[Frontier]

Quote:

Originally Posted by GoldenXtreme

Alright, I've wrapped up The☆Ultraman! There's no denying that this show has truly unfortunate subtitle quality, but if you can deal with that then it's an interesting little experiment for the series. I think the show was at it's best when it played to its strengths with the more "galactic-scale" episodes revolving around big space conflicts, which would be hard to depict in a more traditional tokusatsu show. A lot of the more standard tokusatsu show. A lot of the smaller scale episodes tended to vary between boring and mildly interesting for me, many of them felt like traditional episodes from Showa toku, but stripped of a lot of their typical appeal and crazy energy. I do think that this show had a few innovative aspects that were cool though! Hikari seriously struggled with the secret identity he had to keep up, and he was often seen as a bit of a flake by other members of the team because he was constantly disappearing in fights. Marume in particular had a lot of tension with Hikari that I thought was interesting. The cast in general was pretty well characterized for an older show, though this makes Tobe's near complete lack of focus even more jarring. Not to much to say on this one, it was a pretty good attempt at converting the series into animated form, even if in the end I doubt it'll be the kind of show I regularly think about.

I like that the show managed to really capture the vibe of an Ultra show and all the usual trappings of one in animated form wayyyyy before the Gridman anime universe was a thing. It may not have captured it as well but the effort was there and it kind of made me want more Ultraman-style anime in traditional form compared to the Netflix show which was basically just Kamen Rider.

Mutsumi is one of the best Showa girls...

It was also one of the first times we saw a host and their Ultra really communicate with each other on an ongoing basis alongside Jack Shindo and Great.

I did find it kind of funny how they had like a Captain transition like you'd expect from a live-action show replacing actors (like what happened with the Captains in RoU) only to come to replace a normal captain with a more anime captain.

Now that you mention it I think Tobe only got like two focus episodes, one of which involved that crazy professor that was always getting them involved in stuff.