Question about title.


What does "Gojira no gyakushû" mean in English??

reply

[deleted]

So "Godzilla raids again" was some sort of alternet title?

reply

[deleted]

Gojira no gyakushû means "Godzilla's Revenge".

reply

[deleted]

Yes it IS Godzilla Raids Again, Not Godzillas Revenge, that came out 13 years later.

Why do you guys fight like this???
Fight Like this!!!

reply

It is as best a translation as one can muster it means: The Revenge of the Whale-Gorilla (or Gorilla-Whale). Or The Whale-Gorilla's Revenge. Or The Gorilla-Whale's Revenge. Which would mean the exact closest English translation of "Gojira". Plus the obviously descriptive adejetives.

The name "Godzilla". Has no meaning. It is a mistranslation.

Which means exactly nothing in English.

As neither Gojira. Nor Godzilla has an exact English meaning. Nor translation!

reply

The title translates as Godzilla's Counterattack, which I think is better than Raids Again...though either one is a vast improvement over the inexplicable, idiotic and ridiculous Gigantis, the Fire Monster.

However, the name Godzilla is not a "mistranslation". It's not any kind of translation. It was the name chosen by Toho executives themselves as the "international" name for the monster Gojira. How they hit upon it, you'd have to ask them, probably in a seance by now. (I guess the -zilla sounded reptilian.) But indeed, it has no "translation" as such. Gojira, as you pointed out, is a combination of gorira (gorilla) and kujira (whale), so it is sort of "Gorilla-Whale" if one wanted to carry things that far.

reply

When Warner Brothers acquired the rights for this film they could not use the word Godzilla because that name was copyrighted by AIP who had released the original Godzilla in America. I saw this in Malta in Europe as a re release in February 1978 and it was still doing the rounds under the title Gigantis The Fire Monster.

reply

Well, you're incorrect on several points.

First, Godzilla, King of the Monsters -- the Americanized version of the actual original film, Gojira -- was released jointly in the US in 1956 by Trans World Pictures (credited on screen) and Joseph E. Levine's Embassy Pictures, to which the owners of Trans World had sold half the rights, and which handled its marketing and distribution. AIP never had anything to do with GKOTM, held no rights to it and had no financial or other interest in it, ever.

Second, the name "Godzilla" was not copyrighted by any American company -- it's a Japanese invention, the "international" name for Gojira, owned by Toho. In 1957, a company called AB-PT purchased the US rights to the original Japanese feature, Gojira no gyakushu, from Toho, planning to insert American scenes and heavily redo the script, similar to what was done to the original Gojira. Subsequently, AB-PT collapsed and its assets were acquired by Warner Bros. The producer of the American version, Paul Schreibman, revamped it into merely a dubbed version of the original (with narration and some padded footage added). It was his decision, not the studio's, to rename the monster "Gigantis" -- not for copyright reasons, as WB owned the rights to release the film in the US using the name "Godzilla", but because Schreibman got it into his head that the movie would do better using a "new" monster name instead of Godzilla. Since there had at that point been only one other Godzilla movie (the original), and the monster wasn't yet the household name he would become in the 60s, there was a particle of reason to this basically absurd, or pointless, decision. Several years later, after Godzilla had become hugely famous (and profitable) in a succession of movies, Schreibman admitted that renaming the monster had been one of the stupidest things he had done professionally, and that he should have kept "Godzilla". There was no legal impediment to his doing so -- it was simply a dumb decision driven by misguided box-office concerns.

This is why the dubbed version of the film was eventually retitled Godzilla Raids Again, under which name, as you say, it played for years, well into the 1980s. The idiotic thing about this was that, though they inserted a new (and clumsy) title card in the American version reading "Godzilla Raids Again", they didn't change the dubbing, so throughout the film the monster was still called "Gigantis"! Only since the 90s has the original film surfaced in the US, but the retitled name Godzilla Raids Again stuck, even to the original version, in spite of the fact that the actual translation of the Japanese film is "Godzilla's Counterattack".

reply

my reply was from memory, things I read a long time ago.As soon as I wrote Aip sounded strange but I did not remember Levine.

Are you sure there were no legal impediment of any sort/ Even if the name was not copyrighted as such there might be some indirect rights which remain wit the distributor of the first film.However I am not a copyright lawyer and much less an expert on copyright law as it stood in 1957.It is true that there was only one preceeding film but changing the name is incredibly stupid.

I saw the film in March 1978 and it was rereleased here in 1977. It went by the title Gigantis the fire monster and not Godzilla raids again.

Is there any reliable book on the Godzilla films?

reply

Well, I've read a fair amount from a number of sources, and from everything I've ever seen there were no legal impediments to using the name Godzilla back in 1959. If there were, they must have been resolved after a time because WB still owned the Americanized picture, Gigantis the Fire Monster, so when the title was changed to Godzilla Raids Again years later they obviously had to be able to do so legally. I do know that this producer Schreibman made the "Gigantis" decision and later regretted it, which further indicates he had the option to use "Godzilla" but chose not to. My understanding has always been that this was a commercial decision, with no copyright issues involved.

There have been a number of books specifically on Godzilla and the other Toho monsters, but though I've perused some of them in bookstores, for some reason I never bought one, though I might in the future. Unfortunately I don't recall any titles but I know you can access the extant Godzilla literature (that does sound funny, doesn't it?) on Amazon, and elsewhere I'm sure.

reply