Henshin Inspection presents Going Ultra.
This is MJ.
I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer.
You can find all my work at MJMunoz.com.
Join me as I talk about Ultraman Blazar Episode 12.
Let's go Blazar!
So I like this episode a lot.
I'm just going to go through my notes real quick and the first thing I have is Railgun
Godzilla.
I wonder how much fun the people who designed EarthGaron had with the design and what they
were thinking what their ambitions were.
As I've said previously, I think it makes a great toy.
Those action figure commercials make it look amazing and I'm sure if I was a kid I would
really want an EarthGaron for myself.
And I think it's great.
Good job.
Good job making him.
Seeing him with the modified Mega Shot, I think is what it was called, was amazing.
Honestly I thought those M2 or whatever they were called on his back, on his shoulders
were the Mega Shot but I guess they're really really big so they weren't the Mega Shot.
This was the Mega Shot and I just thought there's a dinosaur robot, like a Godzilla
robot with a Railgun in this show and it's amazing and I love it and I can't believe
that they did this.
It's incredible.
Such an incredible visual.
Speaking of weapons, I like the Tilsonite Rod being used as a weapon by the DGF and
I like even more that somehow, and I had to look it up online to see what exactly is going
on here.
This doesn't quite make sense to me.
I don't remember how it came about exactly but basically Gento asked Blazar to help him
out a little bit and then in the midst of the fight this, it's a Garamon coin or stone
is formed and inserting that into the brace somehow makes it so the Tilsonite Rod which
comes from the Garamon is able to transform it into a sword which is a weapon with these
torietic aspects where it's got this thing you can pull on it and it can absorb energy
which isn't a trait of Garamon as far as I know.
Maybe it's a trait of Tilsonite, I'm not sure but it sure looked cool and it had a really
nice finish to it and some of it looked like the blue in Blazar.
So I'm trying to figure out what's this guy's power set and what does he do because he also
absorbed the Rainbow Serpent, he absorbed its power somehow and I guess now he's got
a Nijigagichi stone that he also uses so when he wants to use that power I guess he uses
that.
I don't know, I'm a little confused as to what's going on here but the sword looks freaking
cool and I like that it absorbed lightning and I like that he rode the lightning with
it and I almost feel like they repurposed his rising to have him coming down and it
almost looks like they just cut it and flipped it and then composited it back into the shot
to have him riding down the lightning to slice this particular Kaiju in half and that was
a cool finisher.
That was a cool finisher, it's a cool sword, it looks really good.
I think I prefer weapons to modes for Ultramen because modes are a weakness I think with
the Ultras.
Alright so switching gears a little bit here, Haruno mentioned a second wave which implies
a first wave and a possible third wave.
Who's giving him this intel?
When did the first wave happen?
Was that three years ago?
They've stopped the second wave now.
Is it waves of Kaiju coming from space?
We don't know what kind of Kaiju it was that attacked during the first incident three years
ago with Blazar.
We can presume it could have been one of those, a space Kaiju and maybe that's why space Kaiju
are given a distinction from Earth Kaiju I guess you would call them or Terrestrial Kaiju.
Anyway so that's kind of interesting.
I think that's definitely going to play into the end game of the show or at least something
going on in a few more episodes.
Hopefully it's part of the bigger overarching plot but we'll see.
I know the timeline doesn't really matter but I'm a little confused as to the fact that
it took apparently three years between the first incident of Blazar partnering with,
pairing with Gentel and the second one and that just seems kind of weird and I find that
to be interesting.
I wonder what's up with that although it looks like Ultraman Arc.
It took 16 years and that's also interesting although being that things started when Yuma
was a kid I can understand it taking a longer time but then again why couldn't Ultraman
be a kid?
There's actually an interesting anime that I've only watched part of.
The name of the show I was thinking of is Figure 17 and it's by Bandai Visual so there
we go that answers that conundrum.
So yeah I want to talk about in earnest the confusion that I had from episode 10 and how
it's resolved here because it is resolved here.
It's been celebrated into excitement for me and clarity as Gentel has learned that all
of Blazar's extreme violence is in the pursuit of making sure that Gentel goes back home
basically.
There must be some sort of sharing the memories between them that's not expounded upon but
Gentel is seeing Blazar's memories so it stands to reason that Blazar sees Gentel's memories
as well and that's pretty interesting.
And when Gentel has held him back he held him back against killing the baby Kaiju and
the mama Kaiju.
We still don't know what happened to them though so that's kind of interesting but basically
Blazar seems to want to come out of the gate swinging as hard as he can so he can kill
whatever Kaiju they're fighting to protect Gentel and also to protect himself because
of their partnership that's practically tied together so there's a little bit of self-serving
aspect there and if you think about it or however if you think about it them serving
the interest of saving themselves is also protecting the lives of a lot of innocent
people.
So there's a Kaiju and you go 50% against it and because of that weak showing the Kaiju
is allowed to live for longer and it wreaks all this havoc and destruction and mayhem
and millions of people are hurt but if you went hard right at the gate you would kill
the Kaiju eliminating the threat immediately and stopping it from hurting people.
Is there a good reason the Kaiju was attacking?
Is there some sort of mitigating factor?
Is it sad that you're killing the Kaiju parent of a Kaiju child?
All these different questions when they're putting the balance against the lives the
innocent lives that would be lost I can see the argument for saying no we're going to
go hard and we're going to kill this Kaiju that's causing a problem right here right
now in front of us because that's the best option that's going to make the best outcome
for the most people that Kaiju will die it's Kaiju baby or family or whatever will be sad
but millions of human lives will be saved millions of animal lives will be saved you
know flora and fauna will be destroyed different things like that.
Wasn't there a Kaiju that like cooked a mountain?
Think about how many animals died in that instance you know the size of the animal doesn't
affect the worthiness of its life so that's that's kind of interesting that's kind of
interesting.
Yeah so I hope you're ready for a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers tangent because I'm going to
go on one right now because it making these notes it made me think about something from
Power Rangers and I got to talk about it so I'm going to try to bring in Ark and Rising
as well a little bit here we'll see how well I do that.
So here goes.
All right so in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in I think the first episode maybe it's the
second probably the first we get to hear the Zorda Undoction of course that's not what
it's called in the show that's what I'm calling it here which is that you shall never escalate
you know the fighting so always let the enemy pull ahead of you and then transform so fight
un-morphed until fight the putties un-morphed I guess if there's a hundred putties you can
morph and then fight them if a general or whatever if an next level you know higher
ranking monster shows up then you transform to fight that guy you destroy him even if
he's difficult with your tactics and your teamwork and then only after he grows giant
you pull out the Megazord and kill him as opposed to you know putty show up you transform
right away kill him you're calling the Zord by the time the general or whatever shows
up you squash him with the Megazord as he's coming up you squash him again which yeah
I know that would ruin it that would make it so there wasn't a show Super Sentai doesn't
talk about that recently kids been watching Wild Force in the house and I've been paying
attention to that and it always comes as a shock that Toxica and the other guy are going
ahead and making the monsters grow giant and they're doing a second round battle and then
they call down the Zords right that's always kind of a surprise to the Rangers and there's
no Princess Shayla doesn't tell them like make sure you use the absolute minimal amount
of force or anything like that so it's just a very different philosophy and I almost wonder
if that Zordon doctrine was something stated to justify what was going on in the Sentai
footage Byram's Jetman which Pandora I don't know what her deal was I haven't watched you
Ranger and I watched Zyuranger but I haven't watched Zyuranger anyway so I couldn't tell
you what happened there and the way the mechanism that is built into that show for those monsters
to come back have the second round grow giant and do whatever they do and then have the
need for the mech arise or the need for the mech to rise but that's kind of interesting
so like Blazar explicitly the ultra Blazar is taking a totally different approach and
he's saying no we're going to go as hard as we can as fast we can we're going to kill
them as quickly as we can to eliminate further casualties only further damage we're going
to we're mitigating by killing as quickly as we can Ultraman Rising is unclear there
is not enough evidence there's not enough data for us to use to fully understand what
is going on Hayao talks about the need for balance I don't know what that means I hope
they know what that means and I hope it's not just something that sounds good in our
modern world but yeah I don't know what that mean for that need for balance means they
return Emi and Gigantron to Kaiju Island presumably he's been sending Kaiju back to Kaiju Island
as much as he could throughout history or his history I think 30 year history as Ultraman
and I don't know it's really interesting because we don't quite know what happened and we don't
know what the point of it is and we don't understand how Kaiju work in Ultraman Rising
in that world so it's hard to say I frankly don't quite understand how Ultraman or how
Kaiju work in any of these Ultra Series because it's always rather vague and they don't really
get into the nitty-gritty of it and yeah they're giant monsters that need to be killed but
you know you shouldn't be happy about it I guess which I'm not saying Blazer is happy
about it he's just an enthusiastic killer of Kaiju even if he doesn't like having to
do it but when he decides he has to do it he does it with all his might and main with
all his them and vigor and that's just how he rolls so that's interesting so I would
argue that I think it's easy to argue that the Zordon Doctrine causes more harm the Blazer
Doctrine mitigates harm Ark also seems to be like a very efficient destroyer of Kaiju
like he didn't try to save the rat Yuma recognizes Kaiju as like living beings and the first
one the Shaogon Don or whatever it was called like they seem to exist peacefully eating
rocks and that's it so like obviously you wouldn't want to kill those but like these
Kaiju they're growing giant they're a problem and he seems content for now to just kill
them it'll be interesting to see whether or not there's a questioning of killing Kaiju
episode in Ark as there was in Blazar sort of and as there was in Zet because I find
that interesting but a very interesting topic and I just boggles my mind that Ultraman hasn't
like more firmly dealt with that and made a decision about it because they seem to be
kind of of two minds about it the creators and here's the thing it's not one creator
Ultraman is many creators many creative teams giving their different input over time but
if you look at like Taguchi shows to see where he kind of falls out on that maybe you can
kind of see a thesis forming I'm not 100% sure so that's interesting to think about
and let's see the brutality of Blazar versus the clear stakes of Ark oh yeah such as Blazar
is brutal from go to stop to mitigate harm and Ark Yuma knows what's at stake so I think
he's content to kill a Kaiju in order to save those lives and I don't know what more else
I have to say about this episode I want to remind you to check out my writing projects
linked in the show notes will be a story for Ava and the Grow Bug which features a little
girl saving her parents after overcoming her fear she turns into a giant of light and rescues
them and then everything's peaceful and wonderful and there will be more stories like that with
these magical bugs battling monsters and I have a whole middle grade book that is about
23,000 words long to compare to another Tokusatsu person who turned to writing it's about it's
short a little shorter than the length of Skull Charlson's Terror Valley series those
books are I think he said they're around 25,000 words each so that's pretty cool and mine
is a little bit shorter just like 2,000 words shorter I think is what this first Grow Bug
book is and anyway yeah I'm excited about this book it's got Tokusatsu things in there
and if you're a Tokusatsu fan I think you'll enjoy it for sure and I'll be posting about
it as I get closer to the final production of it the final release in the actual publishing
of the book because I'm working on some things in the background to get it all finished and
ship shaped and ready to go also I'm continuing to cover Ultraman Ark and if things go well
after I'm done with Blazar I will jump over to covering Digimon stuff on a different channel
and I'll update links to that because I like Digimon so much and the more I see of like
the Japanese side of Digimon there's a lot of Ultraman stuff in there and I feel like
it's the people making the Digimon Adventure show at least were fans of Ultraman and they
took a lot of visual references from that and I'll share that kind of stuff later and
that's about it although I do have coming up a short that's going to talk about a effect
method that's used in both Ultraman Blazar episode 11 actually and Guyver 2 Dark Hero
which is pretty cool and I really like Guyver if you can't tell and I'll talk about I'll
talk about Ultraman Guyver in another short sometime and maybe I might even do a short
and a long and talk about it a bunch but anyway I gotta go I'm out of time and that's it until
next time folks take care be well be Ultra.