Preservation
This film is infamous for being one of the most poorly preserved tokusatsu films. In 1970, director Ishiro Honda prepared an edited version of the film for the Champion Matsuri, a film festival that showed edited re-releases of older kaiju films along with cartoons and newer kaiju films aimed at children. Twenty-four minutes were cut in total. Unfortunately, this has become the only Japanese language version for which 35mm materials are available to Toho, and it is unclear what happened to the uncut original version's 35mm elements. Fifteen of the missing twenty-four minutes can be found in 35mm prints of the US version, while the remaining nine are only known to exist in badly faded 16mm prints of the 1962 uncut version.
For the film's 1991 laserdisc release, Toho completed a crude reconstruction of the original 1962 version. A 35mm Champion Matsuri copy was used for the majority of the film and the uncut 16mm internegative was spliced in for all the missing portions, on many occasions within the same shot as an incomplete Matsuri shot, resulting in missing frames and inconsistent quality. This laserdisc transfer has been the basis for all home video editions of the uncut Japanese version since 1991.
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Famous quotes containing the word preservation:
“The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)
“Is not our role to stand for the one thing which means our own salvation here but with which it will also be possible to save the world, and with which Europe will be able to save itself, namely the preservation of the white man and his state?”
—Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966)
“The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)