Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for April 13, 2024

Classic movies although the original Kong vs. Godzilla was pretty crude.

From_Not Always Right_: BIG Trouble In Little… Tokyo…

I’ve submitted several stories about my friends, family, and neighbors, and I’m thankful they’ve been published, but I’m hoping y’all won’t mind one more from my paternal grandmother. It’s my favorite of the many anecdotes she shared.

Dad’s family was an Air Force family, and they once got stationed in Tokyo and Okinawa in the 1950s for about four years. (They actually returned to the States right before the very first Godzilla film was released in theaters, but I digress.)

One day while in Tokyo, my grandfather had to speak with his commanding officer before some errands, so he left Grandma with their three kids in the car to wait.

While they waited, the car started shaking. Grandma was afraid that meant an earthquake was building up and panicked since it was the first time she’d experienced one. But just as she was wondering if it was going to get worse, how to keep the children safe and calm, and if her husband would be all right…

…about forty sumo wrestlers went jogging by as part of their training.

Of all the things Grandma had thought might happen in Japan, that certainly wasn’t one of them.

(NOT my story, but I SO want to go to Japan)

There are new ones now, but I kinda like the classics.

Looking at the list of movies on our vizio t. There were 4 Titanic movies listed

Godzilla Minus 1 was fantastic!

Good thing he enjoys being grumpy.

That’s why I like Mystery Science Theater 3000. They may be old and bad, but riffing on them brings new life. Except for The Mask. There ain’t no fixing that one.

I didn’t know the English was being dubbed in, and it was terrible back then, thinking Japaneze talked funny, Their voices would keep talking while their mouths stopped moving.

Hollyweird has run out of ideas.

The Godzilla franchise wouldn’t exist without Raymond Burr! (this is probably not true)

I saw the original King Kong vs. Godzilla when it came out. It’s the first movie I ever remember seeing. It gave me nightmares about a giant octopus attacking my neighborhood.

A number of years ago when bell-bottom jeans came back into fashion for the teenagers my daughter came home from shopping with friends carrying two pairs. I went to my boxes of old photos and pulled out a few of me and my friends wearing bell-bottoms. She just looked at me and said, “you know how much I hate you, right?”

If I wasn’t a ‘’Grumpy ol’ Man’’, I wouldn’t have a personality…..okay, besides being a ‘’Sarcastic ol’ B*st*rd’’ that is.

Fooey on Godzilla! We liked Ultraman!

Ah so…..Arro…………

I did enjoy Bambi Meets Godzilla. It’s on youtube if you’ve never seen it. I’m waiting for Godzilla vs Barbie.

Amen. And look: ANOTHER Ghostbusters movie!

I’ve been to Japan about ten times in the past 15 years. It helps if you have family who are fluent in Japanese and live there. But trust me, in Tokyo you can get by with English. Because it’s an international trading center most of the signs are in English as well as Japanese. At six feet tall with my 5’ 7” wife, we kind of stand out and on many occasions we’ve been approached by people wanting to practice their English. (Happy to oblige)

One time my wife and I were in a store and the clerk came up to me and said “All of the products are all natural” I repeated that to my wife who had been distracted. The clerk must have thought I was correcting her as she repeated again this time perfectly mimicking my RI accent. We chatted for a few minutes and I complimented her on her language skills. We met a lot of other people, like a group of engineering students who were thrilled to explain their solar powered car they built. Despite their invitation, I was way too big to get into one. Of course as a life long Godzilla fan I couldn’t help but notice the Seiko building in Ginza had been nicely rebuilt and the high tension power lines still seem to ring the city.

Cheap special effects meant the writing & acting had to be better to be convincing. They often weren’t which made for comedy. ♥DrWho. Nimoy was Shatner’s straight man. Leia was the heroic lead. Gamera Lives!

I like the strips where Arlo has the only speech bubbles. Wisdom, no ambivalence.

I am a big Godzillaphile. Love the big lug.

I watched the original King Kong vs. Godzilla when I was a little kid, too, and it was awesome!

Where are you published, Yakety?

Arlo should know that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I must be doing it wrong, when I was middle-aged I was grumpy all the time. Now that I have reached… um, and advanced stage of life I find it takes too much time and effort to be grumpy, so I’ve resorted to my mantra from the 60s… “go with the flow” (unless it leads to catastrophe)

Godzilla finally won an Oscar, for best visual effects…nut there’s just something about that guy in the costume in 1954 that they can’t match today

And now you have remake of the remakes of the remakes.

I guess that every time the visual effects get updated, we will get a new Godzilla (originally Gorjira in Japanese) v. King Kong.

I grew up with a dad who introduced to me to a love of old movies. (Long before even Beta tapes). We would watch “The Late Show” and “The Million Dollar Movie” & such on TV.

When I was in college I met a fellow who also had a love of old movies. We formed "The (college name) Movie club. We accumulated a group of like minded friends & we went to movies at our college and elsewhere – new and old movies. Both also grew up with dad’s who loved big band music (the music of their era).

Well, the fellow and I started dating and did so for 4 years. We then were engaged for 2 years. ( I gave him the latest thing – a Beta recorder*-layer – as an engagement gift.) It is now about 45 years since we got married and we still share a love of movies – old and new.

We went just every Saturday night (and sometimes on other nights also) on our movie date, even when we traveling – PA, MA, VA, MD, NC, and Canada (in French which neither of us speaks when we were in Quebec) until Covid came along. Our movie dates then became watching movies on TV which he named “Saturday night movie date on TV”. He also brought back after Covid started “Friday Night Midnight Movies” which we used to got to also when we were dating, but on “TV”. These are only older movies, first one of course was “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”. (We were at the first US showing outside of Manhattan of same.) For The Friday night after Thanksgiving Day, of course the movie was Alice’s Restaurant". We ran through all of the Marx Bros movies and many others on Friday nights – and these old movies are often better than the Saturday night new movie we watch. While they have been on either DVD or what is being broadcast by some channel on cable, etc. we still have movies on Beta and VHS – and some movies in all 3 formats.

On paper we should not be together due to major differences in our family backgrounds and how we raised, but shared love of movies brought us together and kept us together.

See “Bambi meets Godzilla.”