I finished watching 怪奇大作戦! I really enjoyed it a whole lot!
It’s a 1968/69 tokusatsu show by Tsubraya Productions, the people behind Ultraman, made in between Ultraseven and Return of Ultraman, but there’s no giant monsters in it and it’s a more adult-oriented sci-fi/horror/mystery show. If Ultra Q’s a bit like tokusatsu Twilight Zone, then this is tokusatsu X-Files, basically.
And that’s right up my alley! As much as I like giant monsters, they’re ultimately really a vehicle for fun special effects and the excitement of the unexpected, so leaning directly into those elements with stories that are at least relatively mature and complicated compared to stuff meant directly for kids makes for something very cool. This youtube video gives a decent introduction to the vibe.
And it’s also enjoyable for me because I’m a couple layers deep into a niche at this point. I first heard about this show via an old issue of Monthly Halloween of all things, and as far as I know there’s no official English edition and little to no English name recognition (i.e. - no wikipedia page), so it feels extra nice since I wouldn’t have come across it without all this language business. I watched it on Japanese blu rays that lack any subtitles (although for some reason they do provide scripts for the episodes you can click through in the menu so I guess that’s technically an option), and I did okay for the episodes that focus on a flashy special effect (e.g. the moths that dissolve people, the spontaneous combustion one, the かまいたち one), but understood much less about the more dialogue-heavy episodes in the back half of the show. I’d like to watch it again in a few years and hopefully understand more.
The one major downside of the show is that it’s very very… Showa-era men in suits smoking cigarettes. The one female cast member is the team’s teenage secretary, and while there’s a few episodes where she gets something to do, it could definitely be a whole lot better.
That said, I came away a lot more endeared to the cast as a whole than I have been with the various teams in the Ultra shows. Each one of those introduces a new team of monster-fighting folks, but they’re always overshadowed by Ultraman and the giant monsterd of the week. Here, without either holding them back from the spotlight, the ensemble actually feels like an ensemble, and everyone I think plays their role great, especially Shin Kishida. He played a side character in Return of Ultraman, but he has so much more to do here as the member of the team most dedicated to science and figuring out the reality behind the mystery, and he steals the show in my opinion. According to wikipedia, he apparently also wrote my favorite Return of Ultraman episode, and shows up as vampires in the sequels to that one vampire movie I watched a while back, so I’ll have to keep an eye out. He also died in his 40s of esophageal cancer… There is SO much smoking in this show…
Anyway, that crosses off all the (not super well defined) goals I put down when the thread started!
I feel like this thread definitely pushed me to watch more things without subtitles, and now I feel much more comfortable doing that, in that exciting “oh, all this stuff is now accessible to me!” phase I remember getting into when reading started being something I could do casually. So thanks for that! Still a long way to go comprehension wise though. Worried vaguely progress will plateau at this point no matter how much stuff I watch but I guess I don’t really have any reason to think that since it’s only gone up so far.
Like I said in the reading thread though, I don’t think next year I’ll make numbered goals, since especially for picking what I watch while exercising, I don’t want to have hitting the goal being part of that decision-making process. To be honest… I watched 怪奇大作戦 just because it had fewer episodes and would count to the tokusatsu goal, and while I loved it, I think from here I’ll do fine watching and enjoying things with Japanese audio whether there’s a goal or not.