During South Korea's cinematic Golden Age of the 1960s, motion picture remakes – especially those that were based on non-Korean productions – could be called ‘illicit’ in either one of two ways. As exemplified by director Kim Ki-duk's notorious 1964 release Barefoot Youth (Maenbaleui cheongchun), ‘illicitness’ might refer to unlawfulness, or the legal complications that arise when movie producers do not follow the proper channels of copyright clearance or other protocols involved in making near-replicas of existing works (Yecies and Shim 2016, 82, 94–5). In this case, Kim's controversial youth romance about a pair of star-crossed lovers from opposite sides of the track, financed by Geukdong Heungeop (a film company that the director had co-founded five years earlier) and written by Seo Yoon-seong (who would later re-team with Kim to concoct the endearingly cheesy Godzilla knockoff Yongary, Monster from the Deep [Taekoesu Yonggary, 1967]), copied the screenplay of Nakahira Kō's Mud-Spattered Purity (Dorodarake no junjō, 1963) without seeking permission to do so from the author of the original novel (Fujiwara Shinji), the Japanese filmmaker or the studio for which Kō worked (Nikkatsu). As archival scholar Chung Chonghwa elucidates, however, a license to produce Barefoot Youth had been obtained from the original film's screenwriter, Baba Masaru, though as the ‘adapter’ of the novel he was falsely referenced as the sole arbiter on the issue of remake rights, which was made more complicated by the fact that ‘the Republic of Korea (ROK) was not then a party to the Universal Copyright Convention’ (Chung 2016, 15).

A side-by-side comparison of the two films – each of which was shot in anamorphic widescreen (although the Japanese original was photographed in colour and features a running time of 91 minutes encompassing 126 scenes, whereas the Korean remake was photographed in black-and-white and features a running time of 117 minutes encompassing 122 scenes) – reveals significant thematic, tonal and visual differences (Chung 2016, 11–24; Chung 2017, 68). Nevertheless, despite those textual disparities and the now-verified belief (supported by archival evidence) that approval had been given (albeit in an unconventional, unofficial manner), Barefoot Youth was and still is commonly referred to by journalists and cultural historians as not just an inferior copy or pale imitation but an outright ‘plagiarism’ (pyojeol) of the original (Lee 2002, 71; Chung 2017, 68; Klein 2020, 120).