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I've just started reading Dungeon Meshi and I had to share some context for a Japanese-culture joke that I actually got for once!

When I was in college, there was a little independent theater that mostly showed foreign & independent films, plus midnight cult classics, monster movie Mondays, and a monthly? amateur short film festival that was also a gong show*. I didn't make near enough use of this theater and I regret that to this day, but one of the movies I did see there on a Monster Movie Monday was Matango.

Spoilers for Matango below, if it wasn't obvious.

Matango (1963) is a Japanese monster movie by director Ishiro Honda, who you're most likely to know as the director of Godzilla (1954). Matango is generally considered his darkest film. Also, weirdly, I've heard a rumor it might be a major inspiration for Gilligan's Island? And I can kinda see it?

Anyway, it's about a group of people who are shipwrecked on an island full of radioactive fungus. Everybody's pretty leery about eating them, because the shipwreckees found an older shipwreck, including a ship's log from its (now-absent) survivors saying the mushrooms cause hallucinations - but they're running low on food so eventually some of them say y'know what, fuck it.

The mushrooms turn out to be not only hallucinogenic, but also addictive and infectious - you can tell how long someone's been eating mushrooms based on their level of mushroom disfigurement. The mushroom eaters hunt down the holdouts and force them to eat the mushrooms too. Only one dude escapes the island, and in the last shot of the film we see - dun dun DUN! - even though he got away without eating any mushrooms, he still got infected and is turning into a mushroom person.

So the implication is that the travelogue guy ate from a Matango-style walking mushroom, and got transformed into one himself for his trouble. And because it's a funny side page instead of main comic continuity, Marcille understands the implication and is freaked out by this.

What's funnier to me, though, is Laios's nonchalance. You just know that if he understood the cultural reference, he would be fucking drooling at the thought of a monster he could both eat and turn into.

Dumb asides about that independent theater's film festival below the cut.

* The Gong Show was a 70s TV talent show where if someone's act sucked, they'd ring a big gong to cut them off. In the case of this short film festival, there was a 2 or 3 minute grace period, after which one of the organizers shone a light on the gong. Once the light was on the gong, the audience was allowed and indeed encouraged to shout "gong!" if they weren't enjoying the current film; if there was enough shouting, the host would ring the gong and the film would be cut off. From a creator's perspective I imagine this must have been humiliating; but from an audience and I suppose business perspective, it was crucial to keeping the event fun and well-attended. Very few people would have paid 5 bucks to spend their Friday night screening a bunch of poorly-paced, masturbatory student films. Instead, the threat of the gong encouraged locals to make short funny videos that would have done numbers on Tiktok if it had been around at the time. (An example I still remember 15 years later: shots of someone's hands assembling a cheese sandwich while Duel of the Fates plays. Cut to show the guy throwing the sandwich into the air, just as the music is climaxing. The guy is in jedi robes, activates his lightsaber, and swings at the sandwich. Cut to the sandwich falling back onto the plate, cut in half, grilled from the slice out. The guy picks up one of the halves and takes a bite. End of film.)

I only saw the audience not be ruthless about gonging a boring film once. An out-of-towner entered a short about a woman losing her child during the Holocaust. Not depicting an actual series of events, you understand - just symbolic shots of stars of david and swastikas and a woman and her child frolicking in a field and then DRAMATIC SLOW-MO on a shot of her spinning around and then gasp! The clothes are empty!

During the intro (every entrant gave one before their film was shown), she mentioned that it had won some other local film festivals, but she didn't think it was going to play as well here. I get the impression she hadn't realized this was a festival attended by normal-ass people, and was rather embarrassed about how poorly hers was going to go over. But, nobody wanted to be the first one to boo a film about the Holocaust, and so everyone patiently waited through her maudlin piece of crap film. (When your film is already dragging, for the love of god, don't add slo-mo .)

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