Outerman is Outta Sight



When Toku first launched in 2017, it seemed like a cruel joke: an obscure cable channel broadcasting Ultraman shows never before available in English. Each new season they acquired was accompanied by a triumphant press release... and each failed to turn up anywhere online. But 2018 brought the launch of a Toku streaming service, along with the acquisition of several older Ultra Series that Crunchyroll lost the rights to. I signed up in October during their $1.99-a-month-for-9-months sale, and promptly discovered a tokusatsu film they hadn't announced: Minoru Kawasaki's Outerman (2015).

Outerman passed the English-speaking tokusatsu fandom by; you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who talked about it besides the omnipotent Kevin Derendorf. Given Kawasaki's previous works in the genre and its lack of subtitles until now, this is not terribly surprising. Here's the real surprise: Outerman is a fine-tuned Ultraman parody, overcoming rickety production values with a clever premise that never loses steam.

Kaiju Legend Ishiro Honda Meets the Legends of Tomorrow



When TV shows about time travel bring in historical figures, they tend to pick names the average viewer will instantly recognize: your JFKs, your H.G. Wellses, your Rosa Parkses. So I was quite surprised to learn that an episode of Legends of Tomorrow, "Tagumo Attacks!!!", was going to feature Eijiro Ozaki as director Ishiro Honda, a legend to kaiju fans and few others. I figured a CW superhero show would favor dramatic storytelling over historical accuracy, and it certainly did. The curious thing is that the episode would have really been onto something if it had focused on one of Godzilla's other Founding Fathers.

The Oldest Godzilla is New Again



This weekend, Godzilla celebrated his 64th birthday by looking towards the past and the future. Godzilla: The Planet Eater, his latest epic, premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival, while a replica of the suit from his first film stomped around Godzilla Fest 2018 in Hibiya. Normally, the former would be much bigger news than the latter, but the first two entries in Polygon Pictures’ animated trilogy have already turned off many a fan, and it turns out that suit wasn’t just for photo ops. A trailer screened at the Fest, already making the rounds on social media, shows it razing a modern tokusatsu set. The end product is a short film which will debut at the Eiji Tsuburaya Museum on its opening day, January 11th. Godzilla’s target is Sukagawa, the famed special effects director’s hometown.

Kaiju Mono Can't Quite Make the Pin


The worst part of being an American kaiju fan is the waiting. With the exception of Crunchyroll’s Ultraman simulcasts (may they rest in peace), every new offering from Japan takes months or even years to wash up on our shores—and spoilers can strike at any moment. The latest, Kaiju Mono, took over two years to arrive in the States and saw its Blu-ray release by Section23 repeatedly delayed for two months. Fortunately, in this age of yearly Hollywood kaiju blockbusters, not many people cared, so I went into it virtually blind. (If you want the same experience, skip the fourth paragraph.) The trailer didn’t give away much, focusing on pro wrestlers Kota Ibushi and Minoru Suzuki fighting an ornate kaiju in briefs.

The last Minoru Kawasaki movie to get an English-friendly release, Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit, caught a lot of flack for its lack of action. Local kyodai hero Take-Majin didn’t wake up until the end, while Guilala’s rampage across Japan used a remarkable amount of stock footage from the decades-old The X from Outer Space. Weak political satire filled the void. This time, Mono (Hiroyuki Taniguchi) melts tanks, terrorizes Shibuya, and takes on Ibushi and Suzuki in no less than three bouts. Kaiju fights have long featured wrestling moves, but having experienced wrestlers actually execute them is another thing entirely. Mono, constrained by suitmation, mostly gets by with electrified strikes and poison fog. It’s great fun.

Does all this dynamic violence make for a better movie? Well, sort of. For the first forty minutes, Kaiju Mono is a fine throwback. Kawasaki packs in every stock character he can think of: the disgraced scientist (Ryu Manatsu), the scientist’s beautiful daughter (Miki Kawanishi), the naive lab assistant (Syuusuke Saito), the reporter (Kikurin), the military men (Bin Furuya and Eiichi Kikuchi), the mystic (Shinzo Hotta), the biologist (Takumi Tsutsui). There’s ominous pronouncements and nonsense science aplenty, plus composer Ryo Nakamura channeling Masaru Sato at his jazziest. Ibushi enters the picture when the scientist shanghais his lanky assistant into taking a dose of his greatest invention, Setupp X Cells. Forget making him a man in just seven days—this injection does it in seconds. With a blizzard of wrestling moves, he sends Mono packing and becomes an instant celebrity.

Redman: The Kaiju Hunter Will Steal/Carve Out Your Heart


Something weird happened in 2016. No, besides that. I meant on Tsuburaya Productions’ YouTube channel. Ultraman’s 50th anniversary was on its way, but all they seemed to post was this weirdo in a cheap-looking superhero costume fighting even cheaper-looking kaiju. After a few terrific pieces of fanart crossed my Tumblr dashboard, I decided to give it a watch.


That was all it took. From April to October, Redman had me -- and many other tokusatsu fans -- in his grip. Like the kaiju who kept coming back no matter how many times he stabbed them, his show had found new life 44 years after it ended. We gifed, drew, theorized, roleplayed, cosplayed, filmed. Though the whole series had been released on LaserDisc in 1996, it felt like it had been discovered in someone’s attic after they mysteriously vanished. There was no context for anything that was happening, just endless brawls in the middle of nowhere, set to music that oscillated between chipper and eerie and approximately five sound effects. The idea that this originally aired as part of a “children’s variety show” was as unbelievable as Tsuburaya’s claims that Redman was a hero. To any clear-eyed viewer, he was nothing less than a kaiju slasher… except he always won.

Tsuburaya has yet to launch any live-action projects with Redman in the wake of his unexpected resurgence, despite having a new suit ready to go. Fortunately, they’ve joined with Phase Six and Night Shining to publish something even better: a graphic novel written and illustrated by Matt Frank and colored by Goncalo Lopes. With Volume 1 of Redman: The Kaiju Hunter, they’ve unlocked the character’s hidden potential, while teasing even stranger stories to come.

Such Terrible Destruction: Destroy All Monsters in America


Fifty years ago, Toho tried to end the Godzilla series on a high note. Destroy All Monsters brought the King of the Monsters and ten kaiju co-stars to the brink of the 21st century, threw alien invaders and gun-toting astronauts into the mix, and invited viewers around the world to enjoy the ensuing mayhem. Director Ishiro Honda, special effects supervisor Eiji Tsuburaya, and composer Akira Ifukube reunited for one last adventure, with a straightforward, action-packed script by Honda and Takeshi Kimura. Though the film failed to turn a profit, at least in Japan, Godzilla soldiered on, enduring ever-dwindling budgets for six more entries until going on hiatus.

Today, its shoot-for-the-moon approach has earned it a sterling reputation in the Western fandom; the most recent G-Fan readers’ poll in 2014 ranked it third in the series, behind the original Godzilla and Mothra vs. Godzilla. Even factoring in non-Godzilla movies, its 8.3 rating was only equaled or surpassed by the Heisei Gamera trilogy, the original King Kong, and Rodan.

G-Fan didn’t provide demographic breakdowns for its respondents, but I’d wager the best ratings for Destroy All Monsters came from the people fortunate enough to catch it in theaters. For a Monster Kid in 1969, chasing TV airings and Famous Monster of Filmland issues for more exposure to those beasts from the East, few thrills could be greater than seeing so many of them on the screen at once, tearing the world apart. It was the Avengers: Infinity War of its day, requiring thorough knowledge of the Toho oeuvre to recognize all the returning kaiju. The rare fan who didn’t discover at least one new kaiju watching the film would had to have seen Gigantis the Fire Monster (1959), Varan the Unbelievable (1962), Atragon (1965), Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster (1965), Frankenstein Conquers the World (1966), King Kong Escapes (1968), and Son of Godzilla (1969) first, or have the aforementioned Famous Monsters of Filmland fill in the gaps. Small wonder that G-Fan’s Destroy All Monsters issue (July/August 1999, natch) dedicated five pages to first-viewing memories.


I’m about half the film’s age, and while I still haven’t seen it in theaters yet, I remember my first viewing too. A bootleg tape loomed large in my Easter basket of either 2003 or 2004, and I immediately raced downstairs to watch the whole thing. I don’t know why Dad didn’t opt for one of A.D.Vision’s official releases, but years later I would find myself glad that he did. That a fullscreen, faded bootleg could provide a better experience than a licensed product is a microcosm of how bizarre and unfortunate Destroy All Monsters’ treatment in the U.S. has been since it left theaters. Only King Kong vs. Godzilla (Japanese version still unreleased) and The Return of Godzilla (American version banished indefinitely to VHS and LaserDisc, Japanese version unreleased until 2016) have suffered more.

Ultraman and (More) Godzilla Coming to Netflix


No, I didn't forget about this blog! A few factors are responsible for the month-long drought: preparing for my G-Fest panel, working on a massive Miki Saegusa article... and the general lack of news. G-Fest is still a week away and I don't know exactly when I'll be done with Miki, but Netflix has taken care of the third problem.

Outerman is Outta Sight

When Toku first launched in 2017, it seemed like a cruel joke: an obscure cable channel broadcasting Ultraman shows never before availa...