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

TokuSHOUTSu Announces First Ultraman Streaming Programs

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Los Angeles – October 27, 2020 – Following an exclusive North American streaming acquisition from Mill Creek Entertainment and Indigo Entertainment earlier this year, Shout! Factory TV will release its first collection of films and series from Tsuburaya Productions’ iconic Ultraman library November 1 on both Shout! Factory TV platforms and Shout’s Tokusatsu channel TokuSHOUTsu™, available on Pluto TV.

The first offering from the beloved and renowned library will include five complete television series and two films spanning over 50 years of historic fandom, from the first of the Ultraman series, 1966’s Ultra Q, to the 2018 Ultraman Geed film. The full offering launching November 1 includes series Ultra Q, Ultraman, Ultraseven, Ultraman Orb and Ultraman Geed alongside films Ultraman Orb The Movie: Let Me Borrow the Power of Bonds! and Ultraman Geed The Movie: Connect the Wishes!

Classic Ultraman series Ultra Q, Ultraman and Ultraseven will also premiere on Shout! Factory TV and TokuSHOUTsu in high definition, newly available for Shout! Factory’s expanding streaming audience.

All Ultraman content will be available for streaming on demand across Shout! Factory TV platforms, on ShoutFactoryTV.com; Shout! Factory TV’s Roku, Amazon Fire, Apple TV, and Android apps; and on various Shout! Factory TV branded channels including Tubi, Amazon Prime Channels, and the Roku Channel.

Ultraman content can also be seen on TokuSHOUTsu, a linear channel (#848), in the Gaming + Anime section of Pluto TV. Pluto TV can be found on all leading digital streaming devices and services, including Roku, Amazon Fire, Apple TV, Google Chromecast and more, as well as major smart TVs and game consoles.

The classic Ultraman live-action television series of the 1960s and 70s, produced by Tsuburaya Productions, established new heights of quality adventure and special effects-driven entertainment and built a worldwide audience for the property. The popularity of Ultraman—and the aliens and monsters—has enabled the series to persist to this day, generating over $50 million per year in toys and merchandise in Japan.
Shout! Factory TV plans a continued aggressive rollout of Ultraman properties on its channels in forthcoming months.
 
We're back to chronicling the adventures of Ultraman Zero, with the second part of the serialization of "Ultraman Saga":
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Edit: Appears they forgot the English subs again. :thumbdown:
 
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The video you posted doesn't actually say which series they are adding or when they're adding them. According to this story I found on Nerdist, on Sunday they will be adding Ultra Q, the original Ultraman, Seven, Orb, and Geed.
 
And today's upload, episode #31 of "Ultraman 80":
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Two uploaded episodes from Tsuburaya today! For one, episode #9 of "Ultraman: Towards the Future":
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And the other, outside the Ultra Series, the first episode of 1993's "Gridman the Hyper Agent", which back in the day got the MMPR treatment to be adapted as "Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad" in the US:
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I'm glad to hear that Shout! Factory will be getting Ultra Q. I've been curious about that one. I might like to watch the original Ultraman too, since it co-starred Akiji Kobayashi, whom I've gotten to know as Tobei Tachibana in the original run of Kamen Rider. Also because its sequel CGI anime series is on Netflix, and I guess it'd be preferable to watch the original before the sequel.

And the other, outside the Ultra Series, the first episode of 1993's "Gridman the Hyper Agent", which back in the day got the MMPR treatment to be adapted as "Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad" in the US:

Ugh, I hated Syber Squad. The American footage was just a dumb high school sitcom, and since the action scenes took place entirely in cyberspace, they had little connection to anything else and felt generic and interchangeable. I guess it might be worth checking out the Gridman episode to see if it's any less dire, but I'm hesitant.
 
Ugh, I hated Syber Squad. The American footage was just a dumb high school sitcom, and since the action scenes took place entirely in cyberspace, they had little connection to anything else and felt generic and interchangeable. I guess it might be worth checking out the Gridman episode to see if it's any less dire, but I'm hesitant.

I'm also interested in the anime series SSSS Gridman which started in 2018

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I'm also interested in the anime series SSSS Gridman which started in 2018

I guess the "SSSS" is invoking the initials of Syber Squad. Hard to see why -- is there any nostalgia for that awful show? (Although I think its lead actor went on to star in a fairly prominent sitcom.)
 
Well, I went ahead and watched Gridman out of morbid curiosity. It's a lot closer to its American adaptation than I expected, with largely the same premise, except that the protagonists are running an elaborate homemade computer they built in their basement rather than being in a band. It did try to establish more of a connection between the action in the computer world and its dangerous consequences in the real world, but if anything, that made it even dumber. In this world, apparently computer viruses can cause indoor lightning storms and make metallic objects levitate around the room.

My problem with the action footage was that it doesn't really work as a giant monster battle when the "cityscape" they're fighting in is just a representation of a TRON-like cyberspace, albeit with no inhabitants besides the combatants. It has the usual beats of the monster wrecking "buildings" and whatnot, but there's no sense of scale or real-world context to make it seem gigantic. And since it was always the same virtual environment, it was visually repetitive from episode to episode -- unlike the marvelously diverse miniature environments used for the giant battles in the Ultraman shows I've seen.

I'm surprised that Gridman is basically an Ultra in all but name. He merges with a human host in the same way, he has the exact same enlarging sequence with the fist raised, and he even has the blinking light when his power gets dangerously low, albeit on his forehead rather than his chest. And the show is included on the Ultraman Wiki. So I guess it's part of the overall Ultra multiverse?
 
This week's episode #19 of "Ultraman Z" features the return of Ultraman Ace, and apparently the production team wanted to bring their A-game for this, as it may very well be the most spectacular-looking episode yet:
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Coinciding with Ace's appearance in the latest "Ultraman Z" episode, here is episode #14 of "Ultraman Ace":
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Episode #18 of "Ultraman Max" introduced the Alien Shamer, a new alien/kaiju in the trickster god villain genre similar to Q from Trek or Mr. Mxyzptlk from Superman:
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Shin Ultraman revealed

SHIN ULTRAMAN REVEALED TODAY IN JAPAN: The unveiling of a Shin Ultraman statue, based exactly on how the character will appear in the movie, was shown to the press today with Directors Hideaki Anno (left), Shinji Higuchi (middle), and Katsuro Onoue (right) in Sukagawa City, the birthplace of Eiji Tsuburaya. Yes, in this retelling of the original Ultraman story, our hero from the stars does not have a Warning Light (Color Timer), as the original designer, Tohl Narita, intended. SHIN ULTRAMAN will be released in Japan next year.

G7aJLre.jpg


The more slender look really amplifies the alieness of the character
 
The phrasing of the release is ambiguous. Was it the designer's original intention not to have the Color Timer?
 
I saw that Shout Factor TV had added their Ultraman series when I got on the watch Chojin Sentai Jetman, so after I finished that I watched the first episode of Orb.
I thought it was a lot of fun.
The SSP characters were pretty likeable, and did a good job of giving us a human perspective on crazy stuff going on. Something Search People is kind of an oddly phrased name, at first I thought it was just badly translated, but the name is in English on the show. It feels like something some who doesn't really speak English came up with, and since the show is Japenese I have feeling that was probably the case.
One of my biggest complaints with Jetman has been that the giant monster/mech fights have all been really short, so I was pretty happy that this one was a lot longer and more complex.
This set up some interesting mysteries with the guy in the dark suit and the human form of Orb. I'm curious if the fact that dark suit guy has the same ring device as Orb means he's an evil Ultraman, or just a human who's using it to summon the monsters.
Are the Ultramen only giant, or can they change form and stay human sized?
 
The phrasing of the release is ambiguous. Was it the designer's original intention not to have the Color Timer?

Yes

https://ultra.fandom.com/wiki/Color_Timer

  • According to Tohl Narita, Ultraman's suit wasn't originally meant to have a Color Timer, as the original design he made lacked one (example in his original rise). A physical Color Timer was actually made to reduce the cost using special effects for his warning light.
Are the Ultramen only giant, or can they change form and stay human sized?

It's been shown recently in Ultraman Z and in past series that Ultraman can become human sized for short periods


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Ultraman Z

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OK, cool.
Oh, just a quick note in case anybody else watches Ultraman Orb on Shout Factor TV, the default setting is not subtitles, so you have to make sure you turn them on if you need them. Not sure if it's the same for the other Ultraman series, it wasn't for Jetman, that automatically had them.
 
In the series I've seen (Tiga, Dyna, Neos, and early Cosmos), there's usually at least one episode where Ultraman fights at human size. There was even one where he was miniaturized.
 
I saw that Shout Factor TV had added their Ultraman series when I got on the watch Chojin Sentai Jetman, so after I finished that I watched the first episode of Orb.

Thanks for the heads-up. I started at the beginning with the first episode of Ultra Q. A mixed bag. They tried to cram a whole kaiju movie into half an hour, so there were some narrative shortcuts, like the know-it-all brat who's somehow an expert in prehistoric monsters and the reporters who just uncritically believe everything he tells them, which all turns out to be true. And it's amusing that the first monster is pretty obviously a redressed Godzilla suit. Still, there was some decent character interplay among the leads.
 
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