It’s taken a little while for more of these to show up on my doorstep, but they’re finally started to roll in. That’s right, the amazing folks over at Mill Creek Entertainment have sent more entries in the Ultraman series. A stack of them have showed up, but they’re a bit out of order. I’ll be jumping around, so be patient with me. There’s a chance I may get confused. Let me clarify, I’m actually already confused by all the different incarnations, there’s so much. I’ll start with The Return of Ultraman.
Once the Ultraseven series ran its course and finished airing new episodes, it was now 1968. There was no intention to carry on and Ultra Q, Ultraman, and Ultraseven would have been a complete trilogy. In January of 1970, the Ultra mastermind Eiji Tsuburaya passed away. His son, Hajime, took over the company and set out put a new series in production. Using some of his late father’s ideas, he assembled a team and reworked the story. Originally meant to be a direct sequel to Ultraman, they decided to go into a new direction. Instead of just being about the monsters and the SSSP, the new lead character would have a life outside of all the chaos, he was more human. Three years after the last series, The Return of Ultraman premiered in April 1971 in Japan.
“Following years of relative peace, mankind is once again under attack by giant monsters. A new Ultra Hero, Ultraman Jack, arrives from Nebula M78 to combat this threat. After merging his life with that of Hideki Go, a young race car driver killed while rescuing a boy and a puppy from a rampaging monster, Ultraman Jack battles alongside the terrestrial defense team known as MAT (Monster Attack Team) to protect the Earth.”
As much as I enjoyed the series, my favorite part of these new sets is the packaging. It comes in a standard or steelbook case with an amazing 24pg booklet that offers up some interesting history on the series. There is also an episode guide for all fifty-one episodes, a look at the shows characters, key kaiju list, and a complete kaiju list. It’s really impressive and it’s a great reference guide for the series. It has little pictures with their names, and it’s easy to cross-reference them to go back and find favorite episodes. I had a few; episode 8, “Monster Time Bomb,” was pretty rad. It’s intense and features a top gaiju, Ghotstron, which is such a cool name. Episode 38, “When the Star of Ultra Shines,” offers up some really cool surprises for longtime fans. This series follows the monster-of-the-week formula pretty closely and seems to work best.
While the transfer isn’t perfect, it’s the best available. This series, until now, had never been released in North America, so I’ll take what I can get. Fifty-one episodes is quite a bit, but the (less than) thirty-minute episodes fly by, and by the time you reach the end of the series, you’ll be ready to see where it goes next.
Thank you, Mill Creek, for filling a niche in physical media that needs to filled. Well worth the price tag and there’s so much more to come.
Related Article: Review: ‘Ultraman’ Complete Series Blu-ray
