Friend of the Gutter Michelle Kisner on Kinji Fukasaku’s 1968 film, Black Lizard! “Villains can be alluring and enchanting and, if executed correctly, can hold the audience in the palm of their hands. Kinji Fukasaku’s film Black Lizard (1968) has one such outlaw, Mrs. Midorikawa (Akihiro Miwa), AKA […]
Comedian/actor Steven He presents…. Ginormo! “Created in the early 1970’s, Ginormo! follows the Super Protection Force (SPF) as they protect the world from the evil organization, Beast Advanced Artillery Division (BAAD), which seeks to take over the world using the most terrifying monsters ever created. Unfortunately, due to […]
Summer isn’t quite here, but it’s been hot and a chunk of North America is already on fire, so I thought I’d go straight ahead with my Summer Fun Time Reading recommendations. There’s Gilded Age tomfoolery, science fiction, horror, mysterious figures with antlers, UFOs, ghosts, cats with skulls […]
For this year’s Switcheroo Month, I decided to write about a lesser known film by one of the most reputable directors around—Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well (1960). Set in then contemporary mid-Twentieth Century Japan, The Bad Sleep Well is the story of Koichi Nishi (Toshiro Mifune) seeking […]
BBC Archives shares a 1991 report on “Nintendo and the Japanese Software Boom”: “Gordon Brewer visits Japan, to gauge the state of the Japanese software industry. With Nintendo having already demonstrated that a Japanese corporation can quickly dominate the US video games software market, should the big American […]
At Smithsonian Magazine, Jacquelyne Germaine writes about Yasuke, Japan’s first Black samurai. “Though the Netflix series introduces several mystical elements—including giant flying robots, magical armies and weaponized laser beams—the broad strokes of its depiction of the Honnoji Incident are historically accurate. Yasuke was an African warrior in the […]
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The Cultural Gutter 