase, Matango has Akira Kubo, Atragon has assistant director Koji Kajita, Space Amoeba has producer Fumio Tanaka and Frankenstein vs. Baragon has Sadamasa Arikawa. All of those people worked on those films, while The Mysterians has a unique commentary by Koichi Kawakita and Shinji Higuchi, two SFX directors who were inspired by that film from a young age.

Unlike the other movies that MB released from 2005 to 2007, Toho hadn't yet released Dogora on Japanese DVD when MB released it themselves, so MB's Dogora DVD doesn't include the commentary by Yosuke Natsuki nor the 26-minute featurette with Teruyoshi Nakano and Keizo Murase from Toho's eventual DVD. Additionally, while Toho's 2006 Latitude Zero DVD box set included a commentary by Akira Takarada on the theatrical cut and a commentary by Masumi Okada on the international cut, neither of those commentaries are on MB's 2-disc Latitude Zero DVD.

Toho still allows companies to license special features directly from them. Criterion's Showa Godzilla set includes the 1986 documentary with unused SFX footage and the 1990 interview with Ishiro Honda conducted by Yoshimitsu Banno, each an hour long, along with everything from Criterion's standalone G'54 release. The thing that Toho became super difficult about during the 2010s was original extras produced by licensees. When Echo Bridge released Godzilla vs. Biollante in 2012, Toho approved their own making-of documentary and behind-the-design featurette but they perpetually dragged their feet about approving Ed Godziszewski's completed audio commentary, to the point where Echo Bridge just released the movie without the commentary even though Toho never formally rejected it.

[Kailem]

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that unused Biollante commentary. It certainly seems like it's a traditional Toho tactic to just ghost people when it comes to getting confirmation about things they don't really want to happen, in the hopes that they eventually get frustrated of waiting indefinitely and walk away.

I guess the thing I'm wondering about then if Toho still allows companies to license their special features is why it hasn't happened more often? It was great to get that "NG sfx shots" feature and the Ishiro Honda interview on the Criterion Godzilla set, but other than those and the handful of others, I was kinda disappointed in how few extras that set contained overall (especially when thinking back to the Classic Media releases, even though those were original commissions). I've got to imagine there are audio commentaries for Toho's own Godzilla DVD releases that could have been ported over, as they were for these Media Blasters releases, but seemingly never have been. Is it just laziness, or are Toho just a lot more reluctant to allow their Godzilla film extras to be ported over than they are with their non-Godzilla films?

That's a shame about MB's Dogora DVD not having the features of the Japanese version, but understandable if it came out first. Even the fact that Toho allowed MB to beat them to the punch by getting it out on DVD before they could themselves seems kinda crazy! And even Latitude Zero being a 2-disc edition with two cuts of the film shows they obviously didn't half-ass it even without those commentaries. Nice job with that thread too! I'll have to give it a proper look in a bit.

I need to find some time to watch the Matango commentary soon too, and I've got The Mysterians to finally check out for the first time after that. Then I'll definitely be looking to scoop up the rest of these Media Blasters releases for Christmas!

[Benjamin Haines]

I think the lack of extras on most Godzilla releases comes down to the fees that Toho charges to license anything, combined with a general lack of interest from licensees. I think that's why the only extras on Kraken's discs were the films' trailers, and why most of Sony's discs only had trailers for other Sony releases.

Criterion typically records their own audio commentaries for movies they release, like how they got David Kalat to provide separate commentaries for G'54 and KotM'56. Toho was fine with that back in 2011, just like how they were fine with Media Blasters including a commentary for Destroy All Monsters by Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski that year, and how they were fine with Classic Media making commentaries for their 2006-2007 Godzilla DVDs. Unfortunately, that October 2011 DVD & BRD release of DAM was also when MB brazenly included image galleries filled with hundreds of behind-the-scenes & publicity photos (provided by Ed G.) without getting Toho's approval or paying them to license any of it, prompting Toho to have MB halt retail sales of those discs about a month after release. After that transgression, MB's planned December 2011 release of Godzilla vs. Megalon seemed to mark the first time that Toho indefinitely dragged their feet about approving original extras produced by a Godzilla movie licensee, giving MB no choice but to delay that release. Although Criterion still got their extras-filled release of G'54 out in January 2012, Toho probably had already approved all of those contents before MB's DAM debacle, and every stateside Godzilla disc release since then has been subject to this newer, jilted, far more uptight version of Toho that really doesn't want licensed Godzilla releases to include any extras that don't come directly from Toho.

I don't know if Criterion has ever subtitled an audio commentary from a foreign disc release. Although anime distribution is a big blind spot for me, I don't know if subtitling commentaries has ever been a common practice by any distributor other than Media Blasters. Even MB's DVD releases of Ryuhei Kitamura's Versus and Skyhigh have subtitled commentaries. It would be incredible if Criterion were to license and subtitle the commentaries from Toho's Japanese DVDs for any future Godzilla releases. I just went through Wikizilla to compile this rundown of the Showa commentaries:

G'54 - Akira Takarada
GRA - Sadamasa Arikawa and Motoyoshi Tomioka
KKvsG - Koji Kajita and Yu Fujiki
MvsG - Kenji Sahara
GT3HM - Akiko Wakabayashi
MZ - Yoshio Tsuchiya
Sea Monster - Haruo Nakajima
SoG - Sadamasa Arikawa
DAM - Seiji Tani
AMA - Koji Hashimoto and Kenji Konuta
Hedorah - Teruyoshi Nakano
Gigan - Shinji Higuchi and Kenji Konuta
Megalon - Katsuhiko Sasaki
GvsMG - Teruyoshi Nakano and Yasuo Kurashiki
ToMG - Motoyoshi Tomioka and Yasuo Kurashiki