After all of these years of covering lesser-known tokusatsu series, we’ve finally come to Spectreman, which I’ve mentioned multiple times while discussing other topics—and in its way, it is rather important. This is another series by P Productions, the studio formed by former cartoonist Tomio Sagisu that brought us both The Space Giants/Ambassador Magma and Monster Prince, and managed the feat of sparking a second Japanese “Monster Boom” in 1971, a few years after the mid-to-late-sixties boom petered out. As pointed out in previous posts, it managed to beat both Return of Ultraman and Kamen Rider to the punch by only three months—P Productions was a smaller outfit than Tsuburaya Productions or Toei, but they showed themselves to be pretty on the ball when it came to televised kaiju delivery systems. Crucially for this series’ unexpected legacy, they also had something their bigger rivals did not: distribution outside of Japan.
The third of the Shin series, this one written and directed by Hideaki Anno solo, follows the general trends of the previous two by returning to the first incarnation of a massive tokusatsu institution and sussing out the meaning inherent within it. As in the Anno-written Shin Ultraman, the type of examination at heart of this update of Shotaro Ishinomori’s insect-themed, monster-battling superhero is entirely compatible with an equal amount of superfan-pleasing callbacks and repurposed imagery–even though I’m not as familiar with Kamen Rider as I am with Ultraman, I can see still see that this is all coming from a place of respect for the originators of the series, even if it’s not always as direct as the previous movie (less outright use of the original soundtrack, for example, although older tracks are remixed for key moments.) Even more than in Shin Ultraman, I think Shin Kamen Rider’s delirious narrative momentum comes from its own visual and conceptual idiosyncrasies.
(A reminder: Shin Kamen Rider is not the follow-up to previous subject Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue. That two completely unrelated movies called Shin Kamen Rider could be released decades apart is one way to know just how long running and arcane this franchise is–another way you know is because Shin Kamen Rider isn’t even the first time Toei has put out a cinematic reboot of the 1971 Kamen Rider.)
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 Gameraseries 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.
This month sees the release of the oft-delayed Shin Ultraman, the movie re-imagining of the original series directed by Shin Godzilla effects director Shinji Higuchi (and produced by Shin Godzilla director Hideaki Anno.) That has inspired me to spend the month covering the most exciting of all topics: franchise extensions! Get ready to be synergized this May!
Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue is not the prologue to Shin Kamen Rider, the movie directed by Anno scheduled for next year—in fact, it is technically a prologue to nothing. Produced in conjunction with the twentieth anniversary of the Kamen Rider franchise (although it didn’t release until early 1992, slightly after said anniversary), this is a direct-to-video reboot of the motorcycle-riding bug cyborg superhero created during one of the franchise’s quiet periods, the long stretch between new TV productions that also saw the release of the Ultraman vs. Kamen Rider special I wrote about. Being V-Cinema (although it apparently did get a theatrical run as well), the term for DTV stuff in Japan that has an interesting history of its own, and also being made in the early nineties obviously meant that this new Kamen Rider is very different from the ones that came before—taking on all the dark elements from Shotaro Ishinimori’s original concept (he seemed to be fascinated with the idea of people being transformed against their will) and making them the emphasis, changing its superhero tale into a full-on monster movie, a bloody and dour experience replete with body and psychological horror. This was apparently done to appeal to the now-adult Kamen Rider fans, although it’s difficult to say if it actually did—in any case, it’s a bizarre and fascinating exercise.
There aren’t many standalone Ultraman things out there—as in, ones that are completely outside the historically-minded franchise entries (like the Ultra Galaxy Legend movie I wrote about), and potentially could appeal to audiences who aren’t already invested in that wildly complicated universe. Ultraman: The Next (sometimes simply titled Ultraman) is one of the few, released as part of a confusingly interconnected multimedia strategy that sought to draw in older viewers with a desire for something “grittier”, though that strategy seemingly petered out not long after, and they went right back to their regularly scheduled kids’ TV series. Still, this movie represents one of the times that Tsuburaya Productions has attempted to fully reinterpret the series, taking its familiar elements and putting them in a slightly different context (we’re apparently getting another one this year from the team behind Shin Godzilla.)The Next falls into that realm of “trying to be more real than a wacky cartoon, but not that real”, and while it certainly has far less silliness and more scariness and adult-focused drama to it (including a mildly subversive take on the human/Ultraman relationship), it’s not so far away from the rest of the franchise to feel especially off. If not for those relatively minor changes to the formula, it probably wouldn’t even feel much different at all from the proper spin-off films, which really shouldn’t be surprising given that it was written and directed by Ultra series lifers (the director, Kazuya Konaka, is also the brother of Ultraman Gaia originator Chiaki J. Konaka, who I mainly know as the guy behind the weird third season of Digimon.) So, this comes off less as someone coming to Ultraman from a different perspective, but rather the Ultraman regulars experimenting with tone.
I’ve written about Ultraman studio Tsuburaya Productions’ strange, two-and-a-half decade long wilderness period in brief before, and after all this time I still don’t know much about what really went on in that time. I do know that the seventies Oil Crisis made the costs of many kaiju/tokusatsu productions untenable, and heavily contributed to the cessation of both the Ultraman and Godzilla franchises at the time. During the Ultra series’ hiatus, Tsuburaya tried a few different directions, such as providing special effects for overseas productions (see: The Bermuda Depths), monster-less sci-fi series (Star Wolf, which was adapted into MST3K favourite Alien Fugitive), and, probably the strangest and most intriguing style of all, combining miniatures and suit acting with animation. Among those late-seventies oddities was a trilogy of dinosaur-themed series (albeit, only the first two were hybrids, and the third one was purely live action), the middle entry being Dinosaur War Izenborg, which ran 39 episodes from 1977-1978 on Japanese TV. In many ways, Izenborg feels like an attempt to get back to Tsuburaya’s bread-and-butter, with a military science team tasked to defend Earth from giant monsters using fantastical vehicles, with an added superhero element—but this time, our human heroes are all animated (with that side provided by multiple studios, including the very prolific Studio Deen), either existing in an equally animated space or contrasted heavily by live action photographed backgrounds (it’s about as equally realistic in either case.) This makes it probably one of the most aesthetically jarring pieces of tokusatsu media you’re likely to find.
Of course, if you actually read the title of this post, you’ll notice that I’m not actually writing about Dinosaur War Izenborg, which is not readily available in English (although it was apparently quite successful in both Italy and Saudi Arabia, with financial backers from the latter helping to put together a documentary about the show released in 2016), but Attack of the Super Monsters, an English-dubbed “film” version, which is four episodes of the show stitched together to get it to feature length, released in North America in the early eighties. As we saw back in the Serendipityentry, dubbing and awkwardly editing a TV series into a straight-to-video movie was all the rage in the heydays of VHS. Super Monsters is probably even more blatant in its Frankensteined nature than Serendipity, thanks mostly to the formulaic nature of its original context, with each “segment” having the exact same structure, with multiple instances of reused footage—probably not the way the producers of Izenborg wanted it to be seen. On the other hand, the format also highlights and enhances the already ridiculous nature of the show, creating an experience that is both repetitive but also sometimes enjoyably silly.
Of course, the main appeal of most tokusatsu productions are the fight scenes between costumed characters—it’s what everything always leads up to, deliberately paced so that the inevitable clash between suit man and suit monster gets the biggest reaction from the audience, who knows exactly what’s going to happen and when, but loves to see it happen every time. Based on that, the received wisdom from those with less extensive knowledge of the genre would have you think that all the scenes that aren’t costume character fights are extraneous, or boring—not always wrong, but it assumes that the fight scenes would work just as well without any humans talking and explaining things beforehand. That mindset is really put to the test in Redman, a series of short interstitials created by Ultraman producers Tsuburaya Productions, an experiment to see what would happen if you made a tokusatsu series with absolutely no context whatsoever (as well as no money.) Each two-and-half minute segment (originally aired as part of a variety show called Ohayo! Kodomo Show, or “Good Morning Children Show”, of which there is very little information on the English Internet other than that it regularly hosted short tokusatsu content like this) features the titular hero fighting a monster or two (all of which are reused costumes from Ultraman and its successors) in the middle of the woods or in some badlands (which is sometimes dotted with discarded tires), and that’s it. No explanation, no narration or dialogue other than Redman’s tiny assortment of canned catchphrases, just two people in rubber costumes smacking each other around out in the country. I don’t know if it’s just from watching a whole bunch of these a row, but the experience of viewing Redman borders on a fever dream.
Though I try to be nuanced, my opinions on entertainment can sometimes reflect a duality of extremes: either you produce art that is genuinely thought-provoking, human, and finely-crafted, or you make pure style-over-substance spectacle, where the pursuit of excitement is more important than plot consistency and logic. If you’re not making high art, you might as well be making high schlock, without any pretensions—you’re more likely to create indelible images if you completely loosen yourself from the strictures of narrative and taste, and the best of it can create something engagingly surreal, where it’s not even possible to know what’s coming next. It actually takes a lot of creative ingenuity to do something like that! In my mind, the prime example of perfect high schlock is The Super Inframan, the 1975 martial arts/monster/superhero flick that was one of the genre experiments by the Shaw Brothers Studios, well-known for their long and influential history in the martial arts film business. To boil it down to its raw essence, Inframan is Shaw Brothers’ rip-off of Japanese tokusatsu shows, especially Kamen Rider and Ultraman (which were popular all over Asia at the time), with a movie budget and their own highly-skilled fight choreography—but that only begins to describe the craziness of it. Structured almost like a series of television episodes strung together, Inframan moves at a breakneck pace, rarely letting things up for a moment before barrelling into another fight scene with one of several bizarre rubber suit monster villains. This is a movie where nutty things are constantly happening, and it never stops being fun to watch.
Famously, this is also a movie that Roger Ebert reviewed mostly positively when it came out, and then changed his star rating over twenty years later because his opinion of it only improved over time (“I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that film.”) He ended his original review by writing “When they stop making movies like Infra Man, a little light will go out of the world.” Having now watched it multiple times, I agree wholeheartedly.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 