Friday, September 20, 2013

Ultra Seven: The Complete Series



Unique Series in the Ultraman Franchise
I was amazed to get Amazon's notification of the Ultraseven series coming to DVD. From my youth, I knew of Ultraman and only Ultraman. It would be years into adulthood before I knew there were any other series like this, much less finding out Ultraman was ALSO a sequel of its own from "Ultra Q" (aside from Johnny Sokko and the various Godzilla adventures that were shown endlessly in US syndication). It was my understanding that the original Ultraman series became too expensive to produce, thus it was only in production for one year. Evidently, with series still in production as of the date of this review, that may not have been the case.

I first became aware of "Ultra Seven" when it showed up in weekday morning syndication on the US TNT network mid-90's. They would run two half-hour episodes, which were HEAVILY edited and almost comedic in their English translations (dubbed in the mid-80's by Canadian outfit CINAR). Visually, the series looked a lot like the original...

Seven - Seven - Seven - Seven !!!
Unless you grew up in Hawaii, in the ‘70s, you probably discovered Ultra 7 in the ‘90s on TNT like I did. By the time I saw this particular production I was already in my late 20s, which was perfect due to the comedic treatment that the production team chose for this version of the show.

This DVD set is more pure in treatment to the original production. It is spoken in the original Japanese with English subtitles.

Sometimes, the subtitles are a bit inaccurate and the audio fades out in several occasions. However, this is not really that big of a deal unless you can actually follow the Japanese audio.

Ultra 7 is one of the most popular series of the “Ultraman” shows. In the US, we only ever had the first Ultraman series aside from the Hawaiian version of Ultra 7 that was cited above.

Ultra 7 was the last of the ‘60s productions; for this reason, it still has cool atmosphere, music, sound effects, cars,...

Sensitive Nerds be dammed!
Please ignore the one star reviews, these guys are obsessive geeks who will never be happy with anything. I'll even address their complaints in my own non-review

Its not Tsuburaya releasing it: They had NO interest in releasing their shows in the US(at least at an affordable price), so if they had to lose a lawsuit for me to finally get some subtitled releases SO BE IT!

There is a missing episode: it was banned in Japan so it was not included in the masters. This ep was shown dubbed on TNT so you can buy a bootleg if you want to see that one ep.

Its not dubbed: Boo effing hoo.

Shout has done a great job with the treatment of other TV shows and I suggest that fans support this release. I started watching the fan subbed versions of this show and its really good, not a silly or lighthearted as the original could get, but a very cool show.

I'll update this with a real review when it comes out, till then I just wanted to counter the...

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