NEO ULTRA Q IN 2013! D8

[ultrasanto]

[Silver Kamen]

I really liked Neo Ultra Q, so glad I have the Blu-ray Box. When it was announced though, I was a little surprised. Hopefully we will see some more Q in the future.

[kiryugoji04]

I still need to watch the final three episodes. Unlike Ginga, which is so painful I can't bear to continue, Neo Ultra Q is something so good that I haven't finished it because I am in denial that it's over. So long as I don't finish it, it will never end! D:

[Silver Kamen]

[Kailem]

Might as well bump an existing thread for this; even if half the messages are no longer visible and the last post before this was over a decade ago!

I've only read the first couple of pages to avoid spoilers (what's still possible to read, anyway), but I'll check back through the rest of the thread once I've finished watching the whole thing. I made a start on it last night with the first three episodes, and I had to stop myself there because I was worried that, with only twelve episodes total, I'd end up having none left if I didn't start pacing myself!

I was hoping/expecting that we'd basically get either the straight-up original title sequence or an updated version, so it started off immediately getting a big smile out of me. I really love that theme and weird but simple title screen, it's so good. Likewise I love that it's using the same style of narration, and especially some of the same creepy incidental music that the original show used. It's all so good. And I also like that they're going with the same sort of "three friends plus the occasional scientific advisor" set-up as the original show too.

So yeah, even this early on, I can see why you guys were saying this show is fantastic! Quo Vadis was kind of a lot to take in at first. "Ok, which of these are the main cast and who are the guest characters? Oh, you mean ogre *literally* and not a metaphor for something?" etc. But I quickly found my footing and really liked that they were just jumping right in to this being a weird world where monsters and unexplained happenings are seemingly commonplace. And starting off with a monster, even if not a giant one, was a great start.

I'm sure I remember reading somewhere that one of the original ideas for Ultra Q was that it would be set in a bar called "Unbalance", back when that was the working title for the show, but obviously that ended up being changed, so I liked that they seemingly resurrected that idea here (I am right in that, aren't I? I'm sure I went back to try and find that little detail in the Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters book after I watched Ultra Q last year and couldn't find it).

And then holy crap, Laundry Day! That episode was amazing! I loved the Garamon/Pigmon-inspired Mr Brethren (which is also just an awesome name in and of itself). It was so fun just watching him go around, doing his job super well and everyone being happy with him. Frankly I'd have been fine with the episode having no drama at all and just being that, but man, that got pretty dark real fast. But then just as quickly, it ended on the most hysterical note I've seen in a TV show in a long, long time! I was laughing so much at the absolute absurdity of it! Amazing stuff!

Finally The Businessman Who Came From the Sky also kept that quality bar held high. It was another great, weird concept handled with both some great dramatic seriousness and also some great moments of humour. That brief pan to the Diet building when the characters were running around placing those receptors for capturing negative energy got a good laugh out of me, and the fact that it was a "blink and you'll miss it" moment made me appreciate it even more. I really liked the ending too for multiple reasons, and one of the lines they ended it on was just excellent.

So yeah, Neo Ultra Q is definitely off to a really strong start! I'm both simultaneously wanting to watch more immediately and also wanting to hold off for another night or two just to make the whole thing last a bit longer!

[Benjamin Haines]

^ You can read the invisible posts by clicking the quote buttons!

I don't remember anything about Ultra Q originally being planned to take place in a bar called Unbalance when that was the working title.

Ogre is an unusual translation of the word kaiju but apparently it's deliberate, as it's featured in the show itself rather than just the subtitles. With this series being so unfortunately short, it's great that it just jumps right into the weirdness from the outset.

[lhb412]

I didn't really know anything about Neo Ultra Q before I bought Mill Creek's blu-ray. I think I had some preconceived notion it wasn't especially well-liked?

Totally blindsided by how much I loved it. Fantastic update of the concept. Love that this is a world where the paranormal occurs and is widely believed, but it's rare enough that people are still surprised when it happens to them. I'm not sure I've seen anyone strike just that balance before; such a slam dunk of worldbuillding and leaving things open for just about any direction you want to take it.

[Kailem]

[quote="Benjamin Haines"]^ You can read the invisible posts by clicking the quote buttons![/quote]

Dios mio! The past is not lost after all! I'm gonna have to start doing that a lot now!

[quote="Benjamin Haines"]I don't remember anything about Ultra Q originally being planned to take place in a bar called Unbalance when that was the working title.[/quote]

When I was first watching through Ultra Q I was thinking I'd read about it in Master of Monsters, but when I re-read the Ultra Q and Ultraman sections after seeing those I couldn't find it in there. I must have read it somewhere online because there's nowhere else it could have been, but even looking around trying to find it now I still can't find it (at least with the word "bar" in my searches).

Maybe I'd briefly read something about this show and got it mixed up in my mind.

[quote="Benjamin Haines"]Ogre is an unusual translation of the word kaiju but apparently it's deliberate, as it's featured in the show itself rather than just the subtitles. With this series being so unfortunately short, it's great that it just jumps right into the weirdness from the outset.[/quote]

Yeah it's a bit odd, considering sometimes you can clearly hear people saying "kaiju". But as part of a world where monsters of all shapes and sizes aren't uncommon, I guess it fits that they'd come up with a more specific name for them.

I'm most of the way through now with only three episodes left to go, and yep, it's still great. They definitely seem to prefer open/ambiguous endings even more than the original show did, to the point where I'm now expecting most stories to go unresolved in some way. But just like those episodes of the original Ultra Q, it's never annoying, and often with the subject matter it's almost better that things aren't ended on a more clear-cut note (like the one with the Epignoids).

I've also been a little surprised that there really haven't been any actually *malicious* monsters yet. The odd alien or two sure, but every creature so far has either been a straight-up harmless good guy or just misunderstood in some way. So I'm hoping we get at least one "bad guy" monster before the end, even if it's a pretty timeless message that us hoomans are usually just the worst.

The Tokyo Protocol was the last episode I watched, and that was really good. It reminded me of a couple of the original Ultra Q episodes, one of which I won't specify on the off-chance anyone ever reads this who *hasn't* seen Neo yet. But man, that one came out 11 years ago before global warming *really* got bad! The creatures in that one very much felt like old school Ultra Q creatures, just weird and non-humanoid.

One of my biggest gripes so far though isn't to do with the show itself, but the subtitles. There have occasionally been instances of subtitles being misspelled in the previous Mill Creek Ultra Q & Ultraman Blu-rays I've watched, but they're usually pretty rare and very far between. Here though it feels like there's often something that seems grammatically incorrect or at odds with the context of the story almost every episode. Not to mention in The Tokyo Protocol and Memories are Crossing the Planet, the subtitles are frequently displayed *over other subtitles*, making them really difficult to read.

But hey, I guess I can just take it as a callback to watching the original Ultra Q when I often had to rewind to catch subtitles that didn't stand out well enough against white backgrounds.

[Benjamin Haines]

Mill Creek reportedly just uses English subtitles provided to them by Tsuburaya Productions for all of their releases, rather than translating anything themselves or commissioning a third-party service to do it.

For several of their earliest releases, Ultra Q and Ultraman especially, the word kaiju is translated as monster in the subtitles and there are many instances in which it's misspelled as "mosnter". There are also several such examples in which the subtitles are italicized but the word monster (or "mosnter") isn't italicized, suggesting that the subtitles originally spelled out the word kaiju and then got changed to monster, whether at TPC's insistence or at Mill Creek's discretion. The fact that some of them are misspelled suggests that the person altering the subtitles didn't use a find-and-replace function to change each instance of the word kaiju to monster, but instead hastily typed them one by one and misspelled many of them in the process.

The subtitles on Ultraman Taro actually spell out the word kaiju, and it's italicized every time.

[Kailem]

Yeah I remember noticing the "mosnter" misspelling a few times in those earlier Ultra releases. And there was one time where some sort of plant or meteor or something kept switching names every time someone said it, though I can't recall which episode of what show that was. Here though it just felt like there was a lot of instances of sentences being grammatically incorrect, or *technically* correct but written in a way that you wouldn't ever actually speak out loud or write. It felt like maybe the subtitles on those earlier Ultra releases were done by a westerner who spoke Japanese, whereas for this they were done by a Japanese person who spoke English, and so it resulted in some of the subs coming off a bit stilted and odd in places. It wasn't a deal-breaker, but it did cause me to often pause and rewind more often than I would have liked because I kept thinking "wait, did I read that right?"

Anyway I finished the last three episodes and yet, the shows streak of excellence continued unbroken all the way to the end! Falmagan and Michiru continued the trend of pretty much only ever having monsters that were sympathetic, and even though you could see the ending coming a mile off it still got me teary-eyed. Argos Democracy was a great little genre mash-up where you think maybe the episode is going to be about one thing but then suddenly it takes a massive swerve into total sci-fi territory that I really liked. Alas that tease at the end looks like it went unfulfilled, as I kinda figured it would. And then the last episode, Hominis Dignitati, was also really good. Though I was left a little confused by the ending.

So yeah, overall this was indeed a fantastic show! I must admit I was a *little* surprised they didn't have as many giant monsters as I expected, given how prevalent they were in Ultra Q. But I figure that's probably because at the time Ultra Q first aired there was nothing like it on Japanese television, and part of its appeal was that it brought that classic Toho-style giant monster action to home screens, which was something you could only otherwise get at the cinema. Now though Tsuburaya has been making Ultraman shows for decades, not to mention all the other similar shows like Zone Fighter, Redman etc. that have been on over the years. So "sci-fi shows featuring giant monsters" are no longer quite as unique in that respect as they were back when the original Ultra Q aired, and as such they probably wanted to lean a bit more into the non-giant monster stuff that Ultra Q did in order to differentiate it a bit more from stuff like Ultraman that's still coming out. So in that way it's understandable (and of course they did still have several eps featuring creatures).

It's a shame Dark Fantasy isn't available as part of this whole Mill Creek deal too, because if that's even half as good as Neo is, then the Ultra Q legacy really will have retained an extremely high level of quality over the years.