News Stay At Home With ULTRAMAN| Ultra Science Fiction Hour on YouTube

Episode #34 of "Ultraman Mebius" guest-stars Ultraman Leo:

 

Incidentally, GraphicAudio has posted the cover and blurb for the second installment of TANGENT KNIGHTS, my original audio drama trilogy inspired by tokusatsu heroes (mainly Kamen Rider and Super Sentai, but there are some Ultraman homages as well). Book 2 will be released in digital download format on June 27, with MP-3 CDs available in mid-July.

https://www.graphicaudio.net/tangent-knights-2-tempest-tossed.html

 

Continuing the story from last week, episode #8 of "Ultraman Ace" sees our hero still battling two powerful opponents when a third one appears, while a rogue planet is on a collission course with Earth:

 

Well, Ultraman Nexus finally explicitly tied into the 2004 movie and explained why nobody remembered its events, although its explanation is tricky to reconcile with the movie's "One Month Later" epilogue. And they still seem like two distinct projects grafted together as an afterthought, which is basically what they were.

The last third of the series got somewhat better, when they introduced a new Ultraman host who was very different and more fun than the previous one. But it still wasn't great, and it had a rushed ending because of the early cancellation. There was a regular character who turned out to have been the secret arch-villain all along, and not only did the revelation not make much sense, but it was hard to care about it because that character had been given essentially zero development over the course of the series.

I'm two episodes into Ultraman Max now, and liking it so far. It's well-made, with a good design for Max, and the writing is interesting, though I don't have a strong sense of the characters yet. It seems to rely a lot on nostalgia, with a lot of classic kaiju returning and the male and female leads from the original Ultraman having recurring roles, as well as Max having a very Ultraseven-inspired design and henshin sequence. That presages the following year's Mebius, although this one's in a standalone universe of its own.

 

Not sure you're aware of this website

https://ultrablogdx.wordpress.com/2020/08/05/ultraman-max-production-history/


It's a history of the "Ultraman Max" production. It's a very lengthy breakdown into the show and other Ultraman series. Definitely worth a look at.

 

Thanks -- interesting column. I've bookmarked the site for later reading.

 

This week's episode #18 of "Ultraman Chronicle D" looks at robots encountered by Ultraman Dyna:

 

Argh... Ultraman Max did a 2-parter guest-starring Hurricaneger's Nao Nagasawa as a character who spent part of the story in a ninja costume, and I didn't recognize her! I mean, I did recognize her, but I couldn't remember from where until I checked the wiki afterward. I was thinking, "Is that ShinkenPink?" The ninja getup really should've been a giveaway. I blame lack of sleep.

The first part of the 2-parter introduced Max's superior, Ultraman Xenon, and I'm surprised how much he looks like Mebius, who came along the following year. They both have rather feline features.

I'm finding Max reasonably good but not great. It's been a mix of pretty good episodes and mediocre episodes. But it's well-made.

 

And another Tsuburaya YouTube series comes to an end, with episode #51 of "Mirrorman":


I hope we get another series for Mondays next week.

 

I'm 3/4 of the way through Ultraman Max now, and I must revise my opinion of it considerably upward. It's really become an impressive series. It's driven by nostalgia for the Showa Era Ultra shows in much the same way as the following year's Mebius, but not just to the returning actors and monsters, but to the style of storytelling in Showa Ultraman, with an eclectic mix of standalone episodes in distinctive styles, from serious drama to really wacky humor (I don't think I've ever seen an Ultraman do so much physical comedy, or do it so well) to outright surrealism (there's an episode called "Butterfly Dream" which is told from the perspective of an Ultraman Max writer dreaming that he's the show's hero, or is it the other way around?). It's very different from the more serialized storytelling of most of the Heisei series, but is just as well-made as they were. It's an interesting contrast to Mebius, which revived the Showa continuity but updated it in a very Heisei-ish serialized style of storytelling. Max tells Showa-style stories with Heisei-era quality. (I guess you could say it's the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds of Ultraman shows.)

It's also not afraid to play fast and loose with continuity/reality. Max is theoretically in its own universe where Max is the first Ultra on Earth, but it's a universe where the Ultraseven episode "The Targeted Town" somehow happened 40 years earlier and where Ultra Q existed as a TV series. (I'd been wondering why Mebius didn't do an Ultra Q tribute episode. Now I see it's because Max had already done one.)

 

Well, we went a long time without any problems regarding available English subtitles now, but this week's episode #35 of "Ultraman Mebius" was uploaded without them. Shame.

 

Having finished with Max (which had a satisfying finale 2-parter written by Chiaki Konaka), I moved on to Ultraseven X, which was just 12 episodes, so I'm already done. It's pretty insubstantial, for all that it's supposed to be an "adult" take. A low-budget show set in a vaguely dystopian, Blade Runner-ish world shot mostly at night, with characters who are basically Men in Black, complete with "Agent [Letter]" code names. (Although judging from the title, I suppose they were trying for more of an X-Files thing.)

It's unclear why it's even an Ultra series, since the stories don't really need UltraSeven until the final episode; either there's a gratuitous giant monster tacked on to an unrelated story, or Seven fights at human scale and appears so briefly that it would've been a simple rewrite just to have the human agents defeat the bad guy. The two female leads are both lovely, but there's not much else going for it.

What I don't get is why the wiki assumes that the Ultraseven in this show is the one from the original Land of Light universe, instead of another alternate like Heisei Ultraseven. There's nothing in the show that specifically links it to the LoL continuity. And this version of Seven has a different design, which seems to be emulating Bruce Timm's character design style.


Anyway, I found U7X underwhelming enough that I interspersed watching it with the first few episodes of Ultra Galaxy Mega Monster Battle to break things up some. Which is weird, since both consecutive shows have amnesiac protagonists, though they're totally different otherwise. UGMMB is pretty obviously based on a fighting game, its story structured around the game's format, and seeing kaiju get into random fights just for the sake of the fight isn't very interesting to me. So it didn't do much for me at first. But there is some decent stuff being done with the characters, so that redeems it somewhat. And it's nice to see that the main villain is played by the actress I liked as the female lead of Kamen Rider Hibiki.

 

the most striking thing about that clip is that they are using the classic trek bridge ping from season 2-3 in the Science Patrol meeting. Also possibly using TNG bridge sound FX

 

Yeah, I've noticed a number of Heisei-era Ultra series using TOS bridge ambience in their control rooms.

A number of tokusatsu shows, both Tsuburaya and Toei, have used the Doctor Who TARDIS materialization sound effect for various things as well.

 

Episode #9 of "Ultraman Ace" has Super Beast Gama disappear and re-appear thanks to a photograph, and Hokuto hit a woman:

 

Ah, that sounds like the episode that made Hokuto my least favorite Ultra Host. The woman wasn't even doing anything specific to set him off, just disagreeing with him (not that anything would condone him hitting a civilian, but it didn't even have a BS reason, like her being "hysterical", Hokuto is just an asshole) and he slapped her hard enough to send her to the floor. I never looked at Hokuto the same way after that, it left a bad impression on me for the rest of the show.

 

Episode #19 of "Ultraman Chronicle D" has more Dyna action and deals with his secret identity:

 

I've been a little under the weather, so I spent the weekend pretty much bingeing Ultra stuff. Season 2 of Mega Monster was okay, but largely just more of the same, even having a "trapped Ultraseven" arc mimicking the "trapped Ultraman" arc in season 1. This season brought in vintage aliens as well as kaiju, but having the aliens be rival Reionics made me wonder why Rei was the only Reionics-hybrid individual who could transform into a different appearance. All the others just looked like the usual alien suits.

I managed to burn through the Ultraman Zero film trilogy and the intervening Gaiden specials in a day. I'd been curious about the Ultra Galaxy movie, because I knew it had cameos by some of the obscure Ultras -- specifically the five from the overseas English-language productions, plus Neos and Ultraseven 21 from the direct-to-video series. I'd been expecting some multiversal element to the story to explain their presence, but they were just in the crowd on the Land of Light as if they were natives. Heck, maybe they were, and crossed over into their series' respective alternate universes, like Seven did in Ultraseven X.

I was also confused by Asuka/Dyna's presence in the movie, since I'd forgotten that his series ended with him passing through a wormhole to the Land of Light. I saw Dyna before I'd seen the classic series (aside from seeing the '66 series dubbed on TV when I was a kid), so I guess the significance of that crossover didn't register. (So I was in error to say before that the Gaia movie was the first use of the multiverse.)

Anyway, the first movie was good-looking with its lush visuals of the Land of Light and its frenetic Sakamoto-directed action, but it and the sequel were just elaborate exercises in bashing toys together, moderately entertaining but more about action and spectacle and continuity-mining than anything else. But Ultraman Saga was a terrific movie, much more character-driven and emotional, with some clever ideas. Centering on Earth-human characters rather than suit characters and alien planets gave it more depth and grounding. And I loved the twist of Ultraman Zero's chosen host wanting no part of being an Ultraman, and the two of them having to find common ground.

So that catches me up to the New Generation era, and it only took me another day to burn through Ginga's 12 episodes (counting the special). That was a mediocre show. It was interesting that it tried to do something different from the usual defense team, even choosing a school setting like the last time that was tried with Ultraman 80. And there was some halfway decent character drama and stylish direction, and I really like Ginga's theme song. But the premise is kind of silly and blatantly written around toy collecting, with Ultras and monsters being transformed into plastic action figures as power/transformation devices. It also had a similar problem to Nexus in that its battles were usually out in the woods so you didn't get a lot of interesting miniature sets. Plus for such a short series, it spent an amazing amount of time recapping the story so far, with two episodes (and the long version of the Theater Special) devoting their early minutes to extended recaps.

I'm a few episodes into Ginga S now, and the attempt to revamp it to the traditional defense-team structure is kind of cursory, with Hikaru just getting invited to join after one brave feat. Okay, a lot of the Showa series did much the same with their heroes, and Mebius did it with practically the whole team, but usually they had to get some formal training before being approved, or had already applied or taken the tests in the past, so it wasn't completely unbelievable as a recruitment process. Also, the old dynamic of the defense team exhausting all their conventional efforts before Ultraman was called upon is nowhere to be seen; when a monster appears, Hikaru just blows off the defense team and immediately goes Ultra, so the team seems kind of peripheral.

Still, I'm pleased to see that the defense team's female member is the same gorgeous actress as Sawa from Kamen Rider Build, so yay.

I've realized there's been a change in approach to the monsters in the past few series. It used to be that each series introduced mostly or entirely new kaiju and aliens. Max and Mebius brought back a fair number of classic monsters, but alongside a healthy number of new ones. But from Ultra Galaxy onward, the shows have been relying almost exclusively on pre-existing kaiju and aliens. And looking ahead at the wiki pages for the remaining seasons, it looks like that trend largely continues, with a handful of new creatures but mostly returning ones. It's a lot like how a number of American franchises these days, like Star Trek, tend to rely far more heavily on recycling past ideas than they used to.

Another change that seems to have kicked in starting with the Zero movies is that Ultras (or their hosts) have gotten a lot more vocal, talking a lot during the action. And both Saga and Ginga have used the same kind of "host(s) floating in limbo-space inside the Ultra" device that was also used in Trigger, so I guess that's been the standard over the past decade.

 

Well, I'm done with Ginga S, and I remain underwhelmed. At least the first season tried something innovative with the school setting and the light, humorous tone. GS tried to be a more conventional season but just didn't do it very well. The last couple of episodes felt quite rushed, as if they had to cut them down from something longer. And they kept saying "This is the last time you can change into Ginga/Victory" without explaining why, and then having them change again later, after the "last" time. Which was compounded in the post-series movie.

Also, they did a couple of episodes bringing back the Chigusa character from season 1 and saying she'd become this big beloved pop idol, but she really wasn't that good a singer or dancer. Her trademark song was Ginga's season 1 theme song, and the actress didn't really have the chops to handle the challenging part where C#-A#-F# is sung quickly four times in a row (e.g. "Itsumo, itsumo, itsumo, itsumo"); she didn't quite hit the right notes every time.


Since my first two exposures to the modern Ultra shows (Trigger and Ginga) were both underwhelming, I was afraid the whole lot of them would be like that. But I'm three episodes into Ultraman X now and I really like it. I don't like that it's sticking with the Spark Doll gimmick, and the special armors and other toy-based aspects don't do much for me, but I'm enjoying the storytelling, characters, world, and production values. The merger of Daichi and X was done unusually, with Daichi having to figure it out in mid-battle, and it was wild getting a first-person Ultra's-eye view as Daichi looked down at his giant body for the first time. And this is another show where host and Ultra have an ongoing dialogue, rather than being treated as one person. Indeed, I've never seen this much conversation between the two, even having X live in Daichi's phone-like gizmo and talk to him through it. I suppose it's building on the way Taro served as Hikaru's mentor in Ginga season 1, or Zero's interaction with his host Taiga in Ultraman Saga.

I like it that the defense force includes both a fighting team and a lab team, and I like it that the show seems to be taking a Cosmos-style "sympathy for the kaiju" view, with X just turning them into Spark Dolls instead of killing them.

EDIT: Incidentally, it's gotten to the point that I can recognize when a movie or episode is directed by Koichi Sakamoto based on the use of high-kicking female fight moves. (Also by the creative action in general, like in X episode 4, where Ultraman X does parkour off the skyscrapers.)

 

After a fight with a monster, Mirai finds an unconscious girl. When she wakes up, she claims to be his little sister, in episode #36 of "Ultraman Mebius" (including English subtitles again):