Presented today are a set of curiosities; five lobby cards dating from the theatrical release of Shochiku’s perennial kaiju cash-in The X From Outer Space. Details are scarce, unfortunately. X saw its first domestic Japanese release in March of 1967, at the height of the Apollo-inspired space craze, but it was in regional theatrical distribution for the next couple of decades. Where the Philippines release falls on that timeline is, at least to the author, unknown.
Further complicating matters is the text that appears on several of the cards, much of which appears to have been deliberately lopped off at some point. The title iconography remains, as does the format hype for the color ‘Scope feature – here it is presented in ‘METROCOLOR’ and ‘Super Ultra Dimension SCOPE’. While the latter is a nonsense rebranding of the film’s generic anamorphic production, the former suggests the involvement of MGM (or at least an MGM film lab) at some point in the process.
The cards themselves are in rough shape, obviously theater-used and well aged, with plenty of tears, crinkles, sunburn and foxing. The most interesting is presented first, an image which was ‘colorized’ at some point in the process. The garish neon hues aren’t especially convincing, but they do lend the image a peculiar aesthetic. The rest are monochrome, each marked with a bit of hand-written script. One retains a tantalizing, indecipherable remnant of the further text that was cropped from these cards.
