Attack Of The Super Monsters (1982)

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 Serendipity entry, 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.

Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans (1995)

In this third of three extraterrestrial review subjects, we enter an entirely new realm: the glorified fan film, based on a popular Sci-Fi TV property. Wait, come back! There’s stuff to say here!

I’ve found myself in and out of the Doctor Who audience over the years: first discovering reruns of the Tom Baker episodes in high school, getting on board the revival when it began in 2005, jumping off board when I inevitably lose interest in watching a TV show on a regular basis, and then watching a few new ones here and there before stopping again. Last year, when Twitch was streaming episodes of the older series non-stop for a few months, I was tuning in regularly—there is still something deeply enjoyable about that run from the sixties to the eighties, even with its low budget nature and the weak stories that are peppered in throughout. What I think always appealed to me about the show is that it often had the feel of a classic Sci-Fi monster movie, combining aspects of the fifties stuff with the darker atmosphere of a Hammer movie—no show had a greater devotion to weird concepts and adorably ratty, but often imaginative!, creature costumes—with the serialization only adding to the charming old-fashionedness of it all. While the show’s time/space-hopping format meant it could be something completely different from week to week, Doctor Who still ended up becoming a motherlode for monster fans, and many of its alien menaces have since become iconic on their own.

Monster Multimedia: Serendipity

Lost childhood memories have a way of being dredged up in unexpected ways: in the book Abominable Science!, which is a skeptical analysis of cryptozoology that I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned a few times before, co-author Daniel Loxton has an aside in the section about the semi-legendary Canadian sea serpent Cadborosaurus where he mentions the children’s book Serendipity, which is about a pink sea serpent. He even contacted the author of that book and got a short quote from him. This reference was part of a larger point Loxton was making about how sea serpents, both fictional and “real”, are modelled after the horse-fish hybrids regularly depicted in Classical Greek art, but as soon as it was was mentioned, I was instead struck with familiarity, and thought to myself “Wow, someone else remembers that thing, too!” The wide world of monsters seemed a lot smaller in that moment.