Shiny Plastic Disk: Ultraman

Some time last year, I had heard that Mill Creek Entertainment was releasing a complete collection of Ultraman episodes on DVD. Now... this gets complicated, because it was apparently a repackaged version of another Ultraman set that they'd put out a few years earlier. I couldn't care less really, because I just want Ultraman on something other than VHS, and I'm not all that picky about how I get it. Considering that I haven't seen more than one or two complete episodes since the '70s, I'd be ready to give anything a try.



And then I wander through Target the other day, and find "series one - volume one" on the shelf. It has the first twenty of thirty-nine episodes on two disks, and the weird thing is, this seems to be a reissue of that earlier version. But again, I don't care, because it's only five dollars, and it means that I'll soon be watching a show that I practically worshiped as a kid.



The best thing about this set, aside from the fact that it gives me a chance to share a part of my childhood with my son, is that I can now finally watch these episodes in the original Japanese with English subtitles.





The overall quality is decent, and though it's pretty obvious that they didn't always have the best source material to work with, I can't help but be genuinely thrilled. I love that I can choose to watch the weird American dubbed versions, or I can switch over to a subtitled version that makes about a million times more sense.





And like I said, I haven't seen most of this since the '70s, when I'd crouch in front of an old black and white TV (I may not have seen some of these episodes in color at all), and tune into the San Francisco Bay Area's finest UHF channels.