Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why And How Was Fist Of The North Star Censored?
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GeorgeC
Posts: 795 |
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OH, this film...
Yes, I saw it on a VHS tape borrowed from a college classmate WAY back when! Between the splatter and the "Dah dah dah dah dah dadadadadaddaaaaaaahhhh!" I was giggling like a maniac. It was over the top funny to me. It was like a Jerry Lewis comedy routine to me. I know that was NOT the intention of the Japanese creators but this cultural thing sometimes is unintentionally funny in other regions. There's a certain amount of animated gore that IS grotesque and disturbing to witness (Elfen Lied) and then there's stuff like Fist of the North Star which I take about as seriously as The Exorcist (1973). In other words, I laughed my butt off at scenes in the FoNS movie. Fist of the North Star was also shown as part of a Streamline package that was exhibited on local (UHF) TV stations(?) in the early-mid 1990s. There was a lot of pixelization censoring of some of those films otherwise they were not significantly/cut down like they would have been elsewhere. I think they showed this film and some with sex scenes, again, heavily pixilated. Yeah, I saw on recent online sale the Discotek release of the film. I have so many other things I'm more interested in it would be a VERY low priority buy for me. I did read part of the Viz English adaptation but have never seen any of the TV series. |
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Theodore Relic
Posts: 68 |
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Oh boy...I still have the Orion Pictures VHS of Streamline's version of Fist of the North Star (the cover's pretty beat up but the tape is just fine). The box description made a HUGE deal of the gore and violence, including a box quote from the NY Daily News: "Post-Apocalyptic Splatterfest in an Akira Vein...".
Mine still has the little sticker warning "Not for Kids"  Ah, the days when Streamline was running that short ad pointing out the reasons their stuff was "not for kids"!
I need to rewatch this thing! |
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5525 |
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SpookyDollhouse
Posts: 39 |
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Something to point out re:fires y'all:
Celluloid is very flammable. A number of film prints and negatives have been lost to fires and water damage. This is a very real thing as funny as it may sound. Archives of such content are ideally kept in salt mines. Climate controlled in-door archives also work but it's still not fool proof. Due to this being a semi common occurence with original materials of movies, it's commonly applied to any sort of lost footage no matter how it was destroyed. in FOTNS's, case this footage might have been excised from the original negative and tossed. If it wasn't it's likely still around if it wasn't tossed anyway. Belladonna of Sadness was re-released in Japan at one point with cut material and instead of cutting film prints after the fact, new ones were struck from the negative which was cut itself. For the recent Blu Ray release a theatrical print from prior to cutting was found in Italy and the footage scanned & spliced with what was left of said negative. |
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Ojamajo LimePie
 Posts: 772 |
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Nitrate film is highly flammable, which is why the film industry switched over to safety film in the 1950s. Unfortunately, this type of film is highly unstable and degrades over time. During the 1990s, polyester became the standard material for film prints. |
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MarshalBanana
Posts: 5525 |
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Anton Chigurh
 Posts: 257 Location: Guam |
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This reminds me of the 2007 JoJo's Bizarre Adventure film fracas: Hirohiko Araki hated it so (they skipped Speedwagon entirely. Speedwagon!), it has had no releases of any kind since. That a movie, or any piece of media, from barely 10 years ago can disappear at the behest of a a corporation or even one single person both fascinates and frightens me.
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jsevakis
Former ANN Editor in Chief
 Posts: 1685 Location: Los Angeles, CA |
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Sorry, but that's not true of any film made after the early 1950s. |
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moff
Posts: 19 |
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It was Belgium, according to this interview with the company that did the 4K restoration: http://www.tcj.com/belladonna-of-sadness-interview/ While there are rumours floating around about Belladonna being shown in italian theaters exactly once in 1974, it's probably an urban legend, since there are no posters, no period reviews, no witnesses, nothing. The uber-rare OST LP, however, was actually printed in Italy in 1975, as the composer Masahiko Sato was living here at the time. http://www.spectacularoptical.ca/2011/11/belladonna-of-sadness/ |
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Zendervai
 Posts: 202 |
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It might be connected to the BBC thing where they actually did burn big chunks of their archives at one point or another because they assumed no one would be interested, and the film itself wasn't up to date enough to reuse (because they did that too sometimes). A lot of stuff has been recovered from reels that were sent to overseas broadcasters and never returned, but a lot of stuff is missing, maybe for good because of it. But yeah, that's probably where part of that common insistence came from. |
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Zhou-BR
Posts: 1463 |
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I bought the BD fully aware that the goriest scenes would still be blurred and distorted, but I was disappointed to find out that even the original theatrical ending was upscaled from the DVD master, except for the stuff after the flowers start growing. Did Toei really lose the original film materials for that scene, too?
Also, there was nothing seamless about the branching they used to allow us to pick between the two versions of the ending (you can clearly see the video freeze right before the chosen ending starts, and again right before Kenshiro starts walking the desert), but I appreciate the fact that both were included. Last edited by Zhou-BR on Mon Aug 06, 2018 7:04 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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xchampion
 Posts: 370 Location: Idaho Falls, Idaho |
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Speak of the devil. I literally just watched the Fist of the North Star movie on Crackle this last Saturday for the first time. It still seemed really graphic and gory to me and that it's the edited version blows my mind. I loved it. Its pure 80s madness. That insert rock song during the climatic fight scene is amazing btw.
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mrsatan
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 915 |
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Indeed, I've heard this about everything. And half the time these supposedly "destroyed in a fire" titles end up coming out on DVD or Blu-ray anyways. There are a handful of uncensored shots on the Italian VHS. There's a part where a thug's head explodes and his twitching body sprays blood all over Bat. This scene is sepia-toned in all versions except that VHS. The most interesting restored scene is when Kuhogan Galf crushes a guy's head for chanting "Ken-Oh" off-tempo. The scene is completely gone in all other versions; it just cuts away to some reused crowd footage and back. |
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MattB1
Posts: 23 |
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Ah, you might be thinking of Network One. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6364 |
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To be pretty fair to the writers of the film Speedwagon is about as integral to Phantom Blood as Danny was cept whereas Danny is remembered as the first example in the Jojoverse regarding Araki's questionable mindset towards dogs. Speedwagon is largely remembered for being largely useless and becoming a meme as a consequence. |
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