Neat Junk Archive

We continue our look at Japanese box art with a group of horror movies. Asia as a whole knows how to scare the heck out of me with their horror stories, so I wonder how Japan dressed up the boxes of some of my favorite American horror movies.

Warning: there are disturbing images on some of these.

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Ah jeez, they went straight for the gross-out stuff – bugs in your mouth, tongues in your phone, and a guy on fire. Looks like they were going for shock value with this cover.

The Exorcist

This VHS was released in 1979. I saw more recent Japanese releases of The Exorcist with much creepier things on the covers, specifically a big red image of Regan staring menacingly at the camera. It’s interesting how this back cover is so tame. All that text is apparently explaining the history of how the movie came to be made.

The Silence of the Lambs

The LaserDisc edition of this one goes right for the jugular. I’m shocked that they decided to feature some of the more gruesome scenes in the movie here. And that huge red photo of the death’s head moth over Hannibal’s mouth is something I haven’t seen on English releases of the movie. It’s really evocative.

Let’s take a look at the box art used for subtitled versions of American comedy movies over in Japan.

Army of Darkness (Captain Supermarket)

As noted before, Army of Darkness was released as Captain Supermarket in Japan. Mato guesses it’s because while it looks like a horror movie on the surface, it’s definitely a comedy at its core. To release it in Japan as “Army of Darkness” would make it seem like a generic horror movie that nobody would pay attention to.

You can see by the artwork that they really ran with the “comedy” theme. The front cover kind of looks a little like a comic book setup.

Ernest Goes to Camp

I was surprised and extremely happy to learn that Ernest Goes to Camp, one of Poemato’s favorite movies, was released in Japan. It’s an 80s camp movie where an accident-prone janitor-turned-camp-counselor is put in charge of reforming a group of delinquents, while also trying to save the camp from being taken over by an evil mining company.

This box is simply covered with screenshots from the movie, which is an interesting approach. I like how the biggest image on the front is of the two cooks shoving a disgusting dish into Ernest’s mouth. And on the back cover I spot… a scene that never happened in the movie?! Or at least it wasn’t in the version I grew up with. I don’t remember anyone wearing a big ol’ fuzzy moose head.

Super Mario Bros. Movie

Ehhhhh, this movie. Had to get it.

The cover art looks really good, but what the hell is up with that giant disintegrating Koopa head on the back? Wouldn’t that scare kids rather than make them want to watch it? Oh, hmm… Maybe that was the plan all along!

Well holy crap, LoL is in possession of tons of Japanese-subtitled movies!

These are research for a project we’re slowly working on. A lot of the back covers are pretty interesting – it’s neat to see the types of screenshots they used to market these movies to a Japanese audience. I’ll do a few more updates highlighting the best back covers.

Mato & I have been playing Yakuza 0 recently and it’s quickly become one of my favorite games ever. It’s our first Yakuza game and now I want to play the entire series. Good thing Yakuza 1 just got a remake and Yakuza 6 is coming next year!

I found an interview with Scott Strichart over on michibiku.com. He’s currently heading up the localization for the new Yakuza games, and he previously worked on favorites like Persona 4, 3D Dot Game Heroes, Ni no Kuni, and some Final Fantasies. He covers interesting topics in the interview like:

• How he and his coworker took Yakuza 0‘s localization to the next level
• Walking the fine line between a gritty crime drama and over-the-top humor
• Why he recommends new players start with Yakuza 0 instead of Yakuza 1
• How he became a walking Yakuza bible
• The challenge of rewriting stuff like the Mahjong tutorial so that western players could understand how the heck to play Mahjong

It’s a great read, so check out the whole interview here!

The LoL team is always juggling at least 5 projects at once; here’s a peek at one of them. We began collecting a bunch of Japanese-subtitled movies, and this led to Mato & me becoming LaserDisc owners. I… kinda want to buy my movies exclusively on LaserDisc from now on…

Working on the Funky Fantasy book got me thinking about this old video.

Three years ago, Mato drew pictures of the entire plot of Final Fantasy 4. And then he had me watch this video and narrate what was happening. And I barely remembered the plot of Final Fantasy 4 back then.

Please enjoy.

English keyboards are used to type non-English languages all the time. I remember when I knew nothing about how people typed Japanese stuff into computers. The topic could probably get its own full LoL article sometime but basically it’s crazy and you can type words in a bunch of different ways to reach the same spelling. For example, here’s how you can type Pikachu’s Japanese name with some English keyboards depending on your setup:

I actually only came across that when I decided “maybe I should see if other names like Yoshi have weird alternate spellings in Japanese” and then found Pikatyu being used on rare occasion. I’d love to make a gallery of alternate spellings of beloved characters someday.

The November 1999 issue of N64 Magazine got their hands on the technical specs of the Game Boy Advance. They included a picture of an artist’s guess at what the new Game Boy would look like:

Hey, they weren’t too far off!

Back when the EarthBound LoL book was first released, we offered to sign books if people asked. I liked to do personalized messages and one person used that to dare me into signing a piece of toilet paper rather than the book itself. Well I managed to sign the toilet paper after some trial and error learning.

Unfortunately it’s not as feasible to do personalized messages anymore. You can still get a signed copy of our books but they probably won’t have anything more than just our autographs and tiny drawings of things.

oh is it now?

(from the February 1998 issue of Computer and Video Games magazine)