The many, many incarnations of Ultraman over the decades gave fans a decorative Rogue’s Gallery of foes, most of whom were out to destroy Earth or conquer it. The show’s writers were careful to give them all distinctive names, which, oddly, the attack teams somehow always knew despite never seeing that monster before. Most sounded …
As long as we’re doing Narnian bento boxes, how about ones for specific Narnian characters? Like The Lady of the Green Kirtle. You can interpret it either as something she might serve to guests, or one that’s merely inspired by her, intended to be served up at a Narnian theme park. Like all the AI …
Among the more bizarre Japanese tokusatsu hero shows of the 1970s was Warrior of Love: Rainbowman. This sounds contemporary, but the show had nothing to do with LGBTQ people or rights, as it debuted in 1972. Due to the special training he received in India from the yogi Devadatta, young hero Takeshi Yamato was able …
Tokusatsu is a form of media native to Japan. At its most basic, it means any kind of Japanese SFF, horror or war drama that relies heavily upon special effects. But since the 1960s popular usage has defined it as any action-packed TV show or movie with colorfully costumed superhero characters who have their own …
Some vintage Ultraseven record and publication covers from Japan done in that inimitable colorful 1960s style, heavy on the primary red, blue, and yellow. Look closely at the first image, where Ultraseven has a mouth with a lower lip, and it is open! He also has human eyes behind his hexagonal ones. I wonder if …
Ultraseven’s sweet marketing deal with Converse!
Ultraseven Tsurubaya television series 1967 – 1968 Originally shown on Tokyo Broadcast System (TBS) and later syndicated I was eight years old when I was introduced to the original Ultraman, which ran midafternoon, after school hours, on a now-defunct UHF station from Philadelphia. Ultraman was a creation of Eiji Tsuburaya, the special effects guru who …
As I talked about here, H. P. Lovecraft’s Elder Things were such a unique creation both of their time and for SF in general that their caliber was not duplicated for many years. There were echoes of them in the BEMs (bug-eyed monsters) of the lurid SF pulp covers of the 1930s through the …
It’s getting close to Halloween and things are about to get pretty horrible! No more horrible than this Japanese lady who seems to have been transformed into a sink, an open drain for her mouth.
In 2011 we should have been wearing jumpsuits and whizzing up and down spiral ramps to airports in the sky. Jeez, what went wrong?