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.
Shin Godzilla proved to be a bit of an inflection point for tokusatsu cinema, and its success gave director Hideaki Anno and effects director Shinji Higuchi, both veterans of the field in one way or another (the latter having worked on the Shusuke Kaneko Gamera trilogy), the keys to some of the most influential franchises of the form. They’ve ended up using the “Shin” moniker to denote all their creations as one loosely connected meta-series, but just how connected would these subsequent reboots be? Shin Ultraman, the first of the follow-ups out of the gate, provides a surprisingly complicated answer. Directed by Higuchi and written by Anno, this new version of Tsuburaya Productions’ signature kaiju vehicle inherits some of Shin Godzilla‘s aesthetic preoccupations (and a few of the thematic ones), but is not really aiming for the same apocalyptic feeling—in keeping with the general tone of the material it’s based on, this is a lighter affair that is less focused on re-imagining its monster action to fit modern anxieties, but rather transplants much of the original vision of Ultraman into a modern setting and sees how it plays out. That allows them to be more openly fannish in the number of callbacks to the original series they include, some going so deep as to be based in the details of the series’ production, but the most surprising thing about that is just how invested they are in really examining the ideas present in the original.
We haven’t ventured back to the original Japanese Monster Boom in a while, but there is still material there left to pore over. Giant Robo hails from the latter half of that brief period of monster ascension, debuting within weeks of Ultrasevenand Monster Prince, and feeling a bit like a halfway point between those two series: espionage antics involving an international peacekeeping organization as well a child hero with his own giant, monster-fighting companion. It ended with the same 26-episode run as Monster Prince, a truncated existence easily overshadowed by the much longer and more influential Ultra series, but unlike Monster Prince, Giant Robo was dubbed and aired on North American television thanks to the efforts of our old pals at American International Pictures, its title changed to Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot. Johnny Sokko became something of a staple of syndicated TV in the seventies, gaining a cult following among English-speakers who went on to start punk and ska bands referencing it—so despite being “lesser” tokusatsu, it has had a surprising amount of staying power in both the west and in Japan, where it has received irregular reboots (all of them animated) in the decades since.
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.
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.
Many mainstream movies now are made up of references to a vast network of interrelated movies and TV shows and whatever else—having these big universes to prop up stories with signifiers seems to be part of the appeal. That was true when I first saw the subject of this post a few years ago, and is even truer now—but as close as Hollywood genre movies (especially superhero ones) have gotten to matching the overwhelmingly reference-heavy sugar rush of Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy Legend The Movie (that title!), there’s a purity to its nonsense that I don’t think they’ve reached. Being a spin-off of a spin-off of the Ultraman series, there are points where it seems like it doesn’t care at all about slowing down for anyone not deeply entrenched in the forty year history of the franchise, breathlessly introducing ideas and characters that could be callbacks or completely brand new, but it can be hard to tell for even someone like me, who has done some deep diving into that history. When I think about something made for fans first and everyone else maybe sixth or seventh, I still think of this—the difference here being that while a modern superhero movie will reference movies that came out within the last ten years, this is bringing in things from TV shows going back decades, including the original actors themselves. That, and it’s also clearly trying to take the franchise in new directions, complicating matters further. What I’m saying is that this movie is very busy.
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.
Ambassador Magma (dubbed The Space Giants in North America) is notable for two reasons: first, it was a show with a very similar premise to Ultraman (alien superhero fights giant monsters) that premiered six days before it, and as I learned from August Ragone’s Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters, the producers of Ultraman ended up airing a “live” special broadcast just to avoid having their thunder stolen; second, it was based on a manga by Osamu Tezuka—so yes, we’re back in Tezuka Town, albeit in a very different form than last time. The series, made by P Productions (who would go on to create the oddly influential Spectreman in the early seventies, which helped spark a second “monster boom”, as well as a series of tokusatsu shows about a lion man), received a respectable fifty-two episode run, and despite living in the shadow of Ultraman, had a decent following in Japan and even in its syndicated run in North America.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 