by ryuuseipro » Sun Dec 02, 2007 11:49 pm
I watched the first episode tonight, and I enjoyed every minute of it! My spoileriffic review below:
It is indeed "Godzilla meets Star Trek & Pokemon," as some people have put it (and this series is, IMHO, a lot like the old Star Trek series, and has more kids' appeal than the dreary ripoffs on TV today!), but this show was a ton of fun! Plenty of fan service for Ultra-Kaijuu fans (and any kaijuu fan in general)! There was one hilarious fanservice moment where Oki was working on a model of a skeleton of Chandrah, and Kumano mistook it for a skeleton of Pegila (confirming that the monsters are similar but different)!
I thought it was cool that they made Gomora a good guy, AND give him a beam weapon to boot! Gomora's one of my favorite Ultra Monsters, especially since I still have the old 15-inch Bandai Gomora and Red King figures in my collection. The monster action was quite brutal without being too bloody! The hero Rei is quite an impressive character, and not the pretty boy most Japanese heroes these days are. He looks like a young Akira Yamaguchi! The ZAP Spacy team isn't half bad, either! I love the conflict between Rei and ZAP Spacy, hinted at in the previews!
The next episode has two Ultra Q monsters, Litra and the Mammoth Flower, fighting each other in CGI!
Overall, I think this series is going to do pretty well! A very cool, exciting and thrilling concept that will certainly make the Ultra Monsters even more marketable. If Godzilla had a TV series (which Toho won't allow), it'd be a lot like this. I feel that kaijuu may yet dominate the airwaves for the first time since the 60s! I'm definitely looking forward to the next episode!
-John Cassidy
Richmond, VA
http://ryuuseipro.livejournal.com/
"The monster a child knows best and is most concerned with [is] the monster he feels or fears himself to be." -Bruno Bettelheim