[Fish Sandwich]

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.