See? That’s what I’m talking about – rows upon rows of books, the best visual representation of accumulated knowledge one could wish for.
I couldn’t find any pictures of the inside of the Japanese Diet Library, though. I guess it’s a general pattern with libraries, the number of people who see them from the outside dwarves the number of people who’ve ever seen the inside. So the inside shots are from a Swedish library, which had just the right mood for this sequence.
And of course, in a B-movie all of this is about furnishing a backdrop, anyway – they’d never bore the audience by actually showing the heroes engaging in any sort of serious research. At most there’d be a time-compressed montage, but more typical is the scenario depicted here: there is only one tiny, but crucial clue to the mystery to be found in the whole, gargantuan mountain of knowledge, and it’s on the very first item the heroes are shown to pick up. In this case, it’s an old postcard properly filed under the right keyword – but if they would have had to pass by the cafeteria on their way in, and Biff would have picked up the menu, he’d have found the clue there instead. >_>
Mopey is completely correct in stating that they were justfied to overlook Snuka’s tattoo, even if it’s smack-dab in the middle of his (often smacked) face. And the justification is: it wasn’t relevant up to now, so it wasn’t visible. The same justification, coincidentally, will apply to why the tattoo will likely only be seen sporadically, if ever again – or why it might look completely different the next time around. It’s the B-movie version of Checkov’s gun:“If a rifle goes off in chapter two or three, you should have said that there is one hanging on the wall in chapter one. But it’s a pain keeping track of all of those rewrites, and the audience is probably not going to even notice, anyway, and..”
A note on the postal code: The Ogasawara Islands belong to Tokyo prefecture administratively, but they’re actually 600 miles south of Japan in the Pacific. Compared to the rest of the prefecture, population density and real estate prices are considerably lower, either of which facts speaks strongly in their favor as far as building a secret hideout is concerned. And they are in fact the usual place for mysterious islands in Japanese pop fiction. “Monster Island” from the Godzilla franchise was claimed to be part of the island group, as was “Macross Island” from the Macross anime, amongst others.
More on Thurs…uh, Monday!