I've decided to go back to a mostly chronological progression through live-action Ultraman series, so I took a look at the two English-language shows produced in the early '90s, the Australian Ultraman: Towards the Future (called Ultraman Great in Japan) and the American-made direct-to-video Ultraman: The Ultimate Hero (aka Ultraman Powered). They're both 13 episodes, so they're pretty quick watches. Both were Tsuburaya productions and had Japanese writers and producers, so they were pretty authentic for the most part. Neither is particularly well-written or well-acted, though both have their moments. TTF's writing starts out moderately okay and gets worse in the latter half, while TUH's writing starts out bad and gets moderately better in the latter half.
Towards the Future is probably the more interesting of the two. It tends to have an environmental theme, and there's an overall arc about an alien infection creating monsters in Earth's biosphere. All its monsters are original to the show (though there were plans to use the Baltan if they'd had a second season), and the creature suits and miniature work are pretty good, though the video effects are very low-budget early '90s stuff. Ultraman Great looks pretty close to the original Ultraman design, but has rounded ears instead of angular ones and had a more complex pattern of red highlights on the body.
The show is notable for being directed by Andrew Prowse, who would go on to be one of Farscape's main directors. It's also an early writing credit for Chiaki J. Konaka, who would go on to work on Ultraman Tiga and be head writer for Ultraman Gaia (as well as writing Serial Experiments Lain and Digimon Tamers), and Sho Aikawa, who'd go on to write for multiple Super Sentai and Kamen Rider series as well as Fullmetal Alchemist.
The best thing about TTF is that it features something I've always wanted to see more of -- an ongoing internal dialogue between the Ultra and his human host, with Ultraman as a voice in Jack Shindo's head on a pretty regular basis. Most Ultra series treat the Ultra and host as a single entity for the most part, so this was a refreshingly different interpretation. (Although I did see an episode of the '79 anime where they did that too, when Hikari wanted to prove his strength without Ultraman and Ultraman told him it was because of his strength and courage that he'd been chosen.).
The Ultimate Hero is more of a loose remake of the original 1966 series; all of its monsters are from that series, and many of its episodes are based on the original plots. It's got some familiar actors; Sledge Hammer!'s Harrison Page plays the captain, and it has guest appearances by Jeffrey Combs, J.G. Hertzler, Bill Mumy, Tracey Walter, and even The Dick Van Dyke Show's Rose Marie. Ultraman's host Kai is played by Kane Kosugi, the year before he moved to Japan to play Jiraiya/NinjaBlack in Kakuranger. (His father Sho Kosugi did Ultraman's voice in the first and last episodes.) I'm pretty sure that makes Kosugi the only actor to play both an Ultra host and a Ranger (let alone consecutively and transcontinentally), though Return of Ultraman's Jiro Dan played the father of the Goraigers in Hurricaneger and an elder of the Ryusoul Tribe in Ryusoulger.
But Kosugi wasn't much of an actor and tended to be the least prominent of the main cast members -- not actually that different from Hayata in a lot of the original show. Although the other main cast members did mediocre jobs too. It's like none of them were trying that hard.
Oh, and the stuntman who played Ultraman Powered, Scott Rogers, is now the stunt supervisor for Star Trek: Picard. Powered is kind of a weird-looking Ultra, with unusually narrow eyes that glow a dim blue, and turn red when his Color Timer does. He's also got an odd mouth design that makes it look like he has sort of a droopy mustache. He looks oddly like Western stereotypes of Asian facial appearance.
The monster suits are pretty good, but the miniature landscapes are startlingly poor; the skyscrapers look like cardboard and the miniature mountainsides wobble when a monster hits them. And apparently the monster suits were so fragile that they couldn't hold up to much action, so the fights tend to be slow-paced and rely more on shoving, dodging, and energy attacks than serious fighting. Indeed, both series have pretty mediocre choreography in the monster fights, compared to the Japanese shows. Both Great and Powered tend to get knocked down an awful lot.
The Ultimate Hero does have pretty good music, by Toshihiko Sahashi, who would go on to do Ultraman Gaia and a number of Ultraman movies, as well as various Kamen Rider and Sentai series, most recently Kamen Rider Zi-O.
TTF is unusual in that the series ends with Shindo's identity as Ultraman still secret from everyone. I guess they were leaving it open-ended for a second season. By contrast, TUH ends with the entire team finding out, so I wonder how they would've done a second season.
