A Legendary Evening with Two Toho Tokusatsu Legends!

In between Eiichi Asada and Takashi Naganuma.

On Saturday evening, September 24, I joined another SFX party with two of the coolest cats around, namely Eiichi Asada and Takashi Naganuma.

Takashi Naganuma wears his Toho Visual Art Co. jacket. Photo by Brett Homenick.

As usual, it was a lot of fun talking with Naganuma-san. I really enjoyed seeing him in his Toho Eizo Bijutsu jacket, too. I wanted to make sure I snapped a photo of him in it.

One very cool thing was that I noticed some old LaserDiscs on a table. It was an Orion double feature of Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1971) and Monster from a Prehistoric Planet (a.k.a. Gappa the Triphian Monster, 1967). I was quite amazed to see an obscure American home video release sitting on a table for no apparent reason. 

Yours truly with the Orion LaserDisc.

Then one of my friends explained to me that the LaserDisc (along with other LDs and DVDs nearby) belonged to Teruyoshi Nakano, and now they were in need of good homes! I must have looked quite impressed because while I was staring at the LD in question, I felt a hearty slap on my back. When I looked up, I was surprised to find that it was Asada-san who did it! 

Ultimately, I was able to take two LDs -- the aforementioned Orion double feature, as well as a Crazy Cats flick called The Big Explosion (1969), which was Nakano-san's first film as SFX director. I'm very proud to own these home video releases that used to belong to the master himself.

With a photo of the legend we were all celebrating.

There was a mixture of old Hollywood features, as well as Japanese films from the same period rounding out the rest. Public domain (in Japan) releases of The Third Man (one of Nakano-san's absolute favorites), Grand Hotel, the original A Star Is Born from 1937 were among the titles on offer, and other event-goers snapped them up. I did consider taking Nakano-san's copy of The Third Man, but someone else grabbed it before I could. Oh, well.

Eiichi Asada. Photo by Brett Homenick.

After the event itself, I was about to leave when I was invited to join the main guests and a couple of others at an izakaya for a sort of after-party. I immediately accepted the invitation. We arrived at the izakaya and continued the conversation. We talked about pro wrestling, and I asked Asada-san if he know who Sting was. To my surprise, he did! When he started talking about how Sting resembled a famous musician, I thought he may have been talking about the singer Sting. But it turned out he meant the rock group KISS, whose name he had forgotten. Honestly, I'd never made that connection before. (Most wrestling fans compare the tag team Demolition to KISS, anyway.)

Overall, it was one heck of an evening. I figured it would be another pretty standard event -- which are always fun, don't get me wrong! But this turned out to be so much more than what I usually experience. Very grateful to everyone who made it so.