[Kiwami]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kiwami

Guess I'll have to watch Ginga now

And I did. Well, the first one, I just started Ginga S.

My history with Ginga is weird: I watched the first episode like 5 years ago and then just never continued. I wasn’t familiar with Ultraman at the time, it was barely a few months after Toku became a thing for me and I was mainly exploring Kamen Rider at the time.

Ultraman seemed like a natural fit for me at first because Godzilla was my favorite thing as a kid so giant monsters wrecking stuff is just up my alley.

But for some reason the vast Ultra universe with all its characters and monsters overwhelmed me a bit, and maybe I just wasn't accustomed to the style just yet. I also remember thinking Spark Dolls were the dumbest thing ever.

Luckily Ultraman X really grabbed my attention back when it first aired, I loved the show and that’s what I needed to fully embrace and explore the Ultra-series. I watched every new series ever since, plus a few movies, and now with the announcement of Ultraman Victory in SHF-form I felt ready to dive back into Ginga, to complete my "New Generation Hero"-journey.

And I gotta say, Ginga was a nice show to watch. Not mind-blowingly amazing, and very much a "restart" with much less ambition and budget than later entries in the series (which makes sense because Ginga was the first re-emergence of a new Ultra show in quite some time, as far as I know) but it's still really fun.

I find the limitation of the story and action to one particular location, the school building, enjoyable and even refreshing to a degree. Nowadays Ultraman protects cities and continents with a variety of locations to choose form, back in Ginga it was one building and the surrounding woodlands.

It all feels limited, like a short web-series, but that also gives it a strange kind of focus. Each character has their time to shine, they work as a group and the overall narrative is simple yet fulfilling.

It was a short experience but a fun one. I enjoyed it very much. And thankfully I have arrived at a point in my Toku fanboy life where I find the Spark Dolls charming to a degree. I'm still glad they're not a thing anymore, but I also wish we could go back to Ultraman having his own origin and powers instead of fusions or borrowing powers from past Ultras. It’s so weird too since all the recent Ultraman have origins of their own, yet they need collectable past-Ultraman tokens to transform regardless.

Anyways, a final yet important note: This show made me become a fan of Ultraman Taro. It’s probably for all the wrong reasons but he was great in this one. The flashback scene with him as a child is especially awesome. Also the comedy was on point with his struggles as a doll. "I want to be big again!". The payoff to this in the final episode was fantastic.

I checked out the first episode of Ginga S today too, because well, Ultraman Victory was the main drive behind me going back, and I like it already. The military organization / defense force theme in Ultraman is my favorite, so I'm glad they're bringing it back. Plus, the subterran people thing makes me incredibly nostalgic because that's an old theme from the Godzilla movies as well. Many others too, but in the context of Toku Godzilla comes to my mind first.

Ultraman Victory is great; I love his Kaiju-arm gimmick. I binged all of Ginga during the weekend and I will continue to pop an episode of Ginga S daily now, I will have it finished by the next weekend I think, so I'll write down my final thoughts on the Ginga-series by then. But so far? I love it.