I do not see Raymond Burr's name mentioned in the credits. Am I missing something? He narrates the film by portraying an American reporter named Steve Martin.
shareThat's GODZILLA: KING OF MONSTERS (1956), not this one.
shareThis is the board for the original Japanese Gojira. Raymond Burr was added into the movie for the American version called Godzilla, King of the Monsters
shareBesides which, for over thirty years all the credits on prints of Godzilla, King of the Monsters were for some stupid reason cut out. Only the title and "The End" were left. The actors, the director, everything, were eliminated. The end credits were restored in the Classic Media DVD release in 2006 but in the wrong order, and the opening studio credit (New World Pictures) was still missing. Both these have been corrected in the Criterion release.
Anyway, how do you write "Raymond Burr" in Japanese characters?
Anyway, how do you write "Raymond Burr" in Japanese characters? - hobnob53
I was being facetious, darryl-tahirall. I was just making an admittedly lame jest about the thread question.
Of course, foreign names can be rendered in Japanese characters, as well as in any other writing system, just as Japanese names can be transliterated into English (or Latin) letters (allowing for a certain degree of inaccuracy in any such instances). For a topical example, the cover of Classic Media's original edition of Gojira has the three Japanese characters that form the name written "beneath" the red-colored English lettering.
That said, thank you for the explanation of the differing forms of Japanese script. However, are you sure that writing "Raymond Burr" using romanji would be akin to seeing the name in Cyrillic? Romanji, as you say, uses the Latin alphabet, as of course does English. While seeing the actor's name transliterated using romanji might yield something different from its normal appearance, it wouldn't be the same as transliterating it into a foreign alphabet like Cyrillic. While I don't know Japanese beyond a few stray words, I have seen a handful of Japanese passages written using romanji characters, and it's readable even if not understood. But I do know Russian and how "Raymond Burr" would look in Cyrillic, and it doesn't seem to me the analogy is correct. Even if somewhat different, romanji's Latin characters would still be intelligible to any English-speaker, while Cyrillic, other than to those who've learned it, would not. Might not a better analogy be to an English-speaker reading, say, Albanian? Same alphabet, he can read it, but would not know what it says.
Of course, I suspect an English-speaker could dope out "Raymond Burr" in any language that uses Latin characters, even if it's in slightly differing forms.
I was being facetious, darryl-tahirall. I was just making an admittedly lame jest about the thread question. - hobnob53
However, are you sure that writing "Raymond Burr" using romanji would be akin to seeing the name in Cyrillic? Romanji, as you say, uses the Latin alphabet, as of course does English. While seeing the actor's name transliterated using romanji might yield something different from its normal appearance, it wouldn't be the same as transliterating it into a foreign alphabet like Cyrillic.
From the literate posts of yours I've seen so far, I didn't think you were serious.
As you know, in the original film the term for Dr. Serizawa's invention is rendered in English -- "oxygen destroyer" (though I suspect a literal transliteration of the written words might be something more like "oxijen-destroyah"). Anyway, how would a non-English-speaking Japanese viewer perceive this term? Or are the two words in fact Japanese, borrowed from English much as we have appropriated, say, the term tsunami?
it's the old "use it or lose it" syndrome, I'm afraid.