Spectreman

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 Kamen Rider (2023)

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.)

Shin Ultraman (2022)

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.

Zeiram 2 (1994)

You may remember Zeiram as the movie that begins as a Sci-Fi martial arts clash between an alien bounty hunter and a mutant super-weapon that suddenly pivots into a Laurel & Hardy duo of dimwits having a Scooby-Doo chase with said mutant super-weapon in an empty warehouse district. More than anything, it was a vehicle for director/character designer Keita Amemiya’s intricate tokusatsu aesthetic, probably one of the most prolific ones in the eighties and nineties (aside from various TV series, he worked on the effects of both GUNHED and Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue, and directed the Ultraman vs. Kamen Rider special), let loose from the strictures of television and plot—but that comic relief twist made it an odd one. Amemiya’s sequel, made three years later, actually streamlines the storytelling in a way that better distributes the action throughout its runtime and integrates all the characters in a more organic way, meaning that it might be a better-constructed film, while still being almost exactly the same.

Giant Robo/Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot

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 Ultraseven and 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.

Monster Multimedia: Zone Fighter

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.

Zeiram (1991)

Keita Amemiya is primarily known as an artist and character designer for tokusatsu, contributing mostly to Kamen Rider from the eighties onward, as well as some series in sibling franchises like Super Sentai and Metal Heroes—he’s also created his own series (like Garo) and worked in animation and video games as well (doing design work for entries in the Shin Megami Tensei, Onimusha, and Clock Tower series, among others.) Looking back on things I’ve covered, he provided “SFX Supervision” for Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue (he would direct many subsequent V-Cinema Rider movies), and even did the monster designs for the Hanna-Barbera-produced Ultraman animated TV special. So, this is someone very deep in the world of Japanese superheroes and monster costumes, and when given the chance to direct a completely original movie (his directorial debut was a film tie-in to the Namco arcade game Mirai Ninja), it’s not surprising that something like Zeiram is the result—a pure representation of tokusatsu style over substance.

Warning From Space (1956)

With Daiei, I always seem to be discovering more pre-Gamera contributions to the tokusatsu genre—they had been testing out monster effects for a quite a while before unleashing their own major series (like Daimajin and Yokai Monsters.) Now I think I’ve found their earliest foray, earlier than even The Whale God—originally released in 1956, Warning From Space (Japanese title Spacemen Appear in Tokyo) premiered barely a year after Godzilla, and aside from capitalizing on the new trend of people in monster costumes, it also feels very much part of the general trends of American Science Fiction films in the mid-fifties, which is to say that it has almost exactly the same plot as several of them. But if some of the parts aren’t entirely original, this ramshackle little film’s general aura is much odder and more interesting—and its unassuming weirdness apparently had a surprising impact, as one biography named it directly as one of the films that inspired Stanley Kubrick to eventually try his hand at Sci-Fi. Who knows how true that really is, but who wouldn’t want to imagine a master filmmaker sitting around studying this tale of rogue planets and dancing starfish?

Monster Multimedia: Monster Prince

We’ve now entered Dinovember, a month devoted entirely to those terrible lizards we all love. First on the agenda is a return to Japanese studio P Productions, who followed up previous site subject Ambassador Magma/The Space Giants with a series that is still just as youthful in spirit, but also very dino-centric. Monster Prince (Kaiju Ouiji) aired twenty-six episodes from 1967 and 1968, putting it in the latter days of Japan’s Monster Boom (and alongside the much higher profile Ultraseven), and in keeping with the trends of the period, aims to appeal to its target demo even more directly by having a kid protagonist who commands their own kaiju. This particular sort of giant monster fantasy, The Black Stallion with more property damage, was likely started with the Gamera movies, but it’s even more central to this series—while I’ve never heard this show be named as an inspiration for later kids & monsters franchises like Pokemon or Digimon (Gamera and the Ultra series are brought up regularly), it’s hard not to see the similarities. There’s also a few similarities between this and Ambassador Magma—specifically the structure and the pacing—and while I wouldn’t consider this on the same level as its contemporaries, it has plenty of peculiarities going for it.

Orochi, the Eight-Headed Dragon (1994)

During the Heisei era of Toho monster movies, the studio wasn’t really venturing into the genre outside the annual Godzilla flicks (after those ended, they began the Rebirth of Mothra trilogy, and maybe we’ll be getting back into those movies soon-ish…), a big departure from the sheer variety of the Showa days, as we have seen. One exception was this movie, titled Yamato Takeru in Japan, which was directed by Takao Okawara, who helmed every Toho Godzilla film from 1992’s Godzilla vs. Mothra to Godzilla 2000, with the exception of Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla, which released a few months after this (interestingly, Okawara had worked with original series director Ishiro Honda, and his buddy Akira Kurosowa, on Kagemusha.) This is not so much a traditional giant monster movie as a historical fantasy that utilizes Toho’s monster-making crew, which feels like a throwback to the days of Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya applying suitmation to other genres, and even to the fantasy films of Ray Harryhausen and the gang. This is basically a modernized retelling of the legendary tales of Yamato Takeru, a figure who is based partially in history and partly in mythology—in fact, Toho had previously a made a film about him in 1959, a three-hour epic in the style of The Ten Commandments called The Birth of Japan, AKA The Three Treasures, which also included a kaiju-styled version of legendary Orochi (I don’t remember a giant multi-headed snake showing up the Ten Commandments, so Cecil B. DeMille can stick that in his pipe and smoke it.) The “modernization” ends up blending Japanese mythology, high fantasy adventure, monsters, and some tokusatsu flair into definitely different from the Heisei Godzillas, and also quite entertaining.