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Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Hasn't Ultraman Been Given The Hollywood Treatment?
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Vaisaga
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When are we gonna get a Super Human Samurai Cyber Squad reboot instead?
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Hoppy800
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Oh great another legal snarl on the level of Macross and Candy Candy (well at least the latter case had a silver lining but only for Latin America).
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PurpleWarrior13
 Posts: 2034 |
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I doubt any Hollywood studio would be interested. The only person I know in real life that grew up with Ultraman was my Chemistry teacher. And she's from the Philippines!
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belvadeer
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Sweet merciful mango muffins, I had no idea the situation with the rights to Ultraman was anything like this.
Last edited by belvadeer on Mon Aug 01, 2016 5:37 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Videogamep
 Posts: 564 Location: CA |
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I didn't think it was possible, but this might actually be an even bigger mess than the Macross situation.
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Levitz9
 Posts: 1022 Location: Puerto Rico |
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Whoa! Never did I dream that Ultraman was stuck in a Robotech-styled legal snarl!
I had always wondered what had happened with Ultraman Tiga on the FoxBox; sounds perfectly fair that it simply got cancelled. The Fox Box was just getting started, I'd imagine that 4Kids had simply scrambled for whatever licenses were cheapest at the time. When it comes to adaptation of toku shows on TV, it's Power Rangers or bust; even the fairly solid Kamen Rider Dragon Knight didn't seem to do much. Really insightful stuff, Justin. Thanks for answering my question. This was really educational. 
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4158 |
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I didn't know it was the age of Nostalgia, I thought it was the Age of Slapping New Paint on Old Ideas- kind of like how Tsuburaya derived Utraman from Kaiju films in the first place. You may as well just make a Power Rangers movie... with Bryan Cranston... or Godzilla... with Bryan Cra...
Ok, theoretically, it could be done if you sign Bryan Cranston. Buuuut, why get Ultraman for a mint when you can get Toho's Tsuburaya clone Jet Jaguar for cheap whose grinning Joker face, thanks to reasons I don't want to explain, has more of a presence here. Plus, all you have to do to please fans is make a better movie than Godzilla Versus Megalon. Why not do either of them? Because there's a world of difference between controlling a giant robot to fight giant monsters to having a robot, human or alien grow to fight giant monsters. What do you call it "suspension of disbelief"? OK, maybe the Antman and the Wasp movie could help pave the way for "sizable" heroes. Depends on what they do because that was the character in the comcs who made it possible for people to get into a fist fight with Godzilla. "I'm not Ultraman, I'm Justaman! Err, just a man.." Ideas are weird, aren't they? |
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GATSU
Posts: 15563 |
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Even if the rights dispute was settled, they tried putting out an Australian remake of Ultraman in the early 90's, and no one cared. Plus, that South Park Barbra Streisand parody probably hurt its chances of being taken seriously.
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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And legal issues aside, the reason there's not as much "nostalgia" for Ultraman--apart from the fact that only the original Ultraman was shown in the "iconic" 60's-Toho days in the US, while most of the others were a bit obscure--is...he's a bit silly.
It took a lot of struggling (and one goofily dismissive '98 icon-pimping movie) for Godzilla got to travel from Toho to Hollywood, and conquer the pop-kitsch "Big guy in a suit stomping train sets" image we remembered from bad 60's dubs, how effective would it be to feature a hero who visibly IS a big guy in a suit wrestling another big guy in a soundstage city? And then we have to deal with the villains, who are already so decade-iconic in Japan: When even the Power Rangers' similarly sentai-era Rita Repulsa had to be turned into a Mortal Kombat character to look "cool" for her US-nostalgia movie, okay, go ahead and update Baltan for a modern US audience. Do it. We dare you.
Well, Speed Racer would be the "For better" nostalgia: 90's studios wanted to get in on "This anime thing", and only knew of Speed Racer, Astro Boy and Kimba from their old-fogey childhoods, but heard this "Dragon Ball", "Death Note" and "Ghost in the Shell" things had caught on with the hip young kids... While Voltron would be the "For worse": Dreamworks has an exclusive deal to pester Netflix with all their struggling attempts to exploit their property into original series, and happened to own the old Voltron through their ownership of Classic Media. The first thing to answer any question about "Why don't they make (yy) just like they made (xx)?" is to disabuse one's self of the wishful idea that producers made (xx) because audiences wanted them to. |
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epicwizard
Posts: 420 Location: Ashburn, VA |
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Never knew that the Ultraman franchise is stuck in a big legal mess.
That's very interesting! 
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Paiprince
 Posts: 593 |
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I feel like these incidents are like custody battles over two separated parents. Imagine a kid Ultraman being pulled from both arms.
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6294 |
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Not simply a mess a hot mess. Of course everyone had to mention the bitter ongoing dogfight with Macross's rights.
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unready
 Posts: 409 Location: Illinois, USA |
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I've seen posts in forums by people complaining about those DVDs. Now I understand why. Just to expand a little on what Justin said, because it wasn't obvious to me reading it the first time: the episodes were completely dubbed, but sometimes, when they were re-broadcast, they would be cut to insert more commercials. The Thai company has only a copy of the cut versions, so the re-inserted parts have to be sub-only. The complaints about the DVDs are mostly about how the audio switches back and forth between English and Japanese and about how the subtitles don't come on automatically when the audio switches to Japanese. Parents trying to share their memories with their kids are displeased with the chopped-up audio. The kids are displeased with having to read subtitles. Nobody is happy. |
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Guile
Posts: 595 |
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Toku has a stronger history in other parts of the world versus America. One of the main differences is other markets aired the Japanese series as opposed to making their own like America does. Only America makes their own version with footage from original series, which is pretty terrible. They also did this long before America made its own version too, so they got to see the older series pre-Zyuranger. Power Rangers succeeded where others failed more than likely because of closemindedness. People are very quick to call things ripoffs, so there's never room for more than one show in the American market. Even if the idea calling Kamen Rider a Super Sentai ripoff is ridiculous given it predates Sentai in Japan. But all people care about is Power Rangers as it was the first one they saw so every other Toku is now a rip off of it and will be shunned. Just like all monster shows after Pokemon, or card game shows after Yu Gi Oh, despite the fact all of the shows live in harmony in Japan, they were failures in America. There's only room for one franchise per genre in America it looks like |
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Shenl742
Posts: 1525 |
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Am I the only guy who remembers that Australian-based Ultraman show from the early 90s? The SNES fighting game was based on it?
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