Top 10 Giant Movie Monsters
The Angry Video Game Nerd recently posted this video countdown of the Top 10 Giant Movie Monsters. As one would expect, a few Japanese monsters made the list:
Categories: General Japan
Review: Boy and Big Dreams Little Tokyo
Occasionally, we here at Japan Probe have dabbled into review territory. Hopefully we will be doing them often enough to expose the readers to gems. This time, the review is in video form. My apologies ahead of time for my hypnotically slow voice, but remember it’s a review of two media items, not how much I suck at video making 
You can find out more about Beat Takeshi’s Boy here
You can find out more about Big Dreams Little Tokyo here (also filled with the type of music I talked about).
Categories: Books
Nessie Attacks Tokyo Harbor
A very awesome piece of special effects promoting the Japanese release of “The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep”
The 15-meter long Nessie is an impressive combination of water screen lighting effects and some well-placed water spouts (for the giant splash effect). It was part of an event held in Tokyo’s Odaiba area.
[via Tokyo Times]
Categories: Technology
Fighting Piracy in Japan
A TV news crew recently found stores in Osaka that were selling bootleg DVD’s of feature films still in Japanese theaters. In this clip, a guy from an anti-piracy organization shows us how the bootleg DVD of 300 looks:
While the video of the film was filmed inside a theater with a camcorder, the overall video quality is pretty good. It also has Japanese subtitles, which were created and released by fans on the internet well before the 300 was even released in Japan. The expert claims the shadows of audience members getting up at the end of the film are foreign-looking, which means the video was filmed in a foreign country.*
It’s a shame that people aren’t paying to see movies. However, when most Hollywood films don’t see Japanese releases until 6 months to a year after their original release date, can you really blame impatient net-savvy Japanese fans for downloading and watching them?
{democracy:91}
*If you’ve ever been to a movie theater in Japan, you’ll probably notice that audience members tend to wait until the film’s ending credits are completely over before standing up to leave.
Categories: General Japan, Technology
