Voices Like Angels

But for South Korean director Shing Sang oh and movie star Choi yung e, the opposite was true. Films weren't an escape. They were a prison, and their tailor was future North Korean dictator Kim Jong il. In the nineteen sixties, Shin and Choi were South Korea's it couple. Choi was one of South Korea's biggest stars after the Korean War. Her husband Shin was an acclaimed director who, along with Choi,

founded one of the largest film studios in Korea. From the mid nineteen fifties to the nineteen seventies, they made dozens of movies that defined Korean post war cinema. But all was not perfect in paradise, and in the nineteen seventies, Shin Studios was forced to shut down. In nineteen seventy six, Shin and Choi's relationship fell apart as well, when Choi discovered Shin had fathered two children with another woman. The

its couple decided to call it quits. By nineteen seventy eight, Choi traveled to Hong Kong in the hopes that she could direct a film there. It had been hard for her to book rolls after the very public divorce, but a Hong Kong film company had offered her a job. When Choi arrived, however, she discovered it was a ruse. She was forced onto a boat and taken away to North Korea. News of Choi's disappearance drove Shin to fire follow her to Hong Kong, and six months later, North

Korean operatives kidnapped him as well. He was imprisoned, with his sentence eventually stretching to five years due to repeated escape attempts. While Shin was languishing in prison, Choi was ushered into the inner circle of King Jong Il, son of North Korean dictator Kim Jong sung. She was taught the government approved history of the country and was taken

to performances and parties by Kim. Shin was finally released from prison in early nineteen eighty three, and at a party in March of that year, the former couple were reunited after five long years in captivity. They were finally told the reason for their capture. Their host, Kim Jong Il, wanted their help to make movies. Kim Jong il had always been a film buff with a personal collection of

nearly fifteen thousand movies from around the world. When he took over North Korea's propaganda department in the nineteen sixties, he dreamed of making movies that would rival the ones from the West, But after several attempts, it became clear that North Korean actors and filmmaks, who had been cut off from new ideas and technology in film for decades, couldn't make his dreams come true. So he looked to

the South, and he kidnapped Choi and Shin. For the next three years, Choi and Shin made films with Kim Jong Ill. Many were adaptations of Korean myths and folk tales or historical epics, all with a communist bent, of course, and all making sure to paint the Kims as heroes and saviors. But during their captivity, something unexpected happened. Choi

and Shin fell back in love. Choi was touched by Shin, tracking her down to Hong Kong, and after years working together under the pressure of a dictator, all her anger towards him softened. The two remarried and waited patiently for their chance to escape. Their opportunity finally came in nineteen eighty six, when Choi and Shin traveled to Vienna to

secure funding for a film about Genghis Khan. Typically, Kim Jong Ung would send them out of the country before film festivals, but usually only one at a time, so with both of them in Austria, they saw their chance, and they took it. On March twelfth of nineteen eighty six, Choi and Shin arrived at the Intercontinental Hotel to meet with a journalist. When their North Korean bodyguards stepped out of the room, the two made a break for it. They ran out of the hotel, hailed a cab, and

jumped in. Choi and Shin took the taxi to the US embassy and sprinted inside. Once there, they presented American officials with secret recordings they made of Kim Jong ung, in which he admitted to the kidnapping scheme and holding them against their will. The Americans granted them asylum, and after eight long years of captivity, they were finally free. Shin and Choi ended up in Los Angeles, where Shin produced several children's martial arts movies before moving back to

South Korea in nineteen ninety nine. After extensive interrogation of the two kidnap filmmakers, the South Korean government cleared them of any suspicion of willingly defecting to North Korea. The two remained together until Shin's death in two thousand and six. Choi later passed away in twenty eighteen. Choi and Shin may have spent their lives making movies, but in a real life plot twist, they staged a great escape that

would put any Hollywood thriller to shame. In today's world, we have more sources of entertainment at our fingertips than we know what to do with. With a few taps on your phone, you can access hundreds of movies thousands of hours of television and millions of songs. It would take you over four years to watch everything on Netflix, and over seventeen thousand years to get through all the

videos on YouTube. And for those of you who are curious, if you listen to nothing but this podcast feed, it would take you over one hundred hours to finish all of the episodes. With so much content at our disposal, it's easy to forget just how good we've got it. As recently as the seventeenth century, people's entertainment options were much more limited, not to mention expensive. If you wanted to veg out by watching a show for a few hours, you would need a stage, a director, a writer, and

a cast of actors. Feel like listening to some tunes, well, then you'd better have a singer or a pianist on hand to perform. And don't forget the variety and the quality of the music will be limited by the performer's knowledge and talent. With entertainment options so limited, having access to skilled musicians became extremely important. In England, Queen Elizabeth the First maintained a Royal children's choir which was ready

to perform whenever and wherever she desired. The master of the choir, a guy named Nathaniel Giles, was charged with scouting out new talent and to make sure that he got the best singers around. He was given incredible power is he Giles carried a warrant that allowed him to force any child to join the choir. Whenever he wanted. He could walk into a random church or theater in the country, pick out the best singers, and decide that

they now worked for him. If the kid didn't want to go, there was nothing they or their parents could do about it. Now this seems unbelievable today, but it's pretty consistent with Elizabethan society. Children were viewed as a kind of property. They were owned by their parents until they began an apprenticeship, at which point they then belonged to their master. Oh and their training and education weren't

for their own benefit either. That was simply a way to make the kids more useful so that the adults could ring every last drop of value out of them. At the same time, the British monarch was a symbolic

parent figure to her subjects. It was everyone's duty to serve the crown in whatever way they could, so most people wouldn't have found it particularly odd when talented kids were forced to sing for the queen, but it was still a lot of power for one man to hold, and Nathaniel Giles wasn't above using it for his own ends. He and a theater producer named Henry Evans routinely abducted children right off the streets, then refused to return them

until their parents bought them back. They were effectively holding the children ransom, and while this was a clear abuse of power, it was also technically legal. They got away with it for years and may never have been questioned about it at all had they not taken the wrong child. You see, in sixteen hundred, Giles and Evans kidnapped a thirteen year old named Thomas Clifton while he was on his way home from school. As it turns out, the boys'

parents were nobles and extremely litigious ones at that. After getting their son back, they took Giles to court. Their argument wasn't that the choir master had broken the law by kidnapping their son. Everyone agreed that that was within his rights. The problem was that Thomas couldn't sing to save his life. As a result, he'd been made to act in stage plays which were seen as less respectable

than singing, and Thomas's parents won the case. The producer, Henry Evans was forced to resign and he was run out of town, but Giles got off without so much as a reprimand he continued to work as the master of the Royal Choir, although his warrant was adjusted to clarify that the children he took could not be employed as comedians or actors. Singing was the Queen's entertainment of choice, and she deserved to hear only the most angelic of voices.

And apparently if it took a devil of a choir master to make that happen, it was still worth it so long as the music never stopped. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works.

I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious,