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BN: I know you've talked about this a lot before, but I still want to have you mention it, going back a little, is the name, Gidra, kind of that story.

MM: Okay. We were in Campbell Hall, on the third floor. And before the Asian American Studies offices were really set up, we had the space available, so there were like two empty rooms. And we used to hang out there a lot and just shoot the breeze, talk about a lot of different things. As far as I know, there wasn't much drunk usage. I'm not going to blame drunks for this, but maybe some drinking or whatever, I didn't participate in a lot of that. One of the discussions about the newspaper when we talked about what the name should be, and we considered other names. I remember, for example, we considered Epicanthus, you know, for the epicanthic fold that is typical of Asians having single eyelids, things like that, I guess East Asians, really. And we had several other names, but somebody, I think it was Tracy that suggested Gidra because in his recollection of Japanese sci-fi movies, Gidra was a good monster that saved the people of Japan. And we said, okay, that sounds like a good story. And the idea was to pick a name or word that had no prior association. So we didn't want to use something that was generic or something that already had some meaning to people, so Gidra was kind of a nonsensical word. So we picked this worm as kind of the mascot, the smaller version of the monster. And I don't know if people know this, but the sword is supposed to be a pen. So that's how we came up with the name. As it turned out, I think the name in sci-fi films is really spelled G-H-I-D-O-R-A-H, and Ghidorah was a three-headed monster who was a bad monster. I don't know the details. But it didn't matter by then.

BN: Who came up with the graphic of the...

MM: Of the worm?

BN: Yeah.

MM: Okay. So I had a friend named Rick Kasuyama who was a basketball teammate, went to L.A. High. And he was a good illustrator. He was not involved in Gidra, but I asked a personal favor and said, "Would you design something for it?" That's what he did. And so that was the only involvement in Gidra that Rick had.

BN: Well, I'm sure he's been collecting royalties all these years. [Laughs]

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.