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Why is Ultraman not as popular in America as Super Sentai or Kamen Rider
Something that I've been thinking about over the past few days is that, despite more attempts at gaining an international audience, Ultraman doesn't seem to have a large fanbase in America. At least, when compared to Kamen Rider and Super Sentai's fanbase. While Super Sentai had power rangers, Kamen Rider has almost no foot in american pop culture and every american adaptation has been a failure. While I'm not sure of the success of Ultraman's adaptations, far more attempts at an American adaptation have been made compared to Kamen Rider. Why is it that, despite all this, Kamen Rider, and Super Sentai, still remain so much more popular then Ultraman?
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It seems like Ultraman is a bit well known outside the Internet Western Toku fandom since we do Ultraman shows on CR and Ultraman Pop figures. However it seems like the Ultraman is not as popular as Kamen Rider and Super Sentai on the web. I think Ultraman does not appeal to most Toku fans because Ultraman grows giant and people seem to like human size fighters better.
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Ultraman is pretty popular in the West. For a lot of non tokufans, Ultraman is about on par with Godzilla and Power Rangers. I know a fair bit of people a generation ahead of me that love the original Ultraman.
For more recent fans of Toku, Ultraman has dropped off due to his weaker presence in Western media. I think it's because more people getting into toku nowadays prefer henshin heroes at human size, so kaiju sized toku heroes are a bit harder of a sell, and with 40 years of backlog just from Sentai alone, it's harder to pull yourself to away from the big 2 of KR and Sentai. Hell, even Garo and Ryukendo were hard sells to some people despite most everyone loving them. |
Toku in general is very niche and is hard to sell on a bigger scale if you ask me. Power Rangers and Godzilla are the ones that I would consider to be main stream Toku seeing that they both have big nostalgia value to them. Everything else is niche and Toku is view as more of a underground pop culture thing. Japanese special effects don't appeal to most people and people laugh at Toku for not having high level of special effects compare to American TV shows and movies.
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I think Ultraman's presence in the online tokusatsu community has steadily been improving over the past two years. Particularly because the availability of Ultra shows has gotten better.
It's still not quite on the level of Kamen Rider and Super Sentai, but that's probably to be expected. |
Well, Kamen Rider kind of piggybacks off of Super Sentai and Power Rangers.
I mean, what western fan wasn't introduced to it with a "It's kind of like Power Rangers older, more serious brother" line of some sort? |
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The comparisons to Power Rangers were always something I dreaded as a teen. :lol |
I got into Kamen Rider because I loved Masked Rider as a kid lol. I would say UltraMan has been growing because I cosplayed the original UltraMan and got a few people who recognized me. Because some of the shows were on TV helped a bit.
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Well, not in my case since actually Ultraman was pretty popular around Asia. All I could say is just cultural differences, especially Western usually grows up with Power Rangers more than KR or Ultraman. For me, I grew up with Ultraman and its actually quite popular in early 2000s but Ultraman somewhat lost its shine after Nexus and only actually got back in track after Ginga appearred.
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As has been said, Western fans have difficulty with Toku's relatively low budget effects. Add to that the camp factor of two rubber clad guys pounding each other in semi-slow motion on what is, still even now, an obviously closed set - it's no surprise that Ultraman isn't more popular here.
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