[Switchblade]

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.