Monster Zero x SciFi Japan - Archive Only

I just watched a video that shook me to the core, making my question the very foundations of my beliefs:



I always thought Ultraman was syndicated in America basically from the late '60s through the '70s with TBS showing it and Space Giants in the early '80s and then that was it for the show's US run - but this is from 1991! There's commercials for stuff I remember like the original TMNT cartoon and Garfield fruit snacks and that Brady Bunch spot screams early '90s local channel video effects! Was Ultraman really being syndicated into the '90s or did this Chicago station still have the tapes in the basement from '75 and thought they could run it and no one would notice?

I seem to recall TBS from Atlanta showing the original Ultraman, Space Giants, and Spectreman well into the 1980s...maybe even 1990s. Gatchaman, too. Well, "Battle of the Planets."

It aired when I was a kid in the S.F. bay Area until about 1983 (ish...) Not sure when it started, August Ragone would know for sure since he assisted Bob Wilkins and the children's programming block on KTVU-2 back in the day. I remember the block with Ultraman, Spectreman, and Space Giants. I remember battle of the Planets as well, but I think it was on a different Channel; (I remember Star Blazers was on 36, and 40 from Sacramento) .

My family had WTBS (as it was known back then) when we first got cable in the mid-80's. I don't recall Ultraman on there, but if it was...that would have been awesome, and even makes my previous thought about its amazing Longevity in the "too old for Power Rangers" thread even more amazing.

Still it would be nice to have a definitive answer as to when Ultraman first started airing in syndication in the United States, and where the last place/dates was that it aired.

In spring of 1991 Ultraman towards the Future had a limited Syndicated run in several markets. Where I lived in Sacramento they went though the 13 episode cycle once, and that's it, no reruns. In the Bay Area it lasted a little longer, perhaps 2 years. I know because a couple times my VCR screwed up and I missed all or part of a couple episodes, had to call my uncle in the bay area the next time that episode aired so he could record it for me.

I have vague memories of it airing in the NY area in the early 80's, a red and silver giant that battled giant monsters. I don't think I knew it as "Ultraman" until Towards the Future started airing. (and even then I wondered if he was related to Jet Jaguar)

I thought I'd seen some of the advertising materials ("He's on TV in COLOR") with a date on them, I'll try to dig them up later.

I'm not even really clear on what company distributed Ultraman in the US.

United Artists Television. These were the images I was thinking of, taken from the





Bookmarking that site for now, so I remember to track that book down once I have a little spending money

says United Artists distributed it from 1968-1986, of course we now know stations were airing it as late as 1991.

^ Thanks for the info! Bit of a mystery: maybe some other company inherited the rights for a few years or, as I joked earlier, this Chicago station was actually airing it illegally.

I don't think it was too uncommon for independent stations in the late '80s and early '90s to broadcast films or television shows that were no longer in conventional national syndication. The Cinema Shares Godzillas were even running on WNDY in Indianapolis well into the '90s, even when the station was a WB (and later UPN) affiliate.

So maybe United Artists Television still had the rights but was no longer actively offering it. In that case, perhaps that Chicago station requested it?

You know something? The recording of that commercial break helps explain the English audio tracks that we have available on the "official" DVD releases from BCI/Eclipse and later Mill Creek. Back then I had figured that all the gaps in the English audio were from poor bootleg sources provided by Chaiyo, because they didn't have access to the complete English audio tracks available at Tsuburaya. Remember, it's been documented that all of the dialogue scenes were in fact dubbed into English, and the only edits made during the show's original runs on American syndication during the late '60s and '70s were scenes of excessive violence by US TV standards of the time.

I also once had older bootleg DVDs of the show that confirm this. They had much more "complete" English audio likely pulled from old 16mm film copies, and they were synchronized with video file rips from Tsuburaya's Japanese DVDs. The break in footage and audio in that commercial matches the gap in English audio on the Gabora episode on the Mill Creek DVDs (there was additional footage and narration in the episode prologue before the show picks up after the commercial).

My educated guess is that during the show's earlier syndication runs, viewers did have all the dialogue scenes intact and dubbed, but as the years progressed and commercial run times grew larger, small bits of footage had to be trimmed in order to fit in more commercial time. This perhaps resulted in Ultraman's English audio that we have now with all of its holes.

^Makes sense.