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

[Christopher]

Here's the English-dubbed version of the trailer:

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

I think this is our first New Generation Ultraman who doesn't have a human host, but a human form.

No, that's pretty common in NG. Orb is a humanoid alien who was endowed with Ultra powers by the Warrior's Peak of Planet O-50. Geed is a human-Ultra hybrid who presents as human and can change into an Ultra. Rosso, Blu, and Grigio from R/B are humans who inherited O-50 tech/powers that let them take Ultra forms. Ultraman Tregear, the villain of Taiga, takes a human disguise. In Trigger, Kengo initially believed he was Trigger's host, but turned out to be a human manifestation of Trigger; also, Ultraman Ribut takes a human form in his guest appearance. The only New Generation or post-NG Ultras with hosts are Ginga, Victory, X, Zero (in Geed), the Tri-Force Ultras Taiga, Titas, and Fuma (who share a single host, a bit like the Imagin in Kamen Rider Den-O), Z, Decker, Blazar, and Arc. (I'm not sure we're still in the NG, since Blazar onward feels like a new era, and they don't seem to use that branding anymore.)

However, if Omega is Sorato's natural form, then that does make him the first lead Ultra in the NG/Reiwa era to have a human form that's merely a disguise in the traditional manner (of Seven, Leo, 80, and Mebius), rather than someone whose base form is human or humanoid and can transform into an Ultra, as has been common in the NG.

 

[Xerxes82]

The design already kind of screamed Seven, but the slugger just adds to it. I wonder if there will be an explicit connection made, eventually. I also wonder if there may be some connection between Omega and Z, given that Z has a similar head crest (though it's never been shown to function as a slugger in his base form that I'm aware of) and both represent the last letter of their respective alphabets.

Though the most interesting thing in that trailer was the kaiju with Omega's color timer on it's chest. What's up there? Is it copying him somehow? Does Omega have a kaiju form? Do they share a power in some way? I have questions, and I look forward to being completely wrong come July.

 

[Christopher]

The Omega Slugger unfolds to become the transformation device:

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

The design already kind of screamed Seven, but the slugger just adds to it. I wonder if there will be an explicit connection made, eventually.

There have been a lot of Seven-inspired Ultra designs that have no established connection to Seven. Taro is basically Seven with side horns, but they're unrelated, except honorarily in the Ultra Brothers. Seven 21 and Max are both Seven-inspired designs, as are X and Z to a lesser extent, and Rosso and Blu have Sluggers. Yet Zero is the only Seven-based design to have a direct link to Seven.

I also wonder if there may be some connection between Omega and Z, given that Z has a similar head crest (though it's never been shown to function as a slugger in his base form that I'm aware of)

The wiki lists the Z Slugger among Z's standard armaments. It fires energy bolts instead of becoming a separated blade, but I think the same goes for some of Zero's Slugger attacks.

and both represent the last letter of their respective alphabets.

Interesting thought, but it could be coincidence. The current run of shows has been exploring novel approaches and origins for its Ultras rather than tying into the past. Blazar was a "primitive" Ultra from a distant blazar galaxy, and Arc/Rution wasn't even an Ultra in his natural form. Given that this season is treating Omega's origin as a mystery, I suspect they want it to be a surprise for the audience once it's revealed, so I doubt they'll connect it to past Ultra history.

Though the most interesting thing in that trailer was the kaiju with Omega's color timer on it's chest. What's up there? Is it copying him somehow? Does Omega have a kaiju form? Do they share a power in some way? I have questions, and I look forward to being completely wrong come July.

Maybe that's part of the new origin -- Omega and that kaiju are connected in some way and he's driven to find out how. It's interesting how Omega's eyes and timer have the same unusual internal texture, another hint that he, like Arc, is something different from a conventional Ultra.

 

[Christopher]

A leaked magazine scan:

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

Omega will apparently have kaiju allies, summoned by someone named Kosei Hoshimi, that can transform into Omega's armors and weapons, like a cross between Ultraseven's Capsule Kaiju and Ultraman X's MonsArmor. Both kaiju have pentagonal chest lights like Omega's Color Timer, suggesting they share a common origin. It's unclear who Hoshimi is; I see speculation that it's an ally of Omega's, but the description suggests the common New Generation format where there's a regular villain summoning the monsters-of-the-week and compelling them to fight for him, with Omega perhaps freeing them from control and gaining a new power from each monster.

 

[Samurai8472]

Rumors not confirmed.

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

 

[Christopher]

More episodes per season and fewer recap episodes would be great. I've been enjoying my New Generation revisit, but I feel the shows are often too short. I just finished rewatching Taiga (free with ads on YouTube), and though it had plenty of very strong individual episodes and interesting ideas and character arcs, I felt it somehow didn't fully cohere enough to be as strong as some of the others. Part of that is that Ultraman Tregear wasn't all that effective a main villain and didn't have any real goal besides nihilistic chaos, but also I think it just had too many characters and ideas at once and not enough time to explore them all. Having three Ultras sharing a host was an interesting concept, but their character development mostly happened in the supplementary voice dramas rather than the main show, where they were functionally little more than your standard balanced/strong/agile alternate-form dynamic that's been common since Tiga.

 

[Samurai8472]

From the Ultraman Omega press conference

Ultraman Omega transformation & rise (sound only)

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

I think it would be funny if a random arm just came out of nowhere to hand the transformation device

 

[Christopher]

Omega's henshin pose looks the same as Trigger's. Or is it Decker's? Or both?

 

[Christopher]

I'd intended to end my Ultraman rewatch with Ultraman Z, because I found Trigger disappointing thanks to its shallow, one-note characterizations, making a mockery of its assertion of being a new version of Tiga, which had perhaps the richest, most sophisticated character writing in the whole franchise. But I'd planned to rewatch the Z crossover episodes, at least, and I ended up deciding that, since my YouTube queue was offering me Trigger next anyway, I might as well just go ahead and rewatch the whole series, and indeed just keep going through Trigger, Decker, Blazar, and Arc.

As it turns out, Trigger's not as bad as I remembered. It's okay, certainly as well-made as any modern Ultra series, but it's definitely more driven by its serial plot arc and mythology and secrets than by character development (at least for the human characters) or the kind of charming and distinctive standalone episodes that tend to characterize the Ultra franchise. In that respect, it feels more like a Kamen Rider season, perhaps not surprising given that Koichi Sakamoto was the head director -- although his previous series, Ultraman Geed, did a better job with characters and standalone plots. It's a perfectly decent tokusatsu season; it just isn't on the same level as most of the rest of the New Generation.

I just finished rewatching Decker, and it's a great improvement on Trigger, one of the best seasons in terms of character writing, interesting episodic stories, and stylish direction. I think I'd forgotten that because I tend to associate it with Trigger. And because I really hate the D-Flasher voice that calls out Decker's forms and card powers.

 

[FredH]

I'd intended to end my Ultraman rewatch with Ultraman Z, because I found Trigger disappointing thanks to its shallow, one-note characterizations, making a mockery of its assertion of being a new version of Tiga, which had perhaps the richest, most sophisticated character writing in the whole franchise. But I'd planned to rewatch the Z crossover episodes, at least, and I ended up deciding that, since my YouTube queue was offering me Trigger next anyway, I might as well just go ahead and rewatch the whole series, and indeed just keep going through Trigger, Decker, Blazar, and Arc.

I’ve always been curious about this franchise, but haven’t watched more than one or two episodes of the original series. If one were going to dive into Ultraman, what series would you recommend starting with?

 

[Christopher]

I’ve always been curious about this franchise, but haven’t watched more than one or two episodes of the original series. If one were going to dive into Ultraman, what series would you recommend starting with?

Ooh, that's hard to say, since there are different eras with different styles. The original Showa-era series are a mix of the cheesiness of that era with some surprisingly sophisticated stories and arty direction sometimes, but the style of that era is something of an acquired taste. If you did want to start with Showa, the place to begin would probably be with Ultra Q, the pseudo-anthology series that preceded Ultraman and was just about humans dealing with monsters and aliens, with no giant superhero to save them. It was inspired by The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, but it has a regular cast, including the same lead actress that Ultraman had a year later, but as a different character. Its lead actor was Kenji Sahara, the most prolific actor to appear in Godzilla/kaiju films from Toho. (Ultraman was originally intended to be a sequel series set 25 years later in 1991, but later seasons retconned it as having taken place in 1966.)

The modern New Generation shows and after are mostly great (aside from being way too toy- and collectible-driven), but heavily reliant on referencing the history of the franchise and bringing back classic Ultras and kaiju, so you get more out of them if you save them for later. They're kind of paradoxical in that every season is set in a different parallel universe, yet there's a lot of continuity and interconnection tying them together.

I'd say a good place to start would be where I started, both some years back when I first got into Ultraman and more recently on my rewatch: Ultraman Tiga, the first series in the Heisei-era revival in the '90s. Tiga and its subsequent shows Dyna and Gaia were a peak era for the franchise, and most of the Heisei shows didn't rely on series history as much as the modern shows do, at least until you get to the two series around the 40th anniversary, Max and Mebius.

Here's a page listing all the series in order: https://ultra.fandom.com/wiki/Ultraman_Series/Television

 

[The Realist]

I’ve always been curious about this franchise, but haven’t watched more than one or two episodes of the original series. If one were going to dive into Ultraman, what series would you recommend starting with?

You were asking Christopher, but I’ll chime in and say I would suggest either starting with the original series, just for that historical grounding and to see where the elements that make up the franchise all began, or with Ultraman Tiga. The latter is the first series of the Heisei Era, which I’ve been working my way through semi-systematically. It was a ‘90s revival/rebooting of the franchise, and combined the model-stomping fun of the older shows with newly sophisticated characterization and world-building. From what I’ve seen to this point, I’d tend to agree with Christopher that Tiga has perhaps the best character writing of all the shows.

(It should be noted that technically, the “original” Ultraman is not actually the first series in the Ultra franchise, having been preceded by Ultra Q, but that is a series with a very different format and approach — though I understand it was later folded into the same continuity as the subsequent Ultraman shows.)

(And I see that Christopher posted his own response to your question while I was composing this one.)

 

[Christopher]

(It should be noted that technically, the “original” Ultraman is not actually the first series in the Ultra franchise, having been preceded by Ultra Q, but that is a series with a very different format and approach — though I understand it was later folded into the same continuity as the subsequent Ultraman shows.)

To elaborate on this, the continuity in the early years was pretty erratic. As I mentioned, Ultraman was supposed to be a 25-years-later sequel to Ultra Q but was later retconned as happening in the year it aired. Ultraseven was supposed to be in a separate universe altogether, which is why Seven has different design attributes from Ultraman and is disguised as human rather than bonding with a human, and Return of Ultraman was originally supposed to feature the same Ultraman, well, returning; but then RoU did an episode with both the original Ultraman and Ultraseven making guest appearances, retconning them all into the same universe and the original and Return Ultramen into separate characters (with the latter being retroactively dubbed Ultraman Jack in 1984). After that, the rest of the Showa series all presumed a single shared continuity, with each new Ultra being added to the roster of "Ultra Brothers" and the mythology of the Ultras' homeworld being fleshed out as they went; only the 1979 anime was in a separate universe from the others.

It's interesting how several different toku franchises went through a similar pattern. With both Ultraman and Kamen Rider, you have an initial run of Showa-era series that share a universe and have periodic guest appearances by the leads of previous seasons; then you have a Heisei-era revival where the first decade's worth of series are all standalones except for the first two that share a reality (though the connection between Kamen Rider Kuuga and Agito was swept under the rug after the first few Agito episodes); then the later seasons start crossing over more and turn it into a multiverse. The Godzilla films follow a roughly similar pattern to an extent, except that its first decade of Heisei films were in a shared continuity and the standalones started later in 1999, and the modern Godzilla productions have continued the standalone approach instead of building a multiverse.

It's not quite the same, but you can draw a parallel with American franchises. The Star Trek revival series in the '80s-'90s were in the same universe as the original, but focused on telling their own new stories without much reference to the past, in contrast with the modern productions that build heavily on past continuity or revisiting the series's history. And today's superhero movies and shows are often driven by revisiting earlier adaptations and building a multiverse out of them, when in the past they were more about being their own thing without reference to what came before. It seems there's a wider pattern of franchise productions in the early 21st century being more driven by nostalgia and franchise history than productions from the late 20th century.

 

[FredH]

Ooh, that's hard to say, since there are different eras with different styles. The original Showa-era series are a mix of the cheesiness of that era with some surprisingly sophisticated stories and arty direction sometimes, but the style of that era is something of an acquired taste. If you did want to start with Showa, the place to begin would probably be with Ultra Q, the pseudo-anthology series that preceded Ultraman and was just about humans dealing with monsters and aliens, with no giant superhero to save them. It was inspired by The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, but it has a regular cast, including the same lead actress that Ultraman had a year later, but as a different character. Its lead actor was Kenji Sahara, the most prolific actor to appear in Godzilla/kaiju films from Toho. (Ultraman was originally intended to be a sequel series set 25 years later in 1991, but later seasons retconned it as having taken place in 1966.)

The modern New Generation shows and after are mostly great (aside from being way too toy- and collectible-driven), but heavily reliant on referencing the history of the franchise and bringing back classic Ultras and kaiju, so you get more out of them if you save them for later. They're kind of paradoxical in that every season is set in a different parallel universe, yet there's a lot of continuity and interconnection tying them together.

I'd say a good place to start would be where I started, both some years back when I first got into Ultraman and more recently on my rewatch: Ultraman Tiga, the first series in the Heisei-era revival in the '90s. Tiga and its subsequent shows Dyna and Gaia were a peak era for the franchise, and most of the Heisei shows didn't rely on series history as much as the modern shows do, at least until you get to the two series around the 40th anniversary, Max and Mebius.

Here's a page listing all the series in order: https://ultra.fandom.com/wiki/Ultraman_Series/Television

Thanks, that seems quite comprehensive!

EDIT: …aaaand Ultraman Tiga is apparently not available for streaming. Drat.

EDIT REDUX: Mever mind, it’s still on YouTube legally. Okay then!

 

[Christopher]

It occurs to me that Ultraman Blazar from two years ago would be a good jumping-on point, since it's a clean break from the continuity of previous seasons and it represents a peak of quality for the franchise (much like Tiga in both respects). However, it looks like the official YouTube channel is currently only carrying the English dub, which is an issue for me but wouldn't necessarily be for others.

The other downside is that as a recent series (and one with an unconventional approach to its Ultra and its human lead), it doesn't really lay a foundation if you want it to be a starting point for getting to know the franchise as a whole. Once you got through Blazar and Arc (and the upcoming Omega), you'd still have to go back to something earlier.

EDIT: …aaaand Ultraman Tiga is apparently not available for streaming. Drat.

EDIT REDUX: Mever mind, it’s still on YouTube legally. Okay then!

It's frustrating -- up until the end of 2024, Shout! and Tubi (and one or two other streamers that drew on the Shout! library) had virtually every pre-2019 Ultra series and movie in one place, with only a handful of omissions. But then the license expired and it's been piecemeal ever since, with most of the series available but scattered among multiple different streamers, sometimes minor and obscure ones like Fawesome, so it's been a hunt to find them all. (Tubi soon got a number of them back, but not as many as before.) Heck, the only way I managed to rewatch Ultra Galaxy Mega Monster Battle was by borrowing a Blu-Ray set through interlibrary loan.

 

[FredH]

It's frustrating -- up until the end of 2024, Shout! and Tubi (and one or two other streamers that drew on the Shout! library) had virtually every pre-2019 Ultra series and movie in one place, with only a handful of omissions. But then the license expired and it's been piecemeal ever since, with most of the series available but scattered among multiple different streamers, sometimes minor and obscure ones like Fawesome, so it's been a hunt to find them all. (Tubi soon got a number of them back, but not as many as before.) Heck, the only way I managed to rewatch Ultra Galaxy Mega Monster Battle was by borrowing a Blu-Ray set through interlibrary loan.

Thanks for the Blazar suggestion. As to series jumping around on and off different streamers, that seems to be an annoyingly common thing; it seems like Classic Doctor Who, the Trek films, and no doubt much else keeps being switched around among them, the last few years.

EDIT: And from checking out Tiga, I realized I must have seen a couple of episodes back in the 90s, presumably with a different name: I recognized a character who Young Me always mentally named Captain Damnsheshot. (Sorry, I was young, no current objectification intended…)