I just finished rewatching
Ultraman Neos, the 12-episode direct-to-video miniseries that was released in the gap year between
Gaia and
Cosmos, and that I gather was from the same team that did
Heisei Ultraseven. It was the third series I watched after
Tiga and
Dyna (since I couldn't find a complete
Gaia fansub at the time), and I wanted to rewatch it now that I've seen the Showa seasons and could recognize the elements it was homaging. I remembered finding it mediocre and unmemorable the first time, but this time around, I liked it a lot better.
Neos is largely an homage to the first three Ultra series. It's set in an alternate universe where Earth is passing through a dark matter "Unbalance Zone" that breeds monsters and anomalies, an allusion to the working title of
Ultra Q, and the opening narration evokes UQ's as well. And of course the Ultras, Neos and Seven 21, closely resemble Ultraman and Ultraseven, and are dispatched to Earth by Zoffy. A number of the episode plots seem to be new takes on classic episodes of the original, albeit with new kaiju (for instance, there's a monster island episode with a friendly kaiju in the Pigmon role, except it turns into a giant kaiju). But in writing, characterization, and style, it's largely of a piece with the Heisei seasons around it, with a team of fairly well-drawn characters and some reasonably good, thoughtful storytelling, including a recurring serial element involving the Zamu, alien refugees who are clearly inspired by the Baltan from the original
Ultraman, but treated much more sympathetically.
I hadn't realized, or had forgotten, that
Neos's cast included Shigeki Kagemaru, who played Shinjoh in
Tiga, as the team's second-in-command.
Turns out he had main or recurring roles in numerous Heisei-era Ultra shows. One other familiar element is that the show reuses a number of stock music cues from
The*Ultraman.
Rewatching now, I can see how Ultraseven 21 riffs on the original Ultraseven. Like Seven, he shapeshifts into a human disguise rather than taking a host, but the twist is that he uses a different disguise every episode, so he's basically a "spy" Ultra, or a ninja, I guess. That's an interesting angle, a nice way of emphasizing the difference between the two Ultras. Oddly, 21 only once makes use of Seven's trademark move, using the Eye Slugger blade atop his head as a boomerang, and it's edited in such a way that I probably didn't know what the hell just happened the first time I saw it, since we only see the blurred blade in flight and then briefly 21 replacing it on his head.
At the time
Neos was released, it was pretty much a reboot universe, doing a new version of Zoffy, Seven, and the Land of Light, but the modern take seems to be that it was the original Zoffy, and the
Ultra Galaxy Fight miniseries have established Neos and Seven 21 as residents of the original Land of Light. So retroactively, that makes
Neos the first series whose Ultras were not native to the show's universe, predating
Nexus, Ultraseven X, and the multiple New Generation shows that fit the bill. (Well, the first Japanese series, at least, since UGF has implied that Ultraman Great, Ultraman Powered, and the Hanna-Barbera Ultra Force are all from the LoL.)
Still,
Neos seems to be a forgotten season, since hardly any of its kaiju have been reused in later productions, even the nostalgia-heavy
Ultra Galaxy Fight sequence. That's too bad, because despite what I thought the first time around, it's pretty worthwhile. (For one thing, it probably has my favorite end title song in an Ultra series.) I suppose maybe I was disappointed by it the first time because it wasn't as impressive as
Tiga and
Dyna, but now that I've seen the whole range of series from the best (including those two) to the worst, I can see that
Neos rates moderately high on the list.
