I haven't watched the movie in a long time. Almost a decade now, I think. I adore the series - it's one of my all-time favourites - but I'm not overly fond of the movie, especially as it doesn't tie up any of the loose ends from the series, creates a bunch of new ones by jumping forward in time a few years and is a bit of a downer to boot. I don't hate the film, but I did find it rather disappointing compared to the series. Plus Yurika's hardly in it. That's the biggest strike against the flick in my book.
Regarding Ideon being OOP, someone over at the Fandom Post forum reached out to Sentai on Twitter about the situation with Ideon, Votoms and Patlabor and they mentioned they were actually just out of stock right now. You can see the thread I'm not sure what's up with Discotek's releases though. I've noticed a fair few of 'em are getting harder to find now. I'm glad I picked up Baldios when I did.
Anyway, I just started SSSS Gridman now. Thinking back, it was interesting seeing the various reactions from folks during the show's run. Plenty of kaiju and tokusatsu fans loved it, (and I certainly count myself among them) but a good chunk of anime fans seemed to be split into three groups: Some simply dismissed it as just another robot show and left it at that; some would fixate on the fanservice, and quite a few folks took note of the various references, the scene compositions in some episodes or the way the series manages to recreate the look and feel of tokusatsu through a mixture of 2D and CG animation. I saw plenty of cool comparison videos showing all the references to not only the original Gridman or Ultra series, but many super robot shows as well. Loved how Gridman and his support units had this '80s/'90s look to them, like something from the Brave series. I'm not too crazy about CG in anime most of the time, but I was genuinely impressed with it here. The monsters looked great as well.
I shouldn't be at all surprised, but I couldn't help being bemused how some fans saw SSSS Gridman as an anomaly - sort of a "whoah! you got tokusatsu in my anime!" reaction - and not some kind of throwback to the old shows that had plenty of kaiju or toku influences. Like the myriad of '70s, 80s and '90s super robot series, Gatchaman, Hurricane Polymar, The Guyver, Giant Robo, The Big O to name a few. Or even Evangelion for that matter.
I'll grant you not everyone would be aware of the older stuff, but having watched so many shows and noticed how the two mediums have often influenced each other over the years, I can't help rolling my eyes when people act like anime and tokusatsu are both mutually exclusive. Oh well, I'm having a blast revisiting Gridman anyway.