| Media Blaster's DVD of Atragon is a beauty, a colorful enhanced transfer with little or no visible damage. Savant watched five blurry, greenish pan-scanned minutes of it on television twenty years ago and gave up; it looked horrible. The Toho laserdisc had the correct screen shape, but its transfer also looked a little peaked. This new transfer must be from a restored element as the colors pop and the effects match much better than they once did - we can barely see the traveling matte lines, and the blends between live action, painted mattes and miniatures are greatly improved. Even the still paintings representing the Mu warriors frozen by the Atragon subzero spray now look reasonable. On the other hand, the increased sharpness finally allows us to see the wires holding the craft in the air. But only if one looks for them ...
Again, for a rush job Atragon comes off as high-quality adventure. Akira Ikufube's thunderous martial score is one of his best. Atragon is represented by a heavy-duty march theme that transforms a floating toy into a colossal juggernaut. Audio is offered in both mono and 5.1 Dolby for both English and Japanese. The English track is not the original 1965 AIP dub job; Arkoff cut the show by about seven minutes for American release.
The disc comes with an "Exciting!" trailer, but the real treat is a good Japanese commentary subtitled in English, a professional interview with Ishiro Honda's chief assistant director Koji Kajita. He worked on just about every Honda assignment from 1954's Gojira to 1966's War of the Gargantuas and tells a number of interesting stories. The Japanese/American gap is still evident; we wonder if the provocative shot where Tetsuko Kobayashi drops her Mu tunic to don swim gear was that big of a shock in Japanese cinemas ("It was a family film!') or if Mr. Kajita was just personally impressed!
American-International commissioned terrific artwork for their import release. Atragon blasts through the walls of the undersea kingdom while exotic dancers and ray gun-toting soldiers compete for poster space. I remember staring at the newspaper ad for about an hour but didn't get to see the picture when it was new because it was only playing at San Bernardino's Baseline drive-in. The DVD cover illustration copied from the Toho Japanese release resembles a promotion for one of the newer anime Super Atragon shows; the attractive Manda monster at the bottom is a dead ringer for the furry flying dragon in The Neverending Story.
Media Blasters /Tokyo Shock has done it again! Let's hope that other Toho fantasy epics are released in versions as good as this one. Some great titles (Battle in Outer Space, Mothra, The H-Man) are tied up at Columbia, while certain others may be set free for this label, as was Atragon. A couple of years ago it still had some legal ties to Sony/MGM. A similarly entangled title on Savant's mind is the superior astral-collision saga Gorath, which floated around some small outfits before being released to television by American-International. The Japanese laserdisc was in stereophonic sound and had a road show-like orchestral overture -- I hope Toho is preparing it for export as well.
On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Atragon rates:
Movie: Very Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Trailer, commentary with assistant director Koji Kajita
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: January 21, 2006 |
Technical Notes:
