As cool as Blade will always be, those four pages about the Ultra N Project are really fascinating to me, mostly because I've always found the Ultra N Project itself really fascinating.

To give a simple explanation, especially since Die obviously won't have any context, it was a huge multi-media effort to revitalize and redefine the Ultraman franchise back in 2004, which ultimately failed to achieve the kind of success or lasting impact I think Tsuburaya was hoping for. Ultraman ended up looking backwards shortly thereafter, finding more success appealing to nostalgia with shows like Ultraman Max and Ultraman Mebius, and that's arguably still the direction of the franchise to this day, placing a huge emphasis on continuity and reliable, familiar faces.

It's precisely because of how it turned out that it's so interesting to see that early promotional material for the Ultra N Project, back when it was both shrouded in mystery and highly confident in its ambitions.

(Also, I'll say in advance I largely skimmed the actual text since I'm not good with kanji, so keep in mind very little of this will be me reading out the words or anything like that. I mostly just felt like rambling about this topic.)

The way these images put it, apparently – and this is something I never knew before – the "N" in the title represented three key concepts of the project. NOA NOSTALGIA, NEXT EVOLUTION, and NEXUS TRINITY. The first word of each is also a reference to the names of the three central Ultramen, who I never noticed were all connected by that letter before, because I'm just dumb that way.

This article points out that when it was written, only the first one of those had been elaborated on by Tsuburaya. Noa, as I understand it, was basically the mascot for the project. He was the first thing they revealed, and while he didn't star in a TV show or anything huge like that, his radically fresh and unique design was a visual declaration of the project's intent. The "nostalgia" is meant in the sense of returning to the franchise's spiritual origins, rather than the literal ones. Getting back to that raw, basic concept of a mysterious messenger of light. Ultraman The Next was the star of a feature film that would ultimately go simply by the title ULTRAMAN, while Nexus was the titular character in his own TV series.

Nexus especially was essentially the true centerpiece of the project, a big long-form television show connecting the three characters together (maybe that's the "trinity"?), but it failed to find any real success, and whatever momentum Tsuburaya was hoping to create was stopped dead in its tracks, necessitating the aforementioned change in approach.

Despite the financial reality, though, we were left with some pretty cool suit designs, a movie I've heard mixed things about (not having seen it), and a memorable series that ended up being one of a kind for the franchise. In terms of simply doing something experimental, it was definitely a success, and I'll always have a weird fondness for this similarly weird little window of Ultra history.

Man, the more I hear about Nexus the more I wanna watch it. Still waiting for it to get dropped on TokuSHOUTsu though.

You will likely be waiting for quite a while. Mill Creek has only been subbing Showa and New Gen series so far, and Nexus was one of the last in the original Heisei era of shows (the main era Mill Creek hasn't covered yet). I'd just torrent it as usual.

Huh, coulda swore I heard it got official subs somewhere. But if not then yeah, fan subs it is. Thanks!

It did on Crunchyroll I believe, alongside a bunch of random ones? Though I've also heard a lot of those subs are really, really bad. But Tokushoutsu's Ultraman deal is specifically with Mill Creek - unless anything changes - and they haven't even gotten to Tiga yet

Because it did!

EDIT: Er, as you've been informed already. I didn't watch Nexus with Crunchyroll's subs, but I believe they were on the okay side? Not a trainwreck like Ginga, but probably still missing certain nuances that would especially bite in a show like Nexus that's often rather precise in its writing.

Oh neat I--

Oof. Okay yeah. Can preferred sub group for Nexus?

That's actually quite a bit of a rumor that the fanbase perpetuates quite a bit. This article that delves deep into the entire Ultra N Project production history. But one tibit revealed was the intent of the project wasn't to radically alter the franchise but just as a weird little one-off where the team behind it had Tsuburaya full trust to make it however they wanted just for a little while. (Also this blog is awesome so well researched and great resource for Ultraman production history. I implore everyone to give it look to read some fascinating trivia about Ultraman and the love/care as well as context for the franchise state of being over the years.)


Yeah Noa was definitly the mascot character and the emphasis of the word N is seen quite clearly in this trailer.

SFX Fantasy Rayforce

As for me Ultraman Nexus holds a special place in my heart really. I will admit there is REALLY big nostalgia bias here and I'm not afraid to admit that. Despite this Nexus is still something I truly think is worth watching. The atmosphere, characters, themes, and the bond of Ultraman are all done in a way that both different but at the same time feels like natural progession of the entire franchise. Plus this show and the Showa Ultraman and the TDG Trio really help not only define my taste in tokusatsu but media in general so I'll always be grateful for that.

I second this, having found out about it reading the one there about The☆Ultraman back when I was watching that show. I really need to make the time to read more of them. Exhaustively informative stuff. And major props for emphasizing how critical Keiichi Hasegawa's insane level of passion for making Nexus was to its creation.

Thank you for bringing that up! It definitely is important to note that Tsuburaya's history at the time gets *complicated*, to say the least. I'm not even remotely aware of a lot of the finer details, but it's not that surprising to hear that they weren't trying to put all their eggs in one basket.

More from Newtype - The Live 2004/05:

https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3484.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3485.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3486.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3487.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3488.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3489.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3490.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3491.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3492.JPG

Deka Red and his gunkata acrobatics show in episode 1. Still one of the coolest fight scenes ever in toku history looking back now. By the way Die, if you liked Agito I suggest at the least give Dekaranger episodes 1 and 2 a watch while you take a break from rider reviews. A certain Agito alumni appears. And like I said, episode 1 is awesome.

I never liked Deka as a series, but I absolutely appreciated how all in they went on world-building in this show. The setting is so rich with detail, that I found myself watching successive movies just because there was so much going on.

I also want to second everyone's warm feelings about the N Project. The music in Nexus and The Next was enough alone to make me want to write home about how good it was.

Honestly, I’ve begun to sympathise with Die not knowing what most of this stuff in these magazines are. I’ve been listening to an album of Tokusatsu songs released in this era and I don’t know what this song is.

https://open.spotify.com/track/22KQD...R_aYi4vH4E85AA

It's from Kamen Tenshi Rosetta apparently. I've never seen the show myself, but thank you for giving me an excuse to employ my basic reading skills. :p

Sidenote: the theme is also sung by, and the series starred, Yoshii Rei who appeared as Orihime in the Bleach musicals.

More from Newtype - The Live 2004/05:

https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3502.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3503.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3504.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3505.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3506.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3507.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3508.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3509.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3510.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3511.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3512.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3513.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3514.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3515.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3516.JPG

Hey, so this was dead on!

Also, that's an interview about Timeranger that Yasuko Kobayashi participated in! Holy crap! I'm going to have to read that at some point! Thank you so much for making this thread, Die! I am very excited right now, if you can't tell!

Happy to do it! And there's still two more magazines to go! Who knows what exciting content could be in there?

not me because I only know like one toku thing from 2004 and I don't know how excited I'm going to be for the inevitable strongestest rider pictorial

Props to UGF:TAC. :lolol
So at the DVD release celebration event at the time they got our queen Kobayashi, Time Green, Time Pink, and Time Fire, Satoshi Morota, and Jun Hisaka. The article is Kobayashi, Morota, and Hisaka talking about the show though it seems.

Think of these as tomes that are telling you to watch non-rider shows like Dekaranger where the red ranger has the temperament of Goku, the hair of Super Saiyan Trunks, and the gunkata skills of Christian Bale from Equilibrium. :lolol

Well now I'm just hoping at least one of those magazines is literally nothing but 100% Mukki content on every page. It's the only way to properly get across his Strongest-ness! :p

There's probably a semi-decent chance in the future that I'll end up watching Dekaranger and be like I Can't Believe I Wasn't Excited To Watch This Show. Maybe someday I'll even be a Sentai guy, loving the weird train kids and animal teens.

As a tribute to Mitsuki, I have completely overestimated the remaining amount of magazines. It's one full magazine, and maybe 40 pages left in the current one.

And, yes, plenty of Mutsuki in the next one. (I peeked!)

Hey, isn't that the "main guy" from Ryuki? :P

Gosh, that Devilman film though. I was so excited to get that, having loved the OVAs and the old cartoon, and then I watched it, and... I hated it. I absolutely hated it, hahaha.

Still, it's nice to see so much Cutie Honey. Sato Erika was a big deal when she was cast in this role, and I think, despite how big budget it was, this is the one work in Anno's filmography that people seem to forget now, which is a real shame.

I think it's pretty fascinating, what with all of the Shin Ultraman stuff dropping this past week. Anno doing Cutie Honey was a thing that was never even on my radar until I was given these magazines, and it's treated as a huge project by Newtype. For it to largely be forgotten... was it not good? Has anyone here seen it?

I thought it was good. I mean I am clearly biased, being a huge fan of Anno's work, but I think at the time it came out there was no real understanding of Cutie Honey in English speaking territories, and no nostalgia for it, so regardless of how they pushed it here, it made little difference.

I can't speak for how it was received in Japan, or other places in Europe that did obviously have that connexion, but I feel that here, and in America, people expected it to do well but they didn't take into consideration that audiences just didn't know what it was.

I think it's pretty funny, Cutie Honey and Casshern getting live-action treatments around the same time, since they both (probably) were in the same mix of bootleg DVDs at cons where people would be perplexed by them. Like you said, no real knowledge or nostalgia of these properties in America. I imagine they'd do a lot better in a world with more resources to learn about foreign properties? Like, there are a ton of people who loved Shin Godzilla that are about to do some deep goddamn dives on Ultraman, just to make sure they get all the references in the new movie.

Oh, definitely, the internet has changed things to even a greater degree then when I first crawled into this fandom. I think the Casshern cartoon was fairly popular in France, if I recall correctly—the French also got Liveman in the '80s, which I am eternally jealous of—but I know that the first time I knew of it was when I saw the movie as a HK bootleg and noted that Aso Kumiko was in it, and just brought it on a whim.

I know there was an English dub of Ultraman and maybe Ultraseven in America, but I think the first we ever saw of the franchise was the cartoon, The Ultraman, and I remember being fairly indifferent to that as I was well into Battle of the Planets instead.

*snaps fingers at you* You there, boy, bring me my walking stick.

Good to know I am not the only Liveman fan out in these neck of the woods. :rock:
As for the Casshern movie, it sadly was a failure despite having live action Jotaro, Kamen Rider G3, Kamen Rider Sango, and the suit actor for Riderman in the Kamen Rider ZX special. For starters, getting rid of the helmet? That's like Wolverine with adamantium knuckledusters instead of adamantium claws. Apparently the director is the ex-husband to Hikaru Utada and his previous credits were mostly music videos with Casshern being his directorial debut. The visuals were great, really good stuff here and there, but the story in general felt boring and I lost interest after the Casshern vs Barashin fight. In general I would say it ended up being a dumpster fire of a meal despite all the good ingredients it had lined up for it figuratively speaking.

Yeah, I recall a fuss being made of the fact that it was Hikki's husband directing, and she was doing a song for the film. I remember feeling spectacularly untouched by the visuals, despite being told how "lavish" they were, and how much money had gone into the film—to me, the film was just the same as the Devilman movie: two young men cast disparaging looks at one another in front of a green screen for an hour, followed by 20 minutes of computer animation.

But yay for Liveman, which is, in my opinion, the best sentai show ever, regardless of how much I might like later iterations.

Yeah the Devilman movie already had red flags showing for me when their biggest selling point was two members of a boyband who hardly had any acting experience other than one movie will be the stars and Bob Sapp's cameo. :lolol
And yes, Yay for Liveman; great tagline, great story and characters, first to have two robots combine into a bigger robot, first to have a female blue ranger, great story, Takeru/Kamen Rider Ghost's dad in his early 20s as a skater dude, Joji Nakata as a charismatic villain, and who can forget that shih tzu on a skateboard. Look at it, just cruising like it is nothing. :lolol
https://i.imgur.com/O1QgqaL.png

Flame, wasn't it? I remember I tried listening to some of their stuff before I got a copy of the movie, and keep in mind that for all my dedication to extreme noise, I do love a good pop song, and yet I thought they sounded terribly generic. It was then that I began to fret over the movie.

This dog is my favourite part of any sentai opening ever, hahah. Honestly, everything about the show is so well crafted, yet this skateboarding dog is the icing on the cake.

Yeah, and the twins who were hired were not the problem, whatever committee that headed this project who were dumb enough to use it as a publicity tool for said twins is my gripe about the movie. As most of these tend to be, a no-love-for-the-source material-adaptation made shoddily. By the way, one of their members was R2 in Rescue Force. Not the twins who were in Devilman, but their last member to join.

Oh! I hadn't realised that! But yes, I sadly agree with you, a lot of the problems here stemmed totally from the way they approached the source material and in the end, I don't think the movie pleased anyone.

An extra-sized final post from Newtype - The Live 2004/05:

https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3523.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3524.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3525.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3526.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3527.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3528.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3529.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3530.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3531.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3532.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3533.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3534.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3535.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3536.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3537.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3538.JPGhttps://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3539.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3540.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3541.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3542.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3543.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3544.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3545.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3546.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3547.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3548.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3549.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3550.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3551.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3552.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3553.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3554.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3555.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3556.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3557.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3558.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3559.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3560.JPG
https://challengerscomics.com/images...5/IMG_3561.JPG

(there's still a bonus from this issue I'll need to post, "The Gransazers Maximum", before moving on to the next issue)

I just love the fact that in a toku magazine 24 Season 2 is being advertised. :lolol

"Dear amigos." smh. I remember they went through this phase of giving Nao-chan these vaguely Spanish sounding pop songs as she was on some kind of teaching Spanish educational TV show, and they were all terrible, and when they did try and change direction, they'd already pretty much killed off her career. *sigh*

It's nice to see Kobayashi's Dark Mercury in Sailor Moon covered. This was a twist I don't think any of us who liked the original saw coming, and it's one of the most decidedly Toei-feeling moments in the show. It feels a lot like they were eager to demonstrate how different the show was from the comics/cartoon, but I'm not sure if that was really necessary, as, to be honest, a lot of us would have just been happy with whatever we got, lol.

Is it bad that I recognised a feature for Spy Kids 3 in there?

Yeah right after Hurricanger wrapped up she was on NHK's Spanish learning program as a participant, which is why you got her speaking Spanish in Abaranger VS Hurricanger.

Nah, you're good. I recognize the Ben Affleck movie paycheck. :lolol
And who can forget SIC Kamen Rider Kuuga. Seems like the one in the magazine in particular is the later re-release that had parts for Dragon, Pegasus, and Titan.

That's the one! I remember watching that show, and just being like, I want to support you, Nao-chan, but you're not cool in this. hahahaha.

Between that and the 2004 Thunderbirds movie a page below, what a great selection of Western sci-fi to show off. :D

I noticed those pictures as well. Not gonna lie, seeing the images for that movie and the Peter Pan one completely distracted me from the rest of the pictures in the post.