Talk:Teruyoshi Nakano

Potential deletion of the Bloodthirsty Trilogy

It's come to my attention that there doesn't seem to be immediate evidence of Nakano having worked on the Bloodthirsty Trilogy. The only places I've seen so far that credit him are Japanese Wikipedia (for The Vampire Doll only and with no source), David Milner's interview from 1994 (only for Evil of Dracula and not actually confirmed in the interview itself; just something Milner attributes to him in Nakano's introduction), Toho Kingdom, and the booklet in Arrow Video's Blu-ray set. The movies are suspiciously absent from Nakano's memoir and also not listed in the interview or filmography from Godzilla Toho Champion Festival Perfection. Other sources that have turned up dry include Age of the Gods, The Toho Studios Story, Toho Special Effects Movie Complete Works, and Godfathers of Tokusatsu. I've contacted TK about helping in the search, but at the moment I'm at a loss. If we can't find sufficient confirmation, unfortunately the movies will have to be removed. Les (main | talk) 04:08, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Even though the pages are now deleted, I'm going to keep providing updates in case anybody stumbles across this in the future.

Before we made the decision, Toho Kingdom turned up two sources: Stuart Galbraith's The Japanese Filmography, which credits Nakano for all three movies, and another book called Dracula in Visual Media which credits him specifically for The Vampire Doll. TK felt good enough about having two sources to leave Nakano on their Doll page, but removed him from their pages for Lake and Evil. I did not find either of them particularly compelling, however, especially because Galbraith has been demonstrably wrong about things in the past and because The Toho Studios Story was written by him a decade later with no mention of Nakano being connected to those movies.

Just the other day, Brett Homenick made a blog post in response to our decision in which he shared a brief exchange he had with Nakano in 2017 that confirms Nakano was involved with at least one of the Bloodthirsty films. I corresponded with Homenick through email and he explained to me that Nakano did not provide any specifics about his role nor which of the three movies he was involved with; Homenick simply posed a question like, "Did you work on the Bloodthirsty movies?" and Nakano said yes. Even though it's likely he worked in an SFX director capacity, this alone does not necessarily confirm that. To be fair to all the movies we've rejected on technicalities, I think we have to keep these ones in quarantine until we can dig up more. It is good to know for sure that Nakano was involved at all, however. The next best place I can think to check is Fumio Tanaka's DVD audio commentary for Lake of Dracula. Les (main | talk) 19:48, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

It's months later now, but I forgot to make a post about the latest. For starters, I realized that I was too hasty in writing off Nakano's memoir; there *is* actually a mention of The Vampire Doll, but not in his filmography. The main body of the book is a longform interview with Nakano, and while on the topic of Fumio Tanaka, the interviewer mentions that Nakano "helped with"/"contributed to" (手伝った) the film's special effects. Unfortunately this doesn't get us any closer to restoring the movie(s), as we already knew he was involved in some capacity, but just weren't sure that he was explicitly a special effects director. However, I suppose the corroboration is nice.

More importantly, I bought the Region B Blu-ray of the trilogy, which includes a reissue of Tanaka's Lake commentary, some nice photo galleries, and a booklet with a reprinted interview with Michio Yamamoto. The tl;dr is, I do not believe Nakano worked on Lake or Evil. I'm not a Japanese speaker and writing down a whole audio commentary by ear is beyond my skill level, but I used YouTube to autogenerate captions. In looking through these, I could not find any mention of Nakano. There *was* one interesting part, however, where Tanaka insists that the vampire melting away at the end of Evil is not tokusatsu, but rather tokushu meiku (special makeup).

The nail in the coffin for me (ha) is the booklet. Yamamoto confirms that he personally operated the mechanism for the vampire's body deflating in Lake, which is one of very few sequences in the whole trilogy that I would actually call an "effect." The photo gallery also provides some shots of Yamamoto dressing the faux-impaled Shin Kishida with blood. These tidbits together with Tanaka's comment about Evil leave me stumped about what Nakano could've contributed to either movie. Presently I think Doll is our best lead, both because we have the most evidence to suggest he worked on it, and because a miniature shot was used beneath its title card (as confirmed by Koichi Kawakita in Toho Special Effects Movie Complete Works). That same book has a few images which link Yamamoto to the blood-spurting effects toward the movie's end, so the split-second miniature might just be the only avenue left. Les (main | talk) 05:13, 26 June 2023 (UTC)