Product Description
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THE EARTH IS IN DANGER! Even now, fiendish hands are stretching
out from the distant stars to seize the world. From their massive
underground complex near Mt. Fuji, the Ultra Guard, an elite unit
of the Terrestrial Defense Force, equipped with a squadron of
Ultra Hawks, stands vigilant as our decisive first-line to combat
the myriad of alien aggressors, who threaten the very existence
of our planet. But, unbeknownst to his fellow teammates, Dan
Moroboshi, is secretly an extraterrestrial aiding them in their
fight to preserve the future of humanity, considered the 7th
member of the Ultra Guard :better known as Ultra Seven!
Produced by the creative team behind Ultraman, Ultra Seven is the
third entry in the Ultra Series, and is arguably the best of the
long-running franchise, with its emphasis on science fiction and
themes touching on subjects ranging from the cruelty of war to
social and racial injustices in the grand tradition of Star Trek
and The Outer Limits. Plus, Ultra Seven features the colossal
monsters and spectacular visual effects viewers expect from the
men who brought Godzilla to life! For the first time on home
video, complete and uncut, Shout! Factory s complete box set of
Ultra Seven is a must-have!
.com
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Japanese special effects legend Eiji Tsuburaya's giddy and
surreal '60s-era science fiction television series Ultraseven is
rescued from its long tenure in grey-market sources with this
six-disc set. Produced in 1967, Ultraseven was the third in a
lengthy and complicated library of live-action and animated
television programs, feature films, and specials, all largely
concerning the Ultra family of alien superheroes who defend Earth
from an exhaustive array of giant monsters; here, the variation
on the central theme is the origin story detailed in the first
episode, where Ultra Seven, an alien crusader from the same
planet as his predecessor, Ultraman, rescues an ailing ain
climber and assumes his form in order to join the Ultra Guard, a
team of six (including actors Iyoshi Ishii and Bin Furuya from
the original Ultraman series) guarding the Earth from
extraterrestrial threat. When called into action each episode by
the arrival of one or more of Tsuburaya's outlandish and
energetic monster creations, Ultra Seven adopts his giant
costumed form to unleash an array of spectacular weapons with
appropriately explosive results. As with other titles in the
Ultra franchise, said monster showdowns remain the show's key
appeal, as well as Ultra Seven's lack of the time constraint that
hampered the powers of his Ultra brethren (thus allowing for
longer and more elaborate fights), which helped to make him one
of the most popular figures in Ultra history, as evidenced by his
reappearance in several subsequent spinoff series. Ultraseven
also does commendable work for attempting to place the monster
rumble sequences within the framework of more detailed stories
than are usually seen in the tokusatsu (live-action science
fiction) genre.
Unlike Ultraman, Ultraseven went largely unseen by stateside
audiences, save for Hawaii residents who saw it in limited
syndication during the 1970s. TNT finally picked up the series
for broadcast during the early morning hours in the early 1990s,
but this version featured a decidedly tongue-in-cheek dub by the
Canadian production company Cinar, which transformed the program
into broad camp. Ultraseven was later swept up into a contentious
legal battle between Tsuburaya Productions and Chaiyo, a Thai
company that laid a questionable cl on six of the Ultra
series. The latter entity has provided the source material for
this release, which looks fine if not perfect--a respectable
situation, given that the series was filmed in 16mm (a difficult
format to remaster) and the DVD elements come from a third-party
source. Audio is the original Japanese track with optional
subtitles, which may come as a disappointment for those who
fondly remember the Hawaiian or Cinar dubs. And, as Internet
sources have widely reported, this is not the "complete"
series--missing from the set is "From Another Planet with Love,"
which featured a blood-consuming alien whose disfigured
appearance was unfortunately compared in press material to
survivors of the Hiroshima and Naaki bombings. Tsuburaya
subsequently pulled the episode from broadcast and home video
releases, though it aired in Hawaii and on TNT. Its absence,
while unfortunate, should not detract from viewers' enjoyment of
the set, which also features a typically thorough booklet of
liner notes by Japanese genre expert August Ragone. --Paul Gaita
