The Great Prophecies of Nostradamus (1974) ノストラダムスの大予言 Translation & Timing: Grayscale Studios Quality Check: Muzussawa Encode: wowmd Toho's 1974 live-action sci-fi disaster film "The Great Prophecies of Nostradamus" (a.k.a. - Prophecies of Nostradamus, Catastrophe 1999, and The Last Days of Planet Earth) was the number 2 highest grossing film in Japan that year. The brainchild of Yoshimitsu Banno, it takes the environmentalism of 1971's Godzilla vs. Hedora and cranks the craziness up to about a million, resulting in a disaster film that seems bent on portraying just about every kind of disaster imaginable. Climate change and pollution wreak havoc upon the Earth with fires, earthquakes, volcanoes, birth deformities, super-powered mutants, cannibal mutants, signs and wonders in the sky, the complete breakdown of social order, and finally nuclear war. The special effects are top notch for the time and resulted in at least one sound stage burning down while filming. The prophecies of Nostradamus are occasionally mentioned, but this entire enterprise is mainly an excuse to address topics of environmental destruction and sustainability that were probably revolutionary in 1974 and are now sadly the world we live in today. It would be much better known if not for one thing: this is one of a handful of so-called "sealed films". These are movies which garnered some controversy on their release, which resulted in Toho enacting self-imposed bans on their further distribution. Nostradamus's problem was in its fairly thoughtless portrayal of the victims of radiation exposure. Advocacy groups for the hibakusha (Survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) objected to the scenes of radiation victims being reduced to crazed cannibals in the middle of the movie and then misshapen monstrous mutants at the very end. Toho cut a few minutes from the run time in certain markets toward the end of the film's run. It was dubbed for international release in 1979 and cut to 89 minutes, although the offensive scenes still remained. It was also licensed to an American company for the US television version known as The Last Days of Planet Earth, featuring significant re-edits and changes and a running time of only 88 minutes. Naturally, the offensive scenes remained. There was a single broadcast of the film on Japanese television in 1980 and a video release was planned, but never actually carried out. To this day, there is no official video release of the uncut 115 minute version of the film. There are, however, unofficial versions. A 1998 bootleg (Likely originating from the aborted home video release) appeared on the scene, and an MPEG2 file from a second or third generation VHS copy is available on archive.org. That version forms the basis of this release. This new encode tries its best to correct some of the massive interlacing artifacts present in the MPEG2 video, and successfully (for the most part) restores the original 24fps frame rate. Video filtering and smoothing are kept to a minimum to preserve what detail there is in this version. The video is far from perfect, but until Toho either relents and does an official release (or AI video processing gets a lot better), this is about the best video quality you can hope for. The biggest change for this release are the subtitles. There has been a fansub floating around for years, but the translation is very loose in many places, it's clear the translator just couldn't make out what characters are saying and just made a best guess. The rest of it seems to hew closely to the English dub. This release features a brand new translation and soft subtitles. All attempts have been made to make certain of its accuracy. Finally, the distorted, blown-out audio from the original file has been replaced with audio taken from the 1998 drama album CD (Except for two lines of dialogue which were edited out. These have been replaced using the audio from the original video file). This release probably represents the best way to watch this video rarity.