Speaking of UltraSeven, I just finished watching the Heisei Ultraseven series, or rather the four distinct miniseries that make it up. The two 1994 specials were weak, basically hourlong environmentalist PSAs thinly disguised as action stories, and Dan Moroboshi wasn't even in the first one. The 1998 30th-anniversary trilogy followed up on UltraSeven's status at the end of the specials, but only loosely, and introduced a new Ultra Guard team that ran through the rest of the series, with only Dan and his original-series co-star Furuhashi continuing from the specials. The trilogy was okay, but didn't really impress me until the third part, with its rather poignant story in which the villain was the embodiment of a dying sun that just wanted to preserve its planets' inhabitants by feeding on human energy, not realizing that its quest was futile all along.
The trilogy introduced a new lead, UG member Kazamori, whom Dan ended up abducting and impersonating for most of the last two parts, as a way of getting back to the status quo of Ultraseven being secretly a member of the UG. It was a clever way of using the capsules in which Dan/Seven holds his Capsule Kaiju in miniature (an inspiration for Pokemon, I believe), storing a human in one for a change. The actor playing Kazamori did a good job mimicking Kohji Moritsugu's mannerisms when playing Dan in disguise and being totally different as the real Kazamori. There was kind of a mean-spirited running gag of Furuhashi obsessively trying to reconnect with Dan while Dan avoided revealing himself, but they did get together at the end.
The 1999 6-part miniseries was probably the strongest overall. It had Dan seemingly kill an alien-possessed Kazamori (at the latter's request) and take his place for the bulk of the series, occasionally changing back to Dan to give Moritsugu something to do, but it turned out at the end that Kazamori had been recuperating in a capsule the whole time. The 6-parter had a loose arc about a gung-ho defense force leader wanting Earth to wage a war of aggression against the universe, but it was mostly a series of episodic tales that each focused on a different main character, pretty much like a normal Ultra series, just in an hourlong format and pretty well-done.
The concluding 35th-anniversary 5-parter was weaker, I felt. It was the only miniseries not to have Dan or Furuhashi, with Kazamori turning out to have a permanent link with Seven and eventually merging with him fully -- which I think makes Seven the only Ultra to have operated both in human disguise and merged with a human host on an ongoing basis. (Mebius merged with his whole team in the finale, but only temporarily while in Ultra form, so it doesn't count. I also don't count Amia from the anime, because her humanoid form was not a disguise but her natural appearance.) The idea had promise, but the storyline was a mess, purporting to tell an ongoing story arc but focusing each episode on a different threat or crisis that just disappeared in the next episode even if it hadn't really been dealt with (the most egregious case being the "new humans" in episode 3). So it didn't hold together well at all.
Overall, it's a mostly good addition to the Ultraseven canon, at least in the middle two parts. But I have a hard time believing that the Ultra Guard still uses the exact same uniforms, gear, and aircraft designs after 35 years.
