Ultraman Redux

I mentioned Ultraman in an earlier post, but I still owe Eve some photos so I figured I'd do that for today's post. Here's the dubbed pilot episode of Ultraman if you're still curious/masochistic. Japanese doesn't dub well to English for some reason.

One of the "neat tricks" in movie and television production from the 1960's was to build a set in miniature (kind of like a model train), and then film the action on your miniature set. That way, you could add giant space ships, huge monsters, or epic battles without actually spending very much money. Nowadays you'd accomplish the effect with computer graphics, which looks a lot better but isn't nearly as funny. Anyway, it seems that somebody decided that it would be fun to make a television show about a giant spaceman fighting giant space monsters, and thus Ultraman was born. I don't think there's any particular significance to the name (the explanation of the name at the end of the pilot is ultra-cheesy). I guess superlatives make popular names for superheroes.

Ultraman became a pop-culture phenomenon in Japan, and is still very popular with boys (Boys have interesting taste in TV shows). I was introduced to it for the first time by the Ultraman aisle at Yodobashi Camera, a large shop in Tokyo that sells just about everything for males of all ages. Eve, the dazzlingly attractive young lady pictured in a previous post, had heard of Ultraman in the English classes she teaches and was immediately fascinated by the aisle. At this point, I received the impromptu commission to photograph every single model of Ultraman available, and was exhorted to make said photographs available online later. This was difficult for three reasons:

1. Japanese electronic shops are jumpy about people taking photographs inside. I didn't see a "no pictures" sign within eyeshot, but I still wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of attracting official attention, so we had to photograph on the sly. That meant no flash, so the pictures are a bit blurry.

2. Do you know how many versions of Ultraman there are? At least this many. This is only about half of them (and I left out "Ultraman Nice" because it was too badly blurred).

3. After about the first five photos (complete with imaginative announcements), I was laughing pretty hard. This probably made the later photos blurrier than the early ones.

Nevertheless, I have now officially posted the Ultraman photos (it was somewhere between numbers 2 and 3, in case you missed it). If the link quits working, send me a message and I'll probably fix it--I'm changing servers soon, and my old links might break. And now, while the rest of you stay up through the rest of tonight reading the seventh Harry Potter book, I will head to bed.