I've talked about it before, and I probably will again, but Matango (aka Attack of the Mushroom People, aka Fungus of Terror) is a surprisingly effective adaptation of William Hope Hodgson's seminal fungus-person story "The Voice in the Night" by Toho (best known for being the company that made all those Godzilla movies). Like most of the Toho movies with which we're familiar, it involves rubber suit monsters, though in this case the monsters are a) mushroom people and b) only about the size of regular people. They're also wonderful, though I caution you that seeing pictures will never do them justice. You have to see them move, and hear the delightful noises they make.
Anyway, during the heyday of Toho, Matango had quite a lot of awesome marketing, including mushroom people riding tricycles and the wonderful diorama that I have dubbed the Matango picnic scene, images of which are produced below.
Very sadly, I don't own any of these great tie-ins, though hopefully I will someday. In the meantime, Matango is available in a very nice DVD edition and also (apparently) to download for free off the Internet. So check it out, and you won't be disappointed.
2 comments:
A mushroom person on a trike is probably one of the most wonderful things I can think of.
The mushroom trike is made by m1go and is a modern toy. Should not be that hard to acquire. The picnic scene looks like they might be part Iwakura figures (also made recently) mixed in with someone's own painted clay scene.
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