by Benjamin Haines » Sun Mar 31, 2024 4:13 pm
I was able to get this after all. What's up with the first 600 units selling out within a day while the remaining 1,900 units still haven't sold out six weeks later? Did 600 people just urgently want the poster?
I started by watching Golden Bat (Ogon Batto, 黄金バット, 1966), which is inexplicably subtitled as Golden Ninja on this set's packaging and in every instance of the movie's subtitles, even though everyone in the spoken dialogue and in the film's theme song is audibly saying batto (バット), which is clearly just a Japanese pronunciation of the English word bat, and not the Japanese word ninja. This is a fun little black-and-white B-movie based on a a superhero created in 1930 for Japanese paper theater. The score is good and it has a blazing fast pace reminiscent of modern Hollywood blockbusters. The story about the team of scientists awakening the ancient hero Golden Bat to stop the evil alien conqueror Nazo feels like a precursor to Toei's various superhero shows of the 1970s. If this movie had an English dub it would be a perfect fit for Mystery Science Theater 3000. One of Nazo's goons is a guy named Keloid with scars on his face that look like radiation burns, so I'm surprised that Toei hasn't yet pulled this movie from circulation in the same vein as Toho did with Prophecies of Nostradamus or TPC with UltraSeven episode 12.