[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.