Saturday 5 September 2020

A Short Essay of Buruuba

Credited to someone else. 

The first full-scale beast movie in Japan, shot by Daiei primarily in California, the United States with the cooperation of Samuel Goldwyn Studios, an MGM spin-off. Yoshihiro Hamaguchi, a former Olympic swimmer known by the nickname “Water King”, codified what was then the hero of the jungle as depicted in Japanese pop culture during the cold war, playing the role of Takeji, aka Buruuba, a character inspired by both Weissmuller’s Tarzan and Baruuba, while becoming a part time actor for the first time. Yuko Yashio codified the jungle heroine for Japanese audiences, playing Reiko Watanabe, a character inspired by both Maureen O’Sullivan’s Jane Parker and Grace.  

Shigeyoshi Suzuki made a so bad it’s good movie (or just so okay it’s average until the ending that spawned two tie ins and two spinoffs would inevitably happen either way, thanks to Daiei being full of greedy impatient higher ups!) based on a now internationally obscure series of adventure novels for boys and men by Yoichiro Minami, with special effects by Yonezaburo Tsukiji of Gamera fame, and music by Akira Ifukube, who was famous due to his heavy score for Godzilla. The title “Buruuba” means “hero”, “respectable person” and “gorgeous” in a fictitious Bantu language (or a fictitious chimp language in all the old novels).

A man who rides a large beast, perhaps a matronly African forest elephant (look closely that it’s in actuality, a lovely female Asian elephant pretending to be someone else from a heavily jungle clad region in another continent!), that traverses into and through the jungle, fights a lion and later a crocodile, with a trusty Japanese short sword (also in the two better spinoffs which followed it) on the belt of his loincloth. Something happens when he screams out loud by saying just his nickname, “Buruuba!”. But he isn’t even a full on Japanese Tarzan, as the closest that Japan has ever had to matching Tarzan (in any other way!) is the titular whinnying and chest pounding gadfly from Taito’s Jungle King/Jungle Hunt Video Game. Even though he grew up with the jungle animals, he’s primarily raised by lions and chimps (mostly included in the novel). 

The Roaring Jungle and other stories 

American explorer Joseph Wilton, along with his friend Frank, entered a dense and ancient semi deciduous tropical forest in what’s now an East African frontier and continued a desperate blood fight with large lions, rabble rousing huge elephants, and voracious crocodiles, and further from North Borneo to North Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, he fights against tigers and deadly snakes. A battle between a person and the wild beasts, alive and dead in partly unexplored areas, is a great adventure story.


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