Tag Archives: The Monster Island Film Vault

Video

The Monster Island Film Vault – My New Podcast Premieres!

After a year of prep and a summer of hype, my new podcast, The Monster Island Film Vault, premiered today. You can listen to it on several podcatchers, but it’s also on YouTube. The video version is below. Click here for the audio version.

Enjoy!

Hello, kaiju lovers!

Listen as Nathan Marchand, co-creator and season one co-host of the Kaijuvision Radio, regales you with the origin story of his new podcast. It includes a vacation to a resort on the fabled Monster Island (formerly Monsterland), where he met his intrepid producer, Jimmy From NASA (who miraculously survived the infamous War in Space), and got a new job as the curator of the Island’s film vault. Between bantering sessions with his detail-obsessed, fact-checking interrupter of a producer, Nathan explains the podcast’s philosophy of film appreciation and lays the groundwork for the upcoming episodes.

And what will Nathan, Jimmy, and their many guests be discussing first? The filmography of Monster Island’s other most famous resident: KING KONG!

Hold onto your butts!

The Monster Island Film Vault: A podcast seeking entertainment and enlightenment through tokusatsu.

Check out the epic three-hour KVR episode on Shin Godzilla: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyQsL…#JimmyFromNASALives

www.MonsterIslandFilmVault.com

© 2019 Nathan Marchand/Moonlighting Ninjas Media

Blog

Grad School Update: My Ishiro Honda Independent Study

Honda on the set of 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla.

One unique and unusual aspect of my current semester of grad school is I’m doing my first ever independent study. Specifically, a study on several films directed by Ishiro Honda, the lauded director of many Godzilla films. It took a little work to convince my university’s resident film professor (and most reclusive man in the English department) to do this with me, but he agreed. Not only that, but he actually liked the first film I wrote about in this study, 1955’s Half Human, and said the cinematography reminded him of Akira Kurosawa! I’m excited to be introducing him to films he isn’t familiar with.

One fun thing about this is I got to write my own syllabus for it. Here’s an excerpt:

Objective: The goal of this study is examine six films directed by Ishiro Honda and connect their stories to contemporaneous cultural and historical events in Japan. Films are never made in a vacuum, and knowing and understanding their original contexts is vital to appreciating them.

There will be a special focus on discriminated people groups in this study since half of the films being covered will involve such groups.

While Honda is best known for his Godzilla films, I will be focusing on several of his non-Godzilla genre pictures spanning a ten-year period that included what’s considered the “golden age” of Toho tokusatsu (special effects) filmmaking. Honda also directed dramas, war epics, and light comedies, but these films are sadly unavailable in the U.S. currently.

The films and related topics I’ll be examining are Half Human/The Ainu; The Mysterians/Japan and the U.N.; Varan the Unbelievable/The Burakumin; Atragon/Japanese WWII holdovers and the resurgence of Japanese nationalism; Matango/Japan’s newfound opulence;and Frankenstein Conquers the World/The Hibakusha.

This came about because I wanted to fill a few credit hours and make the research I’m doing for my new podcast, The Monster Island Film Vault, count as school credit. Because why not?

There are reasons why grad school might be the best thing in my life right now. J