I’ve written about Japan’s original mid-sixties Monster Boom pretty regularly—that period, roughly 1966-1968, and its explosion of kaiju-based media casts a long shadow over monsterdom. Less discussed on here is the second Monster Boom in the early seventies, which revolved around a new wave of tokusatsu television shows beginning with P Productions’ Spectreman in early 1971 and then followed a few months later by Tsuburaya’s Return of Ultraman and Toei’s indomitable Kamen Rider. This run of tokusatsu was paralleled by the continual decline of kaiju movies, as the Gamera series ended later that year (following Daiei’s bankruptcy) and the Godzilla series limped on to diminishing returns. This was coupled with a slew of other historical events that worked in the favour of TV tokusatsu, including Toho closing its effects department after the death of pioneering effects director Eiji Tsuburaya and restructuring of the studio, and the 1973 Oil Crisis and related economic downturn affecting both production costs and theatre attendance as budget-minded Japanese audiences chose to stay home (all this context and more can be found in this SciFi Japan article.) The presence of kaiju on television since the sixties already gave viewers an alternative to monster movies, and so it really was only a matter of time before the former became the preeminent venue for monster-based entertainment in Japan—something even Toho realized.
Toho began producing tokusatsu television in 1972 with series like Rainbowman and Go! Godman, but their most elaborate production was probably Zone Fighter (original Japanese title Meteor Man Zone), which aired 26 episodes from April to September 1973. One need only a brief glimpse of it to know that it’s a clear imitation of the style of the Ultraman series, and in terms of filmmaking it basically never deviates from that template. The theoretical advantages Toho had over their competition was what they had easy access to—firstly, their roster of movie talent, including Godzilla series directors Ishiro Honda and Jun Fukuda (neither of whom were particularly pleased with being busted down to television, and the latter being openly disdainful of the work he did on this show) and new head of effects Teruyoshi Nakano (as well as his assistant Koichi Kawakita, who would take over as the effects director during the vast majority of the Heisei Godzilla series.) Secondly, and maybe more importantly, was the roster of famous monsters that they could put on the show whenever they wanted—if Zone Fighter is known at all among kaiju fans, it’s as the show that regularly featured cameos from Godzilla and a selection of his monster opponents. I’ve written about television spin-offs of Godzilla before (both American–made), but this is the real deal Godzilla from the movies showing up, a gig he took in the year between Godzilla vs. Megalon and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, giving us a rare glimpse of the King of the Monsters attempting to move into a new medium as his original one was winding down.
The set-up of the series, laid out in the opening, has some novelty—after the hilariously-named planet Peaceland is destroyed by the invading Garoga, its denizens (called Meteor Men) rocket off in familial groups to different worlds. Landing on Earth is the Zone family—consisting of a mother and father, adult son Hikaru, teen daughter Hotaru, kid brother Akira, and a grandfather who is only ever called by the title “Zone Great”, which really is great—who try to live normal lives in Tokyo wearing very colourful clothes, but soon learn that the Garoga have set their sights on their new planet, and so must endlessly combat them and their legion of “Terror-Beasts” that are deployed using rockets. The Zones have a secret high-tech HQ hidden beneath their house, send communication using toy-sized robot rockets, and the three kids have the ability to transform into the superheroic Zone Fighter (Hikaru), Zone Angel (Hotaru), and Zone Junior (Akira), with Fighter also given the ability to transform into a building-sized form to take on the monsters himself. The family-based dynamic is fairly unique among the tokusatsu shows of this era (although they were, on average, a little lighter in tone than the Ultraman shows of the sixties), recalling the similar one in Ambassador Magma, and there are some attempts to have stories involve their Garoga-fighting duties interfering with their regular lives, or inadvertently pulling in their unknowing human friends. Of course, their lives can only be so normal when the breadwinners of the family are a toy designer and a race car test driver, but the thought is there.
You have pretty much all the requisite elements of these shows down pat here: there’s a number of gadgets and vehicles (a jet called Smokey, and even a thundercloud controlled by Zone Great that regularly helps out but evidently eats away at the old man’s lifespan), and Zone Fighter in his giant form has multiple finishing moves (one of them being wrist-mounted machine guns) and a time limit with a beeping timer like Ultraman, although the other members of the family can recharge his battery in times of need. The production values of the show are decent for the time, with good monster suits (that, I noticed, sometimes seemed to be cobbled together from Ultra series monster suits, which is appropriate given how many times Tsuburaya recycled Toho’s suits) and a consistent quality of direction, although the episodes by Honda and Fukuda I viewed were not entirely distinguishable (a few cool shots aside) from the several other veteran Toho directors who worked on the series, a possible side effect of the constrained format. The Garoga, with their cool demonic masks, can be fun villains as well, and I got a kick out of one episode where the Earth invaders are basically visited by the district manager from another galaxy who lightly criticizes them for taking so long, but gives them a monster to help.
The one thing often missing from the episodes I watched, though, were the engaging or imaginative plots of the Ultra series—most stories end up collapsing into formula, even when they start off with a strong premise (including the Garoga attempting to destroy a device that cleans up carbon monoxide pollution, or the family fighting over their suspicions that a friend from Peaceland may be a Garoga infiltrator.) Maybe this is due to the need to accommodate both giant monster and human-level fight scenes, which was probably a smart idea to appeal to the fans of both Ultraman and Kamen Rider, but doesn’t leave much room for a plot to really develop with any coherence. I did notice that some of the later episodes were more inventive and had more vigour to them, with one story involving the Garoga heading up a real estate scheme (using earthquakes to reshape the land) and another having them shrink all their monsters down and hiding them throughout Tokyo; both those stories boasted far more memorable moments. Maybe it would have continually gotten better if the series had continued.
Another device that barely contributes to the plots, as it turns out, is Godzilla, who appears in five episodes and is almost never referenced before being summoned to help out. Called the “Monster of Justice” by the Zone family, he makes his first appearance four or so episodes in, and it basically amounts to “we’ve got Godzilla’s phone number, he seems cool”—in almost every subsequent appearance, he is called in to get Zone Fighter out of bad situation (apparently he spends the rest of his time living in a mountain cave with automatic doors), although the penultimate episode actually has him appear in the beginning as well to do some friendly sparring with Fighter. In that sense, he’s not really all that different from the Capsule Monsters in Ultraseven, except, you know, it’s one of the most famous monsters of all time. This is absolutely the child-friendly superhero incarnation of the G-Man featured in the early seventies Toho films, and despite the name value he brings to the show, I wouldn’t say he is treated with the significance and weight that he once had. Neither, it should be said, are his enemies King Ghidorah and Gigan, pulled straight from Godzilla vs. Gigan and positioned as simply two more Terror-Beasts in the Garoga’s arsenal—the former fights Zone solo over two episodes, while the latter gets another duel with Godzilla himself. All that said, the scenes with Godzilla are played entirely for fun, and in that context they work—the suit actors (Isao Zushi, who is also in this series’ Gigan and Ghidorah suits and who portrayed Godzilla again in vs. Mechagodzilla, and Toru Kawai, who would later play the titular Last Dinosaur) seems to be having a good time, whether Godzilla’s beating his chest, jogging over various landscapes to Fighter’s location, or shaking hands with the star. His fight scenes are all consistently high-energy and enjoyable, and you look forward to seeing him show up—you’ll always know when he will because his name is in the title of every episode featuring him.
Zone Fighter is about as close as you’ll get to seeing Godzilla team-up with Ultraman (unless you count that episode of the original series where they reused a Godzilla suit and barely retouched it), and I’m sure Toho thought that would be enough to bring in the audiences…but it didn’t, in the end. Oh well! This is a pretty mild entry in the giant hero category, albeit one with some merits across its run, but it is rather interesting as a time capsule of both a certain era of tokusatsu and a certain era for Toho and Godzilla, where they were forced to lower themselves to playing someone else’s game. Even if you’re used to the silly, inconsequential tone of Godzilla in 1973, it is still rather strange to see something that iconic used as a recurring guest star on a TV series, outside of the widescreen format that seemingly defined his city-levelling antics (according to the quotes from that SciFi Japan article, effects director Nakano and Jun Fukuda had differing views about whether kaiju worked better on the big or small screen, although I’m so used to seeing both that I don’t really have a strong opinion either way.) After Zone Fighter ended, there would be only two more films starring Godzilla (one by Fukuda, one by Honda) before he went into hibernation for close to a decade, and all of these together represent the twilight days of a franchise that had managed to stick around for twenty years, trying to stay relevant in a completely different age.
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