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12-25-2016, 02:22 PM | #1 |
Member
Join Date: Jan 2016
Posts: 843
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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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12-25-2016, 02:37 PM | #2 |
Tokusatsu Hero
Join Date: Aug 2013
Location: Maryland
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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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12-25-2016, 02:41 PM | #3 |
Stronger Than You
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: nyet
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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.
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12-25-2016, 02:49 PM | #4 |
Tokusatsu Hero
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Location: Maryland
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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.
Ultraman also lack yearly shows. After Mebius, we did have Ultra Galaxy Mega Monster Battle and NEO in 2007-2009 and the Ultraman Zero movies until Ginga in 2013. Kamen Rider and Super Sentai have more yearly shows which are more relevant compare to Ultraman and other Toku Heroes (Metal Heroes, Garo and several others).
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She/Her Last edited by Guyver Spawn; 12-25-2016 at 02:58 PM.. |
12-26-2016, 04:53 AM | #5 |
Fangirl Kaiju
Join Date: Mar 2014
Posts: 172
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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. |
12-26-2016, 05:06 AM | #6 |
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Join Date: Nov 2016
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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? |
12-26-2016, 05:59 AM | #7 |
Fangirl Kaiju
Join Date: Mar 2014
Posts: 172
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Quote:
The comparisons to Power Rangers were always something I dreaded as a teen. |
12-26-2016, 08:25 AM | #8 |
Sky Henshin!
Join Date: Apr 2013
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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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12-26-2016, 08:39 AM | #9 |
本当のクロスセイバー
Join Date: Oct 2016
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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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12-26-2016, 09:44 AM | #10 |
Oldtaku
Join Date: Aug 2016
Location: Atlanta, Ga / Portland, Me
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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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