There’s no shortage of the fantastical on TV and streaming services these days. Star Trek: Picard has fleets of massive starships doing battle, while the Marvel movies dominate the pop cultural landscape. But spectacle without joy is a hollow affair, just a bloated tech demo. Ultraman Zis the perfect union of spectacle, joy, and vision. Ultraman Z is the latest in the long lineage of giant protectors from space, born from Tsuburaya Productions, since the 1960s. Ultraman has delighted audiences for decades, and with so many TV shows, movies, cartoons, and Scatman parody singles, it can be challenging to imagine the show still feeling fresh in 2020. The story, at a glance, is indeed boilerplate. Ultraman Z, a hot blooded rookie of the Galactic Defense Force, lends assistance to Haruki (Koshu Hirano), a hot blooded rookie to the Earth organization STORAGE, which protects Japan from giant monsters
YasushiNirasawa (1963 - 2016) was one of the greats of the garage kit and tokusatsu world. In this video we're taking a look at his earliest published collections of art and sculptures: Fantastic Creature World and Creature Core.
The ninja represents a sort of ideal in video gaming. From the first moments Ryu Hayabusa nimbly leapt off the walls in Ninja Gaiden, games have been trying to encapsulate the speed, agility, and lethality of ninja. Ghostrunner, from developer One More Level, aims to capture that speed and fluidity while dropping the player into a grungy cyberpunk world.
In 2016, Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno created a terrifying new vision of a classic movie monster withShin Godzilla. It was belched forth from the ocean and slithered across the usually sleepy neighborhood of Kamata, knocking cars aside effortlessly, and grew to spew lasers across Ginza.
A creature with five faces belches flame from the top of a skyscraper. A young girl finds out she’s descended from an Egyptian goddess that fought demons. A superhero does battle against someone making counterfeit merchandise of them! The spectacular world of Toei’s tokusatsu TV shows have only existed on the periphery of mainstream US access for decades.
Where do you go if you want classic horror manga, toys going as far back as the 1950s, 1970s idol photo albums, and some doujinshi that was just published the other day? Mandarake!
