Thanks for doing this. While I still have to watch my DVDs of Shinobi no Mono, I have been told that the dripping poison on a thread onto the sleeping victim scene was "borrowed " and put in the classic James Bond film "You Only Live Twice. "
Hi Peter. Yes, that's definitely where the scene in You Only Live Twice came from. I did a fair bit of work trying to figure out exactly how the connection between the two films came about as I was writing my forthcoming article, but I had to cut most of the info relating to YOLT for space reasons. I plan to share what I found in an upcoming post, but the TL:DR is this.
1) The most obvious point of connection is that Hatsumi was a consultant on YOLT as well as Shinobi no mono. Draeger, Hatsumi's students, was also Sean Connery's stunt double, so the ninja connections are right there. I believe that Hatsumi had also been involved with the film crew before filming began, doing some kind of presentation on 'ninja' at an early stage in the project's development, maybe while the crew were scouting locations in Japan.
2) Ian Fleming, author of the YOLT novel, had been in Japan in 1962 and came across the concept of the ninja - they're mentioned in the novel in similar terms to what appears in the YOLT film, though the film is *very* different from the novel. I think Fleming read a 1961 article by Donn Draeger (again) in an English-language magazine published in Japan, and things went from there.
3) It's sometimes been suggested (e.g. in the Shinobi no mono Animeigo DVD program notes) that Roald Dahl - yes, *that* Roald Dahl, who was the screenwriter for YOLT - saw Shinobi no mono. I am not sure that's accurate, because Dahl only joined the YOLT project in Spring 1966, and doesn't seem to have been in Japan before the summer of the same year, once the film had already started shooting. Cubby Broccoli and the original screenwriter, a guy named Harold Jack Bloom (*not* that Harold Bloom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bloom) had already produced a script by that point, and according to Broccoli's recollections it had "ninjas crawling all over Tokyo."
My best guess, then, is that Hatsumi and/or Draeger either arranged a screening of Shinobi no mono for the YOLT advance crew some time in early 1966, or they told the crew about the poison-thread thing around the same time.
Once my article is out, I'll probably write this up and provide the documentation. Watch this space!
Thanks for doing this. While I still have to watch my DVDs of Shinobi no Mono, I have been told that the dripping poison on a thread onto the sleeping victim scene was "borrowed " and put in the classic James Bond film "You Only Live Twice. "
Hi Peter. Yes, that's definitely where the scene in You Only Live Twice came from. I did a fair bit of work trying to figure out exactly how the connection between the two films came about as I was writing my forthcoming article, but I had to cut most of the info relating to YOLT for space reasons. I plan to share what I found in an upcoming post, but the TL:DR is this.
1) The most obvious point of connection is that Hatsumi was a consultant on YOLT as well as Shinobi no mono. Draeger, Hatsumi's students, was also Sean Connery's stunt double, so the ninja connections are right there. I believe that Hatsumi had also been involved with the film crew before filming began, doing some kind of presentation on 'ninja' at an early stage in the project's development, maybe while the crew were scouting locations in Japan.
2) Ian Fleming, author of the YOLT novel, had been in Japan in 1962 and came across the concept of the ninja - they're mentioned in the novel in similar terms to what appears in the YOLT film, though the film is *very* different from the novel. I think Fleming read a 1961 article by Donn Draeger (again) in an English-language magazine published in Japan, and things went from there.
3) It's sometimes been suggested (e.g. in the Shinobi no mono Animeigo DVD program notes) that Roald Dahl - yes, *that* Roald Dahl, who was the screenwriter for YOLT - saw Shinobi no mono. I am not sure that's accurate, because Dahl only joined the YOLT project in Spring 1966, and doesn't seem to have been in Japan before the summer of the same year, once the film had already started shooting. Cubby Broccoli and the original screenwriter, a guy named Harold Jack Bloom (*not* that Harold Bloom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bloom) had already produced a script by that point, and according to Broccoli's recollections it had "ninjas crawling all over Tokyo."
My best guess, then, is that Hatsumi and/or Draeger either arranged a screening of Shinobi no mono for the YOLT advance crew some time in early 1966, or they told the crew about the poison-thread thing around the same time.
Once my article is out, I'll probably write this up and provide the documentation. Watch this space!