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12-02-2019, 02:29 AM | #1451 |
Member
Join Date: Mar 2019
Posts: 318
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Doubt it actually. marvel also made Attack on Titan and Godzilla comics and those weren't in the 616 Universe. Through it would definitely be interesting to see what they do with this. I would be up for a fight between an Ultraman and Galactus.
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12-02-2019, 03:53 PM | #1452 |
Member
Join Date: May 2012
Posts: 486
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Thery had a godzilla comic in the 70s and I'm pretty sure the Avengers faced him at least once. Not to mention Spider-Man showed up in their Transformers comic. And I'm fairly sure Marvel never had the Attack on Titan license.
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12-03-2019, 06:24 AM | #1453 |
Most-hated user. Kill him
Join Date: Feb 2016
Location: Imaginationland
Posts: 1,813
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So the next Chronicle series will be called Zero & Geed in order to celebrate Zero's 10th anniversary. While this may seem nothing at first glance, when you think about it the chronicle series tend to 'foreshadow' the next Ultra series. In 2017 we had Zero Chronicpe and afterwards the premiere of Geed where Zero is a main character. 2018 we had Orb Chronicle and then R/B where it's pretty much a spiritual sequel to Orb and even had an Orb Dark. 2019 gave us NG Chronicle, and they made a cameo in Taiga. So what does this mean? Well Tsuburaya said they have more to reveal about Zero's 10th anniversary later on, I wouldn't be surprised if the next Ultra series is related to Zero in some way. Maybe his official protege, or maybe even Zero's younger brother (or maybe they make Zero had a girlfriend and he had a son with her and the whole series is about teen parents..... With Ultraman )
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12-03-2019, 07:07 AM | #1454 |
Dark Noir Black Schwarz
Join Date: Jan 2014
Location: Australia
Posts: 956
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Ultraman Zero: The Chronicle: The Chronicle.
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12-03-2019, 09:26 AM | #1455 |
天心の英雄たち
Join Date: Oct 2017
Location: Maryland
Posts: 939
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I can't get enough of Geed or Zero, so this makes me happy.
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12-06-2019, 11:26 PM | #1456 |
The Immortal King Tasty
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Every diner you've ever been to.
Posts: 3,833
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Back sometime around when Taiga started airing, I figured it would be a perfect opportunity to watch his dad's own series. What better time could there possibly be to watch Taro, right? Uh, besides when it apparently gets an official Blu-ray release next year, of course. Obviously that's something I didn't see coming 20 or so weeks ago.
All the same, I've been working my way through the show since then, and now that I've finally finished it up, I figure the least I can do is hype it up a bit, because it was a heck of a journey! Now, this is my first proper foray into Showa era Ultraman (the closest I came beforehand was watching a quarter or so of 80), so I'm not in the best position to go into detail about Taro's place in the larger series. I understand it's something of a deliberate oddity in terms of style, taking cues from fairy tales and having an overall lighter tone that, apparently, stands in contrast to Ace before it, and most certainly Leo afterwards. That's all super interesting, I'm sure, but I can only truly focus on Taro as its own entity, and say that I consistently had quite a bit of fun watching it. The show itself is maybe a bit less consistent. That's not me knocking the quality of the episodes, by the way. What I'm talking about is how the show spent an entire year experimenting with its identity while still getting an episode out every week. It has an almost frontiersman-like attitude that I guess must come with the decade or something. If the 70's was a time when Kamen Rider could find a way to keep on kicking without its own lead actor for several episodes, before just replacing him altogether... well, anything that happens in Taro seems pretty tame by comparison, actually. Aside from the completely scandalous cross-company cameos by Kamen Rider V3's face, and no less than both Kikaiders. Yeah, I just really wanted to point that out. Still though, there are some weird oddities every now and then that suggest to me either occasional production hiccups, or simply the show seeing room for improvement in the formula and just going for it. Most notably, ZAT's roster early on is a bit on the bloated side, and the show proceeds to course-correct a bit by replacing one of the characters before the episode count even hits the double digits, before permanently trimming things down by jettisoning the replacement. It genuinely does help tighten things up, too. I remember Nishida so little, I had to go look up his name, and while Ueno gets considerably more time to leave an impression, he simply wasn't adding anything to the show that was enough to make me miss him all that much. In his absence, the core team starts gelling together that much more, and I especially have to applaud the show for regularly letting Moriyama out of her chair whenever an extra pair of hands is needed. I guess it's small potatoes coming off of Ace, but for 1973, having the secretary be entirely capable of hopping in a space-age super jet and shooting lasers at giant monsters with the same level of calm and collected competence she applies to working the radio isn't anything to sneeze at. Something else that's fairly impressive for the time are the effects, which, while not without their own occasional hiccups, are quite well done and often rather creative. The show seems to give particular attention, especially early on, to having plain old tiny humans directly interacting with the monsters. Koutarou especially makes something of a habit of clinging onto tails and whatnot for dear life and always somehow managing to survive, even if he has to temporarily become an obvious puppet to do so! Okay, so again, it's not all super believable, but in scenes like that, Taro is going for pure fantasy anyway, so why bother complaining? Speaking of Koutarou, he's the glue holding the whole show together. Just a wonderfully charismatic lead who's as heroic as can be, a friend to all children, and brave to an almost absurd level, which only makes him that much more endearing. No matter what elements of the series come in or out of focus, or what crazy premise the plot has in a particular episode, he's always there to keep things on track. And some of those premises really do get crazy. It's not every day you see an episode of Ultraman where the monster's entire goal is just to get drunk. There's a lot of variety here, despite pumping the "random kid has problems" well a bit too often, and while I think the episodes guest-starring previous Ultras have a tendency to be the highlights, a lot of the most creative, out-there ideas happen in the ones without any of them. Later on, a lot of the episodes don't even involve Taro having to kill the monster in the end, which as a Cosmos fan is always going to get a thumbs up from me. What also gets my approval is the fine line Taro walks in how it uses the existing Ultra family. Their appearances are paced out in a very considered manner that keeps it clear whose show this is, while still making them feel like a regular thing, and keeping the feel of that bigger universe it takes place in. All in all, while not every episode is some kind of masterpiece, the ones that nail it do so impeccably. It probably helps that it's the freshest thing in my mind, but I have to say, Taro also has an excellent finale that pulls everything together. In just one episode, it brings things full circle by calling all the way back to the premiere, and while Koutarou's big decision towards the end is a famous enough bit of trivia that I've known it for years, I was caught off guard by the why of him coming to that conclusion, which was genuinely pretty touching and emotional. The climactic showdown is also extremely memorable for not taking the obvious route. It's as good a note to end on as any show could ever ask for. That about sums it up, I think. I'm glad Taiga's premise gave me the push to get around to watching Taro. Ginga was my entry into the franchise, so I have something of a natural affinity for the guy, but without Taiga, it's likely wouldn't have gotten around to this for a while. Even if Taro in his own show was basically a completely different character than he became later, and even if Taiga seems more interested in homaging Return of Ultraman that anything, there's an inherent joy I get from seeing that slightly dopey-looking mug of Taro's, no matter the era.
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12-15-2019, 03:47 PM | #1457 |
Dai Shogun
Join Date: Jul 2014
Location: Germany
Posts: 7,524
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Genm Corps put up Episode 17-19 of Taiga up this week and I couldn't help but watch them all at once. This show is so good. Freakin' Tregear is fully unhinged now; it's downright scary how cruel he is. I mean he always was, but this time he's going after the core characters and some of these "shots" come out of nowhere (heh), the first one I saw coming but the second one actually startled me.
Feels nice to just watch some Ultraman Taiga again. I wish we would get weekly translations but at least they haven’t stopped completely. |
12-19-2019, 08:42 PM | #1458 |
The Immortal King Tasty
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Every diner you've ever been to.
Posts: 3,833
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It's been a while since I last gushed about how awesome The☆Ultraman is, and this week's episode, on top of being excellent in its own right, was a big reminder that a crap ton of stuff has happened in the meantime, so I've got plenty of fresh (decades old) material to touch on. This show goes places, and I'm still getting floored week after week how rock solid it basically always is. It kind of came as a surprise when, watching the Taiga voice dramas about Titas' origin, he suddenly started describing some kind of epic space opera show plot that seemed completely unlike what I had been watching up to that point, which, outside of being animated, struck me as a pretty "standard" Ultra series. It all started to come together when the show actually became an epic late 70's space opera anime for a particularly sweet set of episodes. Yes, from episodes 19-21, The☆Ultraman seriously ups the ante, doing an epic trilogy where, after experiencing a shocking defeat against a foe of immeasurable strength, Hikari has to be taken to the home planet of the Ultras to heal using their fantastic technologies. Of course, with all the alien fleets trying to invade U-40, it maybe wasn't the best time to come. It's a packed set of episodes that does intensely thorough and effective world-building, all while remembering to always keep the dramatic tension high. It's an obvious standout so far, and yet I also have to applaud the show's restraint in remembering to get back to normal Ultra plots afterwards. The show keeps its focus where it needs to be in the long-run, but it's also smart enough to not let all that new lore it established go to waste. Not only did it finally give Joneus his name, preemptively avoiding the pitfall poor Jack fell into for years, but elements introduced throughout that trilogy occasionally play into episodes after that point, be it returning characters in guest roles, or more minor references here and there. The world the show takes place in immediately becomes so much larger, and it's only to the benefit of the episodic stories it's still telling. All that, plus the interesting shakeup of replacing the usual attack team's commander with a different, more rough and tumble guy to freshen up the series even more. There's a real sense of creative energy to The☆Ultraman. It has a lot of bold ideas I just don't think any of the live-action Ultra shows were really doing at the time. I think a lot of it comes down to the extra freedom that comes with animation. A show like Taro can't really afford to make more than one set of random tin cylinders and junk to represent the Land of Light, but because those kinds of budgetary restrictions don't happen in The☆Ultraman, it was free to go all out with developing U-40, or to give us wild monster designs that wouldn't be feasible as practical suits, like a giant dinosaur-looking skeleton monster whose bones aren't held together by anything in particular. There's this great article on the show's production background that goes into much more informed detail than I possibly could, and I really recommend you give that a look, but one of the main points it makes, that really helped me lock on to what makes me love this show so much, is that due to how and when it was made, The☆Ultraman is basically a perfect fusion of Ultraman and popular serialized space anime and mecha shows from the time, all of which are way up my alley on their own. So when you throw them together like this, you get a recipe for a show that's a total blast episode after episode.
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12-20-2019, 12:38 PM | #1459 |
天心の英雄たち
Join Date: Oct 2017
Location: Maryland
Posts: 939
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I bought the Orb boxset recently and started watching it. It's really good so far.
Geed has been my favorite so far of the new stuff, (Max and Mebius are pretty great though), but I have to admit the effects and camera angles for Orb are fantastic. The composite shots where you see the giants and the humans in the same shot look great. And I see one of my favorite camera angles from Geed, where the camera is inside an office building as Geed walks by,.. was actually taken from Orb because I saw the same exact shot in Orb. So far the story and characters are still growing on me, I'm only about 5 episodes in,.. but the effects and camera work so far are excellent! I love the older stuff like Ultraman, Ultra-Seven, Ultraman 80,... but I really like how good the effects are for the newer shows. I'd almost say Geed has competition,..... except Geed has Moa, Laiha, and Salaryman,.. and those are really great co-stars. So far none of the Orb characters are really grabbing me, they're interesting but I hope they get better and more interesting as the show progresses. |
12-23-2019, 09:41 AM | #1460 |
Most-hated user. Kill him
Join Date: Feb 2016
Location: Imaginationland
Posts: 1,813
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Quote:
I bought the Orb boxset recently and started watching it. It's really good so far.
Geed has been my favorite so far of the new stuff, (Max and Mebius are pretty great though), but I have to admit the effects and camera angles for Orb are fantastic. The composite shots where you see the giants and the humans in the same shot look great. And I see one of my favorite camera angles from Geed, where the camera is inside an office building as Geed walks by,.. was actually taken from Orb because I saw the same exact shot in Orb. So far the story and characters are still growing on me, I'm only about 5 episodes in,.. but the effects and camera work so far are excellent! I love the older stuff like Ultraman, Ultra-Seven, Ultraman 80,... but I really like how good the effects are for the newer shows. I'd almost say Geed has competition,..... except Geed has Moa, Laiha, and Salaryman,.. and those are really great co-stars. So far none of the Orb characters are really grabbing me, they're interesting but I hope they get better and more interesting as the show progresses.
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