It’s funny, although I’ve never seen the show, I think I had seen posters and toys for it over the years but hadn’t realized it. I just assumed they were malformed/knock-off Ultraman products. Instead, they were posters/toys for a real show which itself was the Ultraman knock-off. They took a design that owes everything to Ultraman (including the flashing chest light that indicates “time up”), and looking at some of the product art, they made it look exactly like Ultraman. I guess the tokusatsu creators weren’t particularly litigious.
It strikes me that it’s the kind of silliness also inherent in US comic books (in fact, some of the exact same silliness, which is why it made total sense that Spiderman in Japan was a tokusatsu show). The kind of things that, if you look from outside the conventions, it makes no damn sense whatsoever (because it’s conventions built on conventions, and the bit that made sense on its own was X generations of imitations back…). Now I’m wondering if someone has done a “grounded, realistic” tokusatsu show/movie in recent years that I’ve missed…
