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?

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.

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.

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).

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?

Well, personally speaking, I wasn't. I got into it as an offshoot of my fondness for the 2001 Cyborg 009 series and Kikaider: The Animation.

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.

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.

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.

Personally, I can't take giant monsters all too seriously, and KR give me Nice drama

I guess its takes a bit of getting used to the whole "Spandex clad warrior fighting a rubber suited monster" idea. I've know about Ultraman for ages but I've only really started watching it recently. While Giant battles are nice every once in a while , I prefer most of the fights to be normal sized. I did like how Hibiki handled large monsters though and would like to see something like that handled a bit more often, though I doubt it will.

I definitely think it's that (at least online fans) aren't huge fans of the battles. I've got a couple of friends who are really into Ultraman now but had the hardest time getting into it because it felt less like the stuff you see in Sentai and Rider and more like wrestling. Personally, I enjoy them all. Ultraman stories tend to be a notch above Sentai when they get dramatic and can touch on some pretty real issues Sentai won't always give the most weight.

But human sized monsters are just fine?

I'm not good at explaining, so bear with me
When both the monster and the Hero are giants in the city, it feels limited. Sure, the stakes are higher, but the scenery and fight scenes aren't as varied, for a comparison to KR, Genm deciding to kill a child last week and attempting to do so felt more threating to me than if a giant monster threw a building at Ultraman. In Gaim, Kouta's first fight had him having to flee to a construction site. It feels much less limited than giant fights

Eh, Ultraman fights on the moon, in cities, in the woods, in desserts... what Kamen Rider can't do since locations are limited Ultraman can do since miniature sets can be anything.

But you're right; most Ultraman fights do take place in a city. Still fun though.

Why not give Ultraman Orb a chance? It has drama too and I think you would enjoy it.

I can sort of see that, but Ultraman definitely does have its change of scenery. You get city battles, yeah, but you also get sky battles and battles out in factories and in the wilderness. The best part of the city battles is that the cities are structured like real cities, so there's a great sense of scale and realism there.

Like, in Ultraman, a monster would never throw a building with the show treating it as nothing. The shows highlight how devastating the scale of the attacks are. This is something Ultraman Mebius actually had to learn after his first fight - he beat the monster but was also cartwheeling around the city and using buildings as shields, basically leaving the city in shambles. He does his heroic pose at the end and one of the characters confronts him, yelling "you didn't protect anything!".

One of my favorite aspects about Ultraman is that things can feel threatening and the heroes don't always win. There's a really great line in one of the movies where the hero fails in saving someone and he feels bummed, goes to the older Ultraman characters for guidance, and they tell him "We're not gods. Sometimes we can't save people and they die." and to me that feels like it adds this very appreciated sense of realism to superhero battles.

I moreso meant that fighting choreography is more limited, no Ultraman would fight up stairs in a construction site or anything like that
Isn't Orb an anniversary thing like Decade/Gokaiger? I assumed it wouldn't be a good storting point

It has references to other Ultramen as in Orb has forms based on their powers, but its no more than "Here is a past Ultraman".

...welp there goes my assumption making me an ass and chump while everyone shuns me

I've really become a big Ultra fan in the last few years. I like how it tends to be more of a serious science fiction action show than the frequently much sillier kid-focused franchises Toei has. The slower, more wrestling-based kaiju fights took me a little while to get used to, but I generally like them a lot now - I think they're far better than anything Super Sentai does with their similarly scaled mech battles, primarily because the actors such a greater range of mobility in their suits than the poor bastard buried in the increasingly massive mech boxes.

I think Ultraman has just had some bad luck with the Western tokusatsu fandom since the majority of this scene grew in the late '00s/early '10s, which was a period where the Ultra series really wasn't doing much besides retrospectives and the Zero movies. There was the better part of a decade between Mebius and Ginga and it really didn't help that there weren't many fansubs available. Before Crunchyroll came along the only post-2000 Ultraman shows available with subs were Nexus, Ultraseven X (neither of which are conventional series), and Mebius, with a little over half of Max done, too. There was a little bit of older material out there, but anything pre-2000 has a much harder time finding an audience, even with subs.

I think that Ultraman would be a lot bigger with the online fandom (like having its own board here, for example) if it had been more consistently active and available in the last couple decades.

That might actually be it. I came across KR purely by sheer luck too

I guess. Fighting cheoreography is still badass though.

What he said. It's funny, Orb is the 50th Anniversary show yet it has no appearances from other Ultraman while X had a whole bunch of returning actors and their respective Ultraman.

Orb just has the cards without any context, and that short bit at the end where we get introduced to some Ultraman from the past.

The show itself has like zero references to other shows, it’s really just the cards being named after old Ultraman and the protagonist of Orb channels their powers to transform, that's all there is to it.

I always viewed X as a sort of a modern day take on Mebius - various older Ultra characters show up but the difference is Mebius gave viewers Showa characters while X gives them Heisei characters.

They probably let Orb stand alone as an anniversary series because of how much new products were being tied into the past.

I can't speak for the rest of fandom, but here's why I'm not as into Ultraman...

Disclaimer: these are just my impressions of Ultraman based on limited exposure to the franchise. I could be way off. If I am, please correct me and point out series that don't conform to my criticisms! I'll probably watch those shows!

1. Militarism: From what I've seen, Ultraman is as much about the Special Defense Force side-characters as it is about Ultraman and the Ultra-mythology. For me, being in the military holds zero escapist appeal, so I have trouble enjoying escapist fiction about members of militarized police forces (unless they're trying to topple or rebel against said forces). Of course, there are Sentai teams and Kamen Riders affiliated with military defense forces and whatnot, but those are the shows I tend to enjoy the least (with the major exception of Jetman, as that show is about civilians who are forced into the military by circumstance, and the corrupt members of Sky Force are often as antagonistic toward the Jetmen as the Vyram are). In general, I find that Toei heroes are (ever so slightly) more outsidery and/or anti-establishment than Ultra heroes. The Ultraman stories I've enjoyed the most prioritize the Ultra mythology over the Special Defense Force characters (i.e., the Zero movies) or are so old that the militarism comes off as quaint, naive, and benevolent (i.e., OG Ultraman).

2. Action: I'm way more fond of dynamic martial arts-style action choreography than I am of giant-sized, pro-wrestling-style brawls. From what I've seen, the action in Sentai and Kamen Rider is way more kinetic, athletic, complex, and visceral than the action in Ultraman -- which is more lumbering and slow-paced (though I'm sure it's very impressive in its own way).

3. Style: Tsuburaya tends to spend their money on different things than Toei does, leading to the shows looking very different aesthetically (different cameras, video/film stock, SFX, CGI, etc...). I'm more accustomed to Toei's style, so Tsuburaya productions look oddly jarring to me (obviously this would change with increased exposure to Ultraman).

4. Accessibility: The show wasn't as popular in the west during my entry into the fandom, so there were fewer fansub options for older shows. Plus, there were no new Ultraman shows for the majority of the time I've been watching tokusatsu. Obviously, Crunchyroll and a slew of new shows have made this reason obsolete in recent years.

5. Backlog: There are just so many Sentai and Kamen Rider (and Metal Hero) shows I want to watch that the idea of adding in Ultraman shows makes me want to tear my hair out. It's just too overwhelming. There are shows I want to watch, and I'm sure I'll enjoy the hell out of them, but I can't even consider them until I've gone through more of my Toei backlog.

--

And... that's pretty much how I see it. Obviously, feel free to challenge my perceptions as you see fit. I'm sure a lot of them are wrong. ;)

Militarism: While I prefer the independent, almost disconnected from the real world feel Kamen Rider and Super Sentai typically has, that was a weird way to say it, I will admit that Ultraman's more military like approach does hold some appeal, at least just because its something different then most Toku I've seen.

Action: That's probably my biggest negative about Ultraman, at least at the top of my head. I'm not a big fan of the battles. While Ginga/X/Orb all have nice special effects in addition to the wrestler-like combat, the battles in Mebius are extremely boring to me. The low use of special effects and slower action make for an experience that almost puts me to sleep.

Just keep in mind that I've only seen Ginga(S), X, and Orb. I've just started Mebius though.

With Toku superhero fans, I notice you have two sides of the fandom in the US. You have the Toei Toku superhero fans who love Super Sentai and Kamen Rider, but can't get into Ultraman, Godzilla and Kajiu in general. While you Kajiu Toku fans that love Ultraman, Godzilla and Japanese Giant Monster movies but don't seem to care for Henshin heroes from Toei like Kamen Rider, Super Sentai and Metal Heroes.

I feel like some kind of freak. I adore Godzilla (Gamera is a'ight, too) and I'm impatiently waiting for an opportunity to watch Shin Godzilla, but I could never get into the Ultra series. :lol

I'm the opposite: love me some Ultra, but could never get into Godzilla and other kaiju stuff (unless you count Daimajin Kanon, which you probably shouldn't).

Well it's certainly pretty pro-establisment, but I think calling Ultraman militaristic is a bit extreme in most cases. The Science Patrol type characters in most Ultraman shows tend to be far more about just that: science. They're problem solvers who just happen to have access to high tech jet planes and the like.

The only show that really plays up the angle the way you're describing it (at least to my knowledge) is Nexus, which makes the occasionally shady organization giving the orders as much a source of conflict as any of the actual monsters, sort of like what you said about Jetman.

Military stuff tends not to have much escapist appeal to me either, so I totally get where you're coming from, but I've never really gotten that vibe from Ultraman too much.

At any rate, if that's one of your big problems, you should probably put Orb at the top of your list of Ultraman shows to watch if you haven't seen it, since it basically completely avoids that element. Or Ginga, I guess, but that show isn't anywhere near as solid in its writing, and has a distinctly low budget feel to the effects, both of which make it pretty hard to recommend. I have a soft spot for it though, because of course I do. :p