Background and Trivia |
- Like Godzilla (1954) before it, which had an early title of "G" in English, the pre-production title of Half Human was simply "S" which was for Snowman.
- Masaru Sato's score for the film was all recorded on July 25th, 1955. The score was, oddly, recorded outside of the Toho studios at an independent stage called the "Radio/Television Center". This was noted in the book Age of the Gods (Self-Published).
- The movie remains controversial due to its savage depiction of the natives in the film. This group is seen as a stand in for the Burakumin, a social group who suffered harshly from discrimination in Japan. Due to the controversy, a home video copy of the original Japanese version has never been released. This is stated in the 2001 publication Tokyoscope: The Japanese Cult Film Companion.
- According to Minoru Nagano, as quoted in Age of the Gods (Self-Published), Eiji Tsuburaya originally tried making some stop motion footage of the kidnapper's truck going down a winding mountain rode. The staff, however, filmed this sequence outside with the sun moving overhead. The result was that the scene looked like it was showing, in time lapse fast motion, that it took the truck all day to reach the end of the road. Toho, after seeing the sequence, denoted stop motion to be too costly and time consuming.
- The US version, released by DCA, utilizes original footage filmed with actors John Carradine, Russ Thorson, Robert Karnes and Morris Ankrum. These new sequences were directed by Kenneth Crane. This version also erroneously credits the production as being from "Pomoyuki Tanaka" rather than Tomoyuki Tanaka.
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