Out of curiosity, have you watched UNFIX on YT?ray243 wrote:The more episodes you have, the more you can spend time developing the character arcs of your secondary characters, do a bit more world-building and give us more of the "filler" episodes where you don't have a new power-up to introduce. Older Ultraman episodes are often self-contained stories that act more like mini-movies than episodes of a serialised story.Saturndusk wrote:Overall I agree but I think it hampers the opportunity to focus on those themes when they’re focused on hitting on only the essential notes.UltramanGoji wrote:Smaller episode count has nothing to do with writing a more nuanced or adult-themed show.
But ultimately it's about how you structure the series, and how much attention you pay to making the monster threat feels real and scary to humanity. Having giant superheroes fight giant monster in a city is fine, but if you are not able to sell the idea that there are people living in the city and trying to flee the monsters, the whole set-up is pointless. It's partly why I really dislike having Ultraman fighting monsters in a abandoned part of the city with not even any attack team around. Where is the risk and danger of people getting injured if Ultraman is not around to stop the monster? Where is the threat of the Monster actually being scary beings that people want to escape from?
It's why having a defence team opens up so much room for more mature storytelling. It's not about having a team with cool weapons, but having a team to investigate supernatural stuff. You can explore one-off filler stories about the team investigating something odd that is going on in the world, but also use that as a platform to offer commentary on society itself.
The older Ultraman series feels very much like episodes of Doctor Who as a result. You have one-off episodes exploring various aspects of human or alien society that offers commentary on technology and society. The only difference is instead of having the Doctor thinking about solutions to defeat the monster, you simply have the monsters become giant size and requires an Ultraman to fight the monster.
It leans more towards the grim-dark side, but it is a stellar example on how to do an intimate, more character interplay-heavy Ultraman series - that doesn’t even have any major tokusatsu scenes in it.
Pull a hijacked by Ganon or Magneto as the trope goes.
