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Ultraman Discussion Thread
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02-26-2021, 11:03 PM
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2184
Fish Sandwich
The Immortal King Tasty
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Every diner you've ever been to.
Posts: 3,833
I finished up watching the original Ultraman, which I was watching for, well, no reason in particular, save to remind myself that I
can
just watch a thing for no reason in particular. Obviously it's an iconic series I've always been meaning to get around to and all, but I mostly wanted to sit back and enjoy some toku without any deeper motivation.
Naturally, I have a ton of things to say about Ultraman.
To sum it up as quickly as possible, I feel like I just watched the guy who invented the slam dunk. Like I just wanna go and
high five
everyone who made this series happen.
I'm far from knowledgeable about a lot of the deeper historical context here, so keep in mind I'll be speaking out of ignorance to some extent, especially not having yet watched Ultra Q, but,
man
, I was consistently impressed by how much Tsuburaya utterly nailed this formula
on the first go
. Just about everything I love about Ultraman is right in here to some extent, and while it's certainly still going to come off as dated to people who don't care much for older shows, I found it shocking how well the original Ultraman holds up.
Much of the special effects work is insanely commendable for the time, which I think probably everybody has heard before, but it's true. It's not always so much about how
real
it looks, per se, (especially watching the show with picture quality that was definitely not a consideration back in the day), but how evident it constantly is that a ton of delicate thought and care was put into realizing a lot of these fantastical ideas on the screen. It's rarely if ever cheap sci-fi B movie stuff; this is a show with serious craftsmanship behind it, and the pride that goes with that. A perfect example is the episode "Oil S.O.S.", where the climax is dominated by shots of
everything
on the miniature set exploding and being set on fire until Ultraman can eventually dump water on the set bit by bit. It is utterly glorious, and I have a feeling they went overboard to film it, because I recall some of the footage being reused in a later episode, as if to make some money back on it.
The drama supporting those impressive action scenes is as varied as you'd hope for from what is essentially still an anthology series, with a lot less repetition than I expected going in, and yet an equally low amount of episodes I thought were stinkers. The first 13 episodes, with Ultraman's delightfully ugly original suit, especially, I remember thinking had this feeling that each episode was doing something totally different. I wondered if they were maybe blowing all their unique ideas too soon, but even though the series broadly settles into a formula of adventurous monster showdowns mixed with the occasional creepy alien story, from start to finish, Ultraman is quite good about finding some kind of distinctive element to the antagonist or the overall plot to keep the episodes feeling fresh. Episodes that go for a notably different tone or atmosphere than usual are a regular delight, including the aforementioned alien episodes, as well as some of the monster ones, like "The Mysterious Dinosaur Base", and "Overthrow the Surface", the latter of which had some
extremely
tense and eerie direction, befitting a story where Hayata is unable to join in on the action for most of the runtime.
Speaking of Hayata, another thing that I found worthy of praise was the main cast. It might just be because my only other exposure to the early run of Ultra shows is Taro, which I thought struggled a bit with this, but Ultraman keeps a nice, trim unit of characters with very distinct traits, and as such, I can actually remember their names and everything! They're not deep, complex, or original characters, of course, but they don't need to be when they serve those anthology stories so well. You've got Muramatsu, who is The Commander, with a capital "T" – the reliable authority figure holding the team together; Ide, who is rather uniquely both the gifted inventor of the team's gadgets and weapons while also being the designated comic relief fool, giving him arguably the most range; Arashi, the guy who's always most eager to use those gadgets and weapons to take the fight to the opponent of the week; Fuji – The Girl – which I'd maybe complain more about if this show from Japan in 1966 didn't also treat her as such a valued, capable member of the team. Like, yeah, plenty of times she just sits at the base answering the phones, but a lot of the time she
doesn't
, and nobody really questions it. Hayata himself is almost a total blank slate of a character, to the point where he
almost
wouldn't stand out from the crowd, but Susumu Kurobe's performance is so charismatic it kinda fills in the blanks. A warm smile or a concerned expression of stoicism from him is often worth more than anything that even could be in a script.
It's a pretty iconic bunch for a pretty iconic series, I'd say. I'm really only scratching the surface of the show here, but since there's no way I'll cover every last thing I'd like to in this one post anyway, I think I'll start winding it down by talking about a few personal favorite episodes, all of which happen to be from the same writer, Mamoru Sasaki, who I realized after a while had something of a monopoly on my favorites, and also wrote two pretty great Taro episodes to boot, so it's a name I'll probably want to remember from now on. Of the ones he wrote for the original Ultraman, my absolute favorites had to be "My Home is Earth", "A Gift From the Sky", and "The Monster Graveyard".
"My Home is Earth" has a pretty macabre undertone to it that I found myself a sucker for. It plays out like the typical monster fare at first, but introduces a moral quandary when it turns out Jamila has a very tragic motive for attacking humanity, blurring the line of justice and forcing the SSSP to consider the weight of their actions more than usual. It's a very well-told, melancholic story that gets some great emotion out of Ide, of all people.
"The Monster Graveyard" takes those ideas and runs with them, and I'd consider this episode to be the seed that would eventually grow Ultraman Cosmos, meaning I have nothing but deep respect and gratitude towards it. It's a late-series episode that outright turns around to say that, yes, in fact, Ultraman
does
feel sorrow for the monsters whose lives he must take in order to save people, retroactively adding depth to the routine of a great many of the monster plots, where the SSSP could arguably come off more as trigger-happy pest control than heroes. I think even this one episode stopping to ask if maybe Gomora
didn't
do anything wrong, or if the monsters that did had their reasons, was a HUGE deal. Dramatizing it through a low-stakes plot about a creepy skeleton dinosaur who the SSSP actually
help
get back home in space because it's clearly suffering from depression and doesn't even want to fight takes it to the next level. There's a sort of gentle sincerity to the story that's utterly captivating. I've never been able to lock down a singular favorite Ultra monster, but after watching this episode, I think Seabozu might have to be it. That's a design I've always liked, and knowing the story it was in is such an instant-classic has massively grown my attachment to it.
"A Gift From the Sky" is the episode right before, and is one that I loved for how smart it was about being
completely dumb
. This is the one where Hayata briefly mistakes a spoon for his Beta Capsule, which is maybe all I need to say.
Apparently there was argument among the staff about whether it was a good idea to do a huge farce like this
, but I can't see why they were worried. There's such a
confidence
to how this episode messes with the formula that's so welcome towards the end of the show. I believe it's the first one to ever break the typical rule of Ultraman only transforming right at the end, and that's emblematic of the freedom it relishes in. It's an absolutely delightful story about the SSSP coming up with
ridiculous plans
to move a big chonky monster with the horribly on-the-nose name of Skydon, made entertaining by a pretty breakneck pace and great sense of escalation. Evidently, it won't be to everyone's taste, but I honestly think this is a brilliant episode that goes to show how creative this show could get. Whatever else you can say about it, it's
certainly
not just another formulaic monster story.
...And that'll be about it, I guess! Again, I could definitely go on and on about the great things in this show for a while longer, but part of the goal in watching it was
not
to dissect every little bit of it in writing, and I think this is still a decent sampler of how I feel about it. Ultraman is a truly phenomenal series, and it takes no effort at all to see how it forever captured people's imaginations to the massive level it did.
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