GHWP Live Tweet Tuesday, Oct 6, 2015 - The Street Fighter (1974 Sonny Chiba)

     "They keep pulling me back in." I've been trying to figure out just what I want to do with my Tuesday #GHWP time slot, and I've run across a nice little assortment of goodies that should sustain it for a little while. Spectreman will continue on Friday nights as usual until its finale on Friday, October 23, 2015, and I also have a number of little riffing goodies on hand to help ease the pain of his farewell.

     Starting Tuesday, October 6, 2015, I am doing away with Spectreman reruns for the foreseeable future in favor of filling in #TrashTue's second film slot with my new Tuesday movie feature "GHWP Movie and a Show" (Note: TrashTue does have another double feature or two planned for October, but GHWP Movie and a Show will become semi-regular starting in November). Why debate over whether to take in a movie or a show when you can do both with Gaping Head Wound Playhouse? Tuesday nights after #TrashTue, #GHWP will bring you a movie as well as an episode of an obscure television series to fit a theme or even an assortment of trailers and shorts.
     Following another popular episode of The Hypnotic Eye a few Tuesdays ago, one particular movie trailer jumped out at the audience, and it fits perfectly with the sort of themes GHWP has focused on so heavily since nearly the beginning: tokusatsu and Japanese heroes. That film is none other than the Toei Company Sonny Chiba classic The Street Fighter. How does Sonny Chiba fit in with Japanese superheroes, you may ask? That's what I'm here for. If you've followed my blog as a fan of movie riffing, then there's a good chance you're also a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which case you're probably also well aware of how Sonny Chiba got his start as an actor even if you didn't realize it: as a Toei superhero. He had appeared in a few Toei roles beforehand such as his first acting role in Nana-iro Kamen AKA The 7-Color Mask as well as two Fûraibô tantei AKA Wandering Detective movies, but Japanese superhero and MST3K  fans know and love him as Space Chief (known in Japan as Iron Sharp) from his fourth credited role in the Toei space action series Invasion of the Neptune Men (Uchi Kaisoku-sen). "They took out the Hitler building!"

Not to be confused with Prince of Space.

     Shin'ichi "Sonny" Chiba and Toei Company go hand in hand with some of the earliest as well as a few of the most popular Japanese space action hero series, and he remains perhaps the company's biggest star. Long before Toei marketed out some of their famed television series to Saban, Chiba gave Toei global recognition at the box office with The Street Fighter after he'd had a career in their acting stable for over fifteen years. If you've followed my movies and live tweets (or take this moment to go back and read a few of my earlier blog entries, particularly the Toku Tuesday material), then you already know I can go a little nuts with Toei stuff. Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds (Toei, 1977) remains one of my favorite movies of all time (freely admitted), and I have been more than a fan of Super Sentai and Kamen Rider since a few years after Saban introduced them to the English-speaking public as the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and Masked Rider. Of course, my history with Toei goes all the way back to the early 1980s when the fledgling USA Network, Night Flight, and Nickelodeon produced a comedy dub of the Toei Super Sentai series Kagaku Sentai DynaMan, which debuted shortly after Spectreman's English dubbed syndication run sadly went off the air. DynaMan filled a void that Spectreman and far too few Godzilla and Gamera movie marathons left behind, and I became a closet teenage Power Rangers fan in the 90s because the giant monsters and robots and color-coded heroes took me back to some very happy memories.
      Space Chief/Iron Sharp followed in the footsteps of American space serials like Rocky Jones: Space Ranger, and Chiba's acting career under Toei eventually led him to the The Street Fighter, which launched him to global stardom as one of the martial arts superstars of the 1970s in what were perhaps the best films Toei Company ever produced. After the success of The Street Fighter and its sequel and spin-off films, Chiba starred with Vic Morrow in the Toei epic Message From Space, a film GHWP still has been trying to find an audience to riff (unfortunately, the film is not on YouTube, so viewers will have to own a copy or view it on a streaming service). In the early 1980s, Chiba would return to his Toei roots with another hero franchise, Toei's Metal Hero series which, like American shows such as Battlestar Galactica, took place among the stars, and he co-starred in two of Toei's Uchuu Keiji or Space Sheriff series, Space Sheriff Gavan and Space Sheriff Sharivan.

The Space Sheriffs.

    By the way, if the Space Sheriffs look familiar, some footage from the third Space Sheriff series was used for Saban's VR Troopers. Of course, the Metal Hero and, sadly, even the Kamen Rider franchises would not be remotely as successful in Saban's hands as the Super Sentai franchise has been to this day in its Power Rangers adaptation.

     But let's get on to the meat of the show. I have to go on record and say that I have not seen this movie, nor am I screening it ahead of time. I was not a follower of martial arts movies or television in my childhood and early adulthood unless they involved giant monsters, rubber suits and colorful costumes. I was a bit of a fan of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan as a kid, but that took a sour turn for several years when I became a teenager. Any love I could have had in my teen years and early adulthood was tainted when my mother began dating a real douche nozzle that lived and breathed martial arts movies... and used his study of those arts to commit acts of drunken physical abuse upon my mother. I didn't want to get near anything involving Kung Fu or Karate just because of him, and the violence of the movies was too close to the violence at home. He is too stupid to realize he is the villain of the movies he loves so much (not was, is... the sorry waste of space is still walking the Earth somewhere in Florida doing the same thing to other women, and there are mugshots on the web to prove it). But I digress. This is about the great Sonny Chiba, not some wife-and-child-beating loser. It took me many years to move on from the memories to allow myself to expand my repertoire. Recently, I have been digging into some more Hong Kong martial arts movies, but my tastes always have leaned toward Japan when it comes to foreign television and movies. That brings us here to Toei, tokusatsu, and The Street Fighter.

     In The Street Fighter, Sonny Chiba is mercenary anti-hero Takuma "Terry" Tsurugi, and he is approached with the proposition to kidnap an oil heiress. When he discovers that the Yakuza are behind the kidnapping plot and that they plan to dispose of him to keep their plans a secret, Terry becomes a one-man gang war and turns the tables on his would-be employers to protect the girl. Thus begins a long tale of feudal times in the modern age as honor, family, and vengeance make that vicious cycle go around and around. But since I'm no expert on the film, I'll let the trailer do the talking.

      Although The Street Fighter is available in higher quality with subtitles on YouTube, I will be featuring the original English dubbed public domain version. It captures the essence of how English-speaking movie goers would have seen it the first time, and that's the kind of nostalgia I like to get behind.

     Join #GHWP Tuesday night at 9:45PM EST, right after #TrashTue's presentation of Flesh Eating Mothers, for a special playlist featuring a handful of trailers of Sonny Chiba's earliest work, some of his most popular appearances, and, of course, the feature presentation of The Street Fighter.

Playlist details:
Shin Nana-iro Kamen AKA 7-Color Mask (1959)
    - Chiba's first credited role as "Spectrum Mask"
Furaibo tantei: Akai tani no sangeki AKA Drifting Detective: Tragedy in Red Valley (1961)
Fûraibô tantei: Misaki o wataru kuroi kaze (1961)
  AKA Drifting Detective: Cape Crossed Over the Black Wind (rough translation)
    - Chiba's second and third roles as detective Goro Saionji
Uchu Kaisoku-sen AKA Invasion of the Neptune Men (1961)
    - Chiba's first major starring superhero role as Space Chief/Iron Sharp
Ogon Batto AKA The Golden Bat (1966)
Uchu Keiji Gyaban AKA Space Sheriff Gavan (1982)
Uchu Keiji Shariban AKA Space Sheriff Sharivan (1983)
    - first of a trilogy franchise in Toei's Metal Hero series
    - Chiba played Gavan's father Voicer, kidnapped by the enemy
The Street Fighter (1974)

Plus, after the movie, stick around if you're not too sleepy for some trailers and previews of GHWP features to come!