PRINCE OF SPACE (1959)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

It's a personal preference that on this blog I never review "compilation films," that is, feature-length films made by cannibalizing either the chapters of a longer serial or episodes of a television series. I will probably make an exception if I encounter a situation where, say, an original chapterplay has been lost and the compilation is all that's left of it. And someday I may choose to review the four films made from a Japanese TV-show, SUPERGIANT, because it's extremely unlikely that I will ever have access to dubbed or subbed episodes of the series.

PRINCE OF SPACE is a slightly different animal. There was a TV show running in Japan's late 1950s, though the actual title was more like "Prince Planet." However, the makers of the teleseries also released two separate short movies, both reputedly an hour in length, to Japanese cinema in 1959. I have heard it said that the Japanese producers sold both short films to the U.S. and that someone over here spliced both movies into a dubbed version, also running just under an hour. This English-language version is apparently the version that MST3K utilized when they spoofed the movie. But before writing this review, I came across a Japanese version of PRINCE on Tubi, but with English-language subtitles-- which is what I'll review here.

Like the slightly later INVASION OF THE NEPTUNE MEN, the most interesting part of PRINCE is the dreamlike way in which the superhero of the title comes into being, sans anything like an origin. And like NEPTUNE, the film's opening foregrounds a little bit of "launch envy" on the part of the Japanese culture of that period.

So three adults and three kids sit around the dinner table. I think one of the kids belongs to a youngish couple there, but the only people necessary to remember are the other adult, an older man named Doctor Maki, and the other two kids, a boy named Ichiro and his sister Kimiko. After some incidental conversation, another adult shows up, name of Waku (Tatsuo Unemiya). Confab establishes that Waku is an unmarried shoeshine man who for some reason has been granted custody of Ichiro and Kimiko, even though they are not related to Waku. The talk quickly shifts topics as the young woman remarks that, thanks to Doctor Maki's great new rocket fuel, "the world's first ever rocket is going to be launched from here." In other words, in the film's world Japan has stolen a march on both Russian and U.S. space programs, though Maki generously credits a U.S. scientist with providing "materials."

Then, as the kids try to watch TV, their reception-- and that of everyone in Japan, if not all Earth-- has to listen to a rant from "Ambassador Phantom of Planet Silver." Phantom asserts that he and his crew will land near Tokyo shortly, and that he will brook no interference from the locals. Naturally, a (very small) crowd of reporters and military men show up at a landing site. However, as soon as the alien ship lands, so does a smaller saucer-craft. Out of the latter ship steps the mask-wearing Prince of Space, who warns the aliens away. Inside his ship Phantom orders his ship to fire on the Prince, who easily nullifies the weapon. The Planet Silver ship flees and eludes pursuit by the Prince's ship.

After that initial exchange of hostilities, the film settles into a series of similar short conflicts between the Prince and the Silverites. It comes out that despite the Silverites's spacefaring technology, they want to steal Doctor Maki's rocket fuel formula. The closest anyone comes to dealing with this discrepancy is that someone suggests that the invaders just don't have enough fuel, but if they had Maki's formula, they could fuel a whole flotilla of ships instead of just one.

I've left out one visual aspect of the aliens (whose planet is named "Krankor" in the English dub): they're all humanoids with long beaked noses. Some, particularly Phantom, wear ruff-like collars, and this appearance led the MST3K jesters to make lots of chicken jokes. Without this wacky touch of alien physiognomy, probably PRINCE would never have been as rife for spoofing. Compared to the uninhibited wackiness of the slightly later kaiju films, or later superhero shows, PRINCE is pretty dull, with very brief fight-scenes and lots of talking heads. I assume most Japanese kids would have guessed that mild-mannered shoeshine man Waku is in reality the world-protecting Prince of Space, particularly when the Prince gives "his" kids a signal-device with which to contact him. But in the two versions I've seen, the Prince never decisively unveils his true identity, and there's no clue as to where he gets his technology.

The most remarkable thing is that, though one would expect the subtitled version to run longer than the MST3K entry, they're about the same. Also, whatever extra scenes the subbed version may contain-- and I didn't attempt a side-by-side comparison-- the sub does NOT contain the climax on Planet Silver, wherein the hero rescues captive scientists from Phantom and defeats a giant humanoid. The subbed version just sort of peters out after an inconclusive battle between hero and villain. I can only assume that the subbed version on Tubi was prepared by the Japanese for some other market, but that they didn't have access to that climactic footage for some reason. And that's a very small pity, since the confrontation on Silver/Krankor is the best part of the original film.

ADDENDUM: Thanks to making inquiries on the Classic Horror Film Board, I've learned that the version on Tubi streaming is most probably the first of the two "Prince Planet" movies, subbed for the fan-market. This explains why the Tubi item contains no scenes from the second film. That short movie, technically titled "Prince Planet: the Terrifying Spaceship," has not as yet been subbed for the fan-market, so that as of this writing, one can only see second-film footage in the recut American version from the 1960s. Therefore, my review really applies to the short film "Prince Planet," while the title "Prince of Space" should really apply only to the American recut. But I probably won't change the title of this review unless "Spaceship" comes into my purview.