Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

For the discussion of any Ultraman related shows, movies, comics, video games, etc.
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Cryptid_Liker
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Re: ULTRA-THREAD 2.0

Post by Cryptid_Liker »

After watching this week's episode of Z, I have now decided to binge Great... finally!

Added in 13 hours 47 minutes 1 second:
I am now halfway through Great. So far, everything's been pretty boring except episodes 1 and 5. Hoping the next half is better.

Added in 34 minutes 36 seconds:
Wait, did I just hear Charles say Majaba's scientific name is Locusta gojirasis mogodia?

Added in 23 minutes 28 seconds:
Thankfully, Majaba lived up to my expectations. I felt very bad for the mama, though.
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Re: ULTRA-THREAD 2.0

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Cryptid_Liker wrote:Thankfully, Majaba lived up to my expectations. I felt very bad for the mama, though.
Yeah, you feel sorry for Majaba. It's not their fault they're genetic freaks mutated by pesticides. The asshole behind them doesn't even get what he deserves - the last we see, he's fleeing in his truck. You think they'd at least show a shot of his truck getting crushed or something.
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Re: Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

Post by LSD Jellyfish »

Funnily enough, this was probably my first Ultraman series. I remember watching a really bad upload of it to YouTube, and thought the series ended after the second guidus episode. Definitely will rewatch it someday.
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Re: Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

Post by Cryptid_Liker »

LSD Jellyfish wrote:Funnily enough, this was probably my first Ultraman series. I remember watching a really bad upload of it to YouTube, and thought the series ended after the second guidus episode. Definitely will rewatch it someday.
It's on Youtube right now, actually. That's how I watched it yesterday.

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Re: Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

Post by Terasawa »

Ultraman Great? More like Ultraman Somewhat Good.

I had the DreamWorks Barrangas toy before I even knew this show existed. I had a vague idea of what Ultraman was and I knew this was an Ultraman character from the box, but it was a few years before I learned its origin. Today I have a couple of the DreamWorks toys and the SNES game (just the cart) and I don't think the show's name is mentioned anywhere on or in them: seems pretty strange that the most visible tie-in merch fails to promote its television series.

I'm pretty sure I've only seen the first 11 episodes. That was around a decade ago when it was streaming somewhere. It's not a bad series but it all feels the same after only a few episodes. That's a pretty bad problem to have when you only produce 13 half hours. And I think it was a mistake the end the Gudis arc halfway in.
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Re: Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

Post by Cryptid_Liker »

Terasawa wrote:Ultraman Great? More like Ultraman Somewhat Good.
Ultraman Somewhat Good? More like Ultraman Boring-until-the-second-half-when-it-actually-gets-good.

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Re: Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

Post by daveblackeye15 »

More like Ultraman The First that got my eyes on Ultraman as a kid.

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Re: Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

Post by Megalon-5 »

Honestly one of my favorite seasons, warts and all. It's not as polished as the Japanese shows, but it marches to the beat of it's own drum, while simultaneously laying the groundwork for the 90's era shows. It's a one-of-a-kind entry and I wish we got a second season.
Terasawa wrote:And I think it was a mistake the end the Gudis arc halfway in.
The Gudis arc was originally the finale, but Tsuburaya didn't want a show with just six episodes, so they produced the second half to keep it going a bit longer.

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Re: Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

Post by Terasawa »

Megalon-5 wrote:
Terasawa wrote:And I think it was a mistake the end the Gudis arc halfway in.
The Gudis arc was originally the finale, but Tsuburaya didn't want a show with just six episodes, so they produced the second half to keep it going a bit longer.
Didn't know that, thanks. But assuming all the shows were completed before it ever aired anywhere (which I think was the case), I would have kept the Gudis finale as the series finale and instead develop the newly-ordered seven episodes so that they could slot in prior to that. In other words, push the Gudis conclusion back so that arc runs the course of the series. It's been about a decade since I watched it, but as I recall, the series felt lopsided in that there was a continuing story arc for the first half of the show while the second half felt like filler.

I do like the show, though. The SFX don't have the same dynamics as the Japanese series but they still work, unlike the American Ultimate Hero show. And where that show's drama unit stuff felt exactly like the cheap American TV it was, the drama in Towards the Future has a style and verve totally unique in the Ultra franchise. But maybe that's because I've never watched any other Australian dramas. :P
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Re: Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

Post by Dino-Mario »

I remember playing the SNES game of this show back when I was younger. Couldn't beat Gudis at all lol. As for the show itself, it is alright but can get just as preachy as any episode of "Captain Planet". The kaiju rock as always, and I would like to see some of them making a reappearance. I recently read about how there were plans for a second season with the Baltans as villains and the Showa Ultra Bros. as guest characters but were regrettably discarded after the failure of Ultraman Powered. Anyway, I'm so pleased Powered and Great will get some deserved spotlight in The Absolute Conspiracy. Great's ears still freak me out tho.

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Re: Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

Post by LegendZilla »

This series was my first exposure to Ultraman. As a very young kid, I saw the complication VHS tape of the Gudis arc.

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Re: Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

Post by o.supreme »

Dino-Mario wrote:I remember playing the SNES game of this show back when I was younger. Couldn't beat Gudis at all lol.
Gudis 1 or 2? 2 was kind of difficult, but my friends and I finished the game on all difficulties pretty easily. Funny story about that, in early promo images for what was coming for Super Nintendo- in Nintendo Power Magazine, there were screenshots of the original Ultraman, and my friends and I went nuts! A game based on an obscure TV show we loved (had no idea it was still going in Japan). And when we got the actual TTF game we were extremely disappointed. That drove us however, before the days of the internet, there were a few retailers in video game magazines that sold import games. We got SFC Ultraman and Ultraseven (which I have both to this day), and had to pay a ton for them. We also got an adapter for $15 so we didn't have to break off the pegs in our SNES, or shave some of the plastic off the cartridge to fit. ;)

I also got a VHS tape (bootleg obviously) from a store in San Francisco's Japan town in 1990 that had the first 5 episodes 2 years before it aired on US TV.
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Re: Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

Post by Dino-Mario »

o.supreme wrote:Gudis 1 or 2? 2 was kind of difficult, but my friends and I finished the game on all difficulties pretty easily. Funny story about that, in early promo images for what was coming for Super Nintendo- in Nintendo Power Magazine, there were screenshots of the original Ultraman, and my friends and I went nuts! A game based on an obscure TV show we loved (had no idea it was still going in Japan). And when we got the actual TTF game we were extremely disappointed. That drove us however, before the days of the internet, there were a few retailers in video game magazines that sold import games. We got SFC Ultraman and Ultraseven (which I have both to this day), and had to pay a ton for them. We also got an adapter for $15 so we didn't have to break off the pegs in our SNES, or shave some of the plastic off the cartridge to fit. ;)

I also got a VHS tape (bootleg obviously) from a store in San Francisco's Japan town in 1990 that had the first 5 episodes 2 years before it aired on US TV.
The first Gudis form, hehe, all I could do was kick and punch him but he always ended up owning me.

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Re: Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

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Yeah the setup is a little wonky but not too bad if you can get use to it. The object is to wear them down to critical levels before unleashing a super attack. If you aren't quick enough they'll regenerate health. You also have to wait for your super attack meter to charge up. You can use some super attacks to wear them down faster buy it also hampers your charge time.
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Re: Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

Post by daveblackeye15 »

Towards the Future game was too loose with the jump mechanic and tough with that and other things.
I tried the Ultraseven game and it felt considerably better. The hard part was timing to reflect attacks.

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Re: Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

Post by TitanoGoji16 »

Towards the Future was my first Ultraman series, as it aired on syndication back when I was a kid on some TV station I was able to pick up on my TV with an antenna (REMEMBER THOSE?). I guess, thinking about it now, it was probably back when the show was still relatively newish.

Fairly recently, I decided to binge watch the entire series - I'd only seen a few episodes before. The cast was okay. Nothing mind blowing but I liked the characters well enough. I remember a few plot twists and leaps in logic that made absolutely no sense here or there, but eh, whatever. There was a weird thing that kept happening throughout the show that the other members of UMA kept acting like they knew that Jack was Ultraman (especially Jean in the second Gudis episode) except it was obvious that wasn't the intent. As Terasawa said, it was a mistake to end the Guids plot so soon - Without the Gudis virus mutating things into kaiju, that just means this world is full of kaiju (or things capable of creating kaiju) already as it is, which didn't seem to be the intent in the premiere. I get that Super Gudis was meant to be the original finale, but once they got extended you'd think they'd just retcon that into "Oh, I guess there's still some more Gudis floating around" and use that to explain the rest of the kaiju and then have Great fight Even More Super Duper Gudis for the finale.

Majaba has always been one of my favorite Ultra Monsters, and I picked up a few more during this binge - like the tragic icy Gigasaurus and the alien Ryugulo, who wasn't evil, but just a cranky a-hole who was jealous of his wife. Apparently there were plans for Ryugulo to come back and be an ally of Great had the show gotten a second season? That would've been cool.

The ending was really lackluster, I thought. There was a doomsday prophecy and Earth was caught between two giant monsters, but we never get a good scene of Great, Kodalar, and Kilazee all fighting together, which is what it feels like the finale is building up to, so there ultimately feels like there's no pay off to anything (they do finally appear on screen together in the second half, but it lasts for about twenty seconds). Also, the two parter's insistence on suddenly focusing on that one guy, the comic relief UMA agent who had bit parts in like three episodes, was really bizarre to me. I don't mind a more low key story, a "the common man's point of view" type thing, but this was the finale to the series and the main cast we'd been following for the whole show barely even factored into things. So that was weird.

Despite its flaws, I liked Towards the Future and I'll always have a nostalgic place for it in my kaiju-loving heart.
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Re: Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

Post by Dino-Mario »

Y'know, it's funny how in the later series, Tiga, the apocalyptic final boss of the show is basically the firstborn son of Cthulhu himself, and in this show, one of the apocalyptic final bosses is a big, chonky turtle boi with the face of a chicken. Kodalar is just oddly adorable on his own way.

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Re: Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

Post by mikelcho »

I remember reading the three-issue continuation comic book miniseries from Harvey Comics (at least, that's who I think released it) and I liked it.

There was at least one sequel miniseries involving a Blue Ultraman, but that's all I know about it. Was there more than one sequel miniseries or not and what was the origin story of the Blue Ultraman?

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Re: Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

Post by Cryptid_Liker »

mikelcho wrote:what was the origin story of the Blue Ultraman?
Apparently, it was some deformed criminal who fought Great's host at the beginning of the comic and got some blood on him. Gudis infected the guy and made him into an Ultraman.

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Re: Official "Ultraman Great"/"Towards the Future" Thread

Post by edgaguirus »

This was my first Ultraman as well. I saw it on tv, and found it fun. Several episodes are forgettable, but a few stick in my mind, as well as a few of the kaiju from it.
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