Henshin Inspection presents Going Ultra. This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an artist,
I'm an analyzer. Join me as I talk about Ultra 724? Huh, return to the north. So,
a little bit of a shtick there. Yeah, Ultra 724. I'll tell you about why I'm
watching it and then I'll get back to here at the brick wall and tell you a bit more
about what I thought about the episode. Richard Star told me about this and I
went ahead and watched it and I liked a lot so I wanted to go ahead and talk
about that now. So, in episode 24 of Ultra 7 we get the first appearance of
Alien Cannon, who is the one who has the gun that controls the machines in
Blazor 6. Anyway, Blazor 5 and 6, even though you didn't know he was there in 5
at first. Anyway, so what happens in this one is there is one of the Ultra Guard,
his name is Shigeru Murashii, I believe. Anyway, there's this thing where his
sister tries to get him to go to see his mom and there's this conflict between
him and his mom. They run a farm up in Hokkaido, which I believe is in the
north because that's the episode's called Return to the North. Anyway, he, so
anyway, just to clarify something real quick, this is my first exposure to these
characters. I didn't know anything about Murashii. I didn't know anything about Ultra 7
other than like Windom comes from it and stuff and I've never watched the show
before. The actor for Murashii also plays one of the guys from the SSSP in the
original Ultraman, so his face was familiar to me and I think he's a
sharpshooter in both shows, which is kind of funny that they would do that when
they knew that it was the same guy playing two different characters, so
that's kind of a funny thing. But anyway, I was really stricken by, well, two
things. One, Alien Cannon was not in the episode as much as I thought they would
be and we did get to see that there were a few of them in this ship and it was
hidden in like a antenna tower type thing, so kind of how it was hidden in the
windmill in this episode of Blazar. And it's a great design. I like basically
that everything's 100% the same. They could have even pulled the old
costume and a mask out of mothballs and used it in Blazar, which is really cool.
So either they faithfully recreated it or they did just that good of a job
creating it in the first place and they were able to use it, you know, decades
later, which is really amazing. So anyway, I'm sure they recreated it, but still,
what I'm saying is the overall design of it is so good and compelling that it's
cool that they were able to reuse the design basically unchanged. So the more
important thing to me, though, other than the Alien Cannon, who wasn't in it for all
that much, is this really important, well, this really well-made emotional story
because Shigeru, like, doesn't want to go back to the farm. His mom wants him to
leave behind the Ultra Guard. You know, I'm sure it's partly because, you know,
what mother wants her son in danger. But she wants him to take on the
responsibility of running the farm and, you know, taking on that role in the
family as, you know, she's getting older and passing and whatever. She's not near,
she's not like in Death's Door a step or anything like that. It's just, that's
how she was feeling. That's what she wanted to do. So she tries to convince him to go
with her and he tries to avoid his mom. He tries to avoid her, tries to avoid her.
Then, because of Alien Cannon, he gets in a situation where he's in a plane, his
ship, his, you know, Ultra Guard plane, a fighter or whatever. It is set on a
collision course to crash into a commercial airliner with like 300
passengers on it, plus the pilots and other crew, and his plane, it's flying and
it's on its collision course, but the Alien Cannon disables the ejector. He was
going to self-destruct the plane and eject or eject then self-destruct the
plane so that it wouldn't crash into the civilians and kill all of them, but he's
unable to because of what Alien Cannon did. So now he's stuck in this plane.
There's a ticking clock. The mileage is getting closer and closer between them.
The time before the self-destruct goes off is getting closer and closer because
I'm sure they wanted to detonate before it was too close to the, to the, to the
plane because, you know, it could hurt it and hurt the people in there, and you get
like this really intense performance of him by himself in the cockpit, and then
his captain of Ultra Guard calls his mom and has her brought in, and she gets on
the comms and they're talking to each other, and it's just this really
interesting, really beautiful interaction or set of interactions between them, and
I found it super compelling. So I'll try to wrap this up quickly. What was so
great about this was the performances between the two actors or of the two
actors because they were on totally different screens, on totally different
sets, you know, just back and forth between the two of them, and at one point
he starts laughing because of this interaction that they're having, and he's
laughing so hard that he's crying, but it might be that he's crying to cover up
his, or he's laughing to cover up his crying because he's so emotional because
he thinks he's gonna die and never see his mother again, and they just had kind
of not creating their action previously, and also, you know, he doesn't want to die.
So anyway, that was really, really fantastic, and it's just a great episode,
and here's the thing. The reason I mentioned I didn't really know these
characters and I don't know Ultra Seven is there's no nostalgia here for me.
There's nothing pushing me to feel anything about these characters except
for the episode as it's presented and the work that everybody did on the show.
The costume design, the set design, the sound guy, the composer, the actors, the
directors, everybody, the lighting, don't forget about the gaffer. Anyway, all these
people put all this effort in, and in this 22, 24 minute episode, I really felt
something genuine from these, you know, characters in this fake show with cheesy
special effects. Tokusatsu's art, guys. I don't know if people will appreciate that
Tokusatsu's art, and it just gets me because I'm not saying Tokusatsu is the only way you can get these sorts of things happening altogether,
where there's an alien, a giant monster, and, you know, silly, not silly, but like kind of funny, battle between, you know,
Windom and Ultra Seven and like the spectacle and the depth and the heart.
I'm not saying you can't have both of those in anything or I'm not saying you can only have that in Tokusatsu.
I'm not saying that. What I am saying is that people just, it's weird to me, it's wild that people don't appreciate how amazing Tokusatsu is.
If you just kind of look past some of the stuff, if you just, I don't know, and that's the effects are bad because they're not.
They're not bad. It's just they're, you know, they are what they are. They're at a certain level and they're executed well at that level.
And like letting that bother you from this beautiful story and these beautiful, like, interactions between these characters and these
beautiful moments is, it's a shame if you can't see the beauty of Tokusatsu or the beauty in the Tokusatsu shows,
then I don't understand and I feel bad for you. So anyway, yeah, like this was just like a really great story.
And the stakes are ridiculously high. This man is literally flying to his death while talking to his mother about how great things
I think have been and are going to be or whatever. Like they're totally ignoring the reality of what's going on and having this conversation.
And I almost feel like they would have just kept talking until he crashed into the plane and this woman lost her son and three hundred
plus innocent lives also were snuffed out because of the machinations of this alien.
And I don't know, that's beautiful that they would just keep talking and pretend like nothing else is going on.
And it was really beautiful that the captain had the presence of mind to do that.
And there was this thing going on about, like, oh, you know, this is personal and, you know, where this is business,
like we work together as a business type of deal, even though they're not, you know, like selling phones or anything like,
you know, this is professional and we're going to be professional here at the office and we're not going to let business like personal stuff mix in with it.
And at the end, the whole team turns out and they tell him like, oh, no, this is personal or this is business.
You can't bring your personal feelings into it. And the captain sends him to Hokkaido to go patrol.
And I believe that he has a conversation with his mother. The way it's presented is kind of weird.
You would think they would have cut to like them having an actual scene together, but it was her like special effects
composited into the scene, talking to him in like a little window, like he was remembering their conversation.
So anyway, regardless, that doesn't matter. Like that technical aspect doesn't matter.
But what doesn't matter is that like this group of strangers and show or this group that has,
you know, their own dynamics and everything that they've been through together over the course of 23 episodes now has like an established way to behave with each other.
And I was able to absorb that through this one episode, through a couple of key scenes.
And just it was amazingly powerful. It was a beautiful episode. That's that's all I have to say about it.
So and I think I've said that maybe six times now. So let's let's go ahead and end the episode.
But I do want you to take the time to go on Tubi or wherever else you're going to look for it, Pluto, whatever,
Shell Factory and watch this episode and tell me what you think about it and tell me don't you think about it?
I want to know good, bad or different.
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Until next time, be well. This is MJ signing out.
This has been a story over everything production.