Falling from a star: Ultraman 80
Dec. 22nd, 2023 09:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akinoameOkay, so...
I think probably the best comparison I can make for my feelings toward Ultraman 80 are my feelings toward Kamen Rider Kabuto. Now, while the two shows are nothing alike, I have the same feeling of disappointment that grew over time with Kabuto. I'd started Kabuto with some skepticism, mid-way through discovered I was really starting to like it, and then in the final arc it just shot down any and all goodwill I ever felt for it. And the same is true of 80: I approached it with some wariness, since I'd learned from watching Mebius that the premise I thought it had, it dropped. Then I was enjoying it a lot for a while. And then it just blew it.
The short version: Skip 80. Or if you want to see what Mebius was talking about in its beautiful tribute episode, watch through episode...12 or so. And then drop the show like a hot potato.
The long version?
Ultraman 80 is remembered for what it is not: the story of an Ultraman who theorized that monsters grew more powerful due to absorbing Minus Energy--the negative emotions of humans--and that the best way to resolve the problem was to become a middle school science teacher and try to help the kids cope with the intense, negative emotions that come with adolescence, fighting monsters when they get bad.
The truth is that the show isn't about that at all. The concept of Minus Energy is actually discovered by humans, and Takeshi Yamato has come to the same conclusion. But it's largely dropped after episode 3, where 80 fights Hoe--which in turn explains why Hoe is usually the go-to kaiju for Minus Energy plots, like in Orb episode 7. And the first 12 episodes build up a really good story of Yamato developing relationships with his students, learning that he does need to be strict at times and that trying to be their friends isn't going to give the kids what they need, and teasing a relationship with another new teacher, Ms. Kyoko. But episode 13 unceremoniously drops the Sakuragaoka Middle School plot, with a murder mystery forcing the UGM team to temporarily split up and be reassigned to other units, presumably forcing Yamato to quit his day job.
So what is it about? Quite honestly, I don't know. It falls into a rhythm of the basic, like Leo fell into, but unlike Leo it doesn't take a hard reset back to its original tone. And in a way, it feels "like" the rest of its '70s predecessors, but without managing to learn from them. Like Return of Ultraman and Taro, it has major characters from the team just leave the show. Like Ace, it introduces a female character who's supposed to be Yamato's equal and fellow warrior and acts as his "Watson," so to speak. Like Taro, it spends quite a bit of time focusing on mythical creatures, and for the finale, it tries to have its final battle be a victory for humans by keeping the Ultras out of it. Like Leo, it sometimes has to go for the most depressing resolution to the monster of the week's plot.
It ends up losing everything that made it unique. The others all have something to them to help them stand out: Return of Ultraman was the first time where the Ultra/host had to balance a civilian life with his heroics, the first time that he had to deal with the danger coming home, and the first time the human and Ultra were able to communicate with one another outside of their initial merge; Ace was two people becoming a single Ultraman, the beginning of the Ultras being a family, and the first time that there was an overarching plot, with a main villain that had to be defeated at the end; Taro was about a much younger Ultra, helping develop the family and build on the Land of Light's mythos, typically more light-hearted, and the first time the Ultra's host had the choice to leave it all behind and grow up; and Leo was about surviving, trauma, legacy, and pain, the first time we had Ultras from outside M78, and the first time that an Ultraman had to fight on his own, without a defense team to back him up.
And in trying to take elements from its older brothers over the past decade, 80 fails to improve upon them. It builds up the characters from Sakuragaoka and from UGM and fucks them over--the entire middle school cast being dropped; the Captain, the Chief, and PR officer Sera getting flanderized over time and being completely unrecognizable from when they were first introduced; silently reassigning Tajima and Harada to Australia when they were beginning to get some development (or Harada was, anyway); building up Jouno as a new potential love interest for Yamato only to just kill her in the fucking stupidest way--more on that in a bit, because good gravy that is not even the most insulting part about this--and the treatment it gives to Ryoko Hoshi/Yullian is just awful. And while Yamato does eventually develop from a naive non-combatant science teacher who suddenly joins UGM into a mature and respected member of the team, it makes him lose something that comes across really strongly in his treatment of Yullian and Jouno.
So to start, let's address the elephant in the room: Ultraman developed competition when it first returned after Eiji Tsuburaya's death. And while I see a lot of exposition about how mecha anime was becoming more popular and threatening their ratings, I can definitely feel the threat that Toei's new tokusatsu properties were.
Kamen Rider premiered in 1971, alongside RoU, and it's clear that Ace felt the pressure of its enormously popular rival, given that Hokuto and Minami spent an episode riding motorcycles, acted as a two-person team that was also mostly just one person doing all of the fighting at one time, and both wore scarves that were very reminiscent of the original Riders' scarves. Presumably, by the time Taro started airing in 1973, they felt a little less threatened by Kamen Rider V3 and proceeded to just be insane, and by '74, both Leo and Amazon were doing their own things that would later inspire new legacy characters.
Incidentally, Chaiyo would later fuck over both Ultraman and Kamen Rider with unauthorized content and stolen intellectual property, but that's neither here nor there.
However, while Kamen Rider was still on the air during 1980, Super-1 wasn't what was threatening 80 so much. It was the relatively new Super Sentai, a franchise known for heroes in multicolored spandex, giant robots, an organized villain threat, and big-ass explosions.
The focus shifting onto UGM and its team dynamics feel like a direct result of competing with Denshi Sentai Denjiman and Sentai in general. I'll admit that I'm fuzzy on the franchise's full history, but it looks like up until 1980, the teams worked under larger, Ultra-style organizations (such as EAGLE in Goranger). Denjiman seems to have begun the idea of recruiting five ordinary young people who just happen to have wardrobes full of the appropriate ranger color. I don't know if that helped influence the push toward putting Yamato on the UGM team full-time, to help restore some essential Ultra element that would differentiate it from "five young adults with attitude," but I will say that there was suddenly a massive increase in Sentai-style explosions when it came to UGM training and stuff. And Yamato was also suddenly showing off his athletic skills a lot more, despite having been defeated by preteens in karate class at the middle school. And it also started trying to focus a little more on having an "action girl" for a little while, by building up Emi Jouno, maybe to compete with the various Pink Rangers.
So initially, Jouno did what most women in previous Ultra series (barring Minami, who was half of Ace, and Anne, who was the team medic) did: working communication and radar and all of the non-combat roles. But when they dropped Yamato's budding romance with Kyoko, they decided to build up a...not a romance, exactly, but a close relationship between Yamato and Jouno that was definitely intended as ship tease. So now she was out with him all the time on patrol, much like we'd had with Hokuto and Minami back in Ace, and when Harada and Tajima were dropped, they were now the senior members of the team, other than the command staff, Cap Oyama and Chief Ito (who had joined in episode 14). Now Jouno was an inspiration to other women in UNDA's academy, as the first female officer to join UGM; and she was sometimes pulled along with Yamato on crazy bullshit like the time they ended up in an old timey Japan that was also the realm of the dead...for some reason.
But in episode 43, UGM comes across a crashed spaceship with a single survivor--a young amnesiac woman in a fancy white dress and expensive jewelry, who is being pursued by dangerous aliens. Yamato realizes that this woman is someone who was telepathically contacting him shortly before the crash, trying to warn him of something, but the shock and head trauma have prevented her from remembering anything. Jouno takes to her immediately, and the team decides to call her "Ryoko Hoshi," since she obviously came from the stars. Hoshi recovers from her injuries remarkably fast, and she shows athletic abilities that surprise Jouno and make her just a little bit jealous. Still, Hoshi is intensely grateful to her for her kindness and gives one of her bracelets as a gift. However, it turns out that the aliens were onto Hoshi and suspected she was hiding out among UGM in human form. When they see her bracelet on Jouno, they assume she's their target, Yullian, a princess from the Land of Light who came here to warn Ultraman 80 of a revenge plot against him.
Now, please know that although Yullian is identified as a "princess" within her series and across later ones, there is no indication that the Land of Light has a monarchy. In fact, the first actual indication of any kind of governmental system there is in Ultra Galaxy Fight: The Absolute Conspiracy chapter 2, "The Divergence," where the early version of Father of Ultra discusses a congress (at least this is the English translation given). The aliens who attacked her ship in episode 34 are specifically after 80 for revenge against their crown prince's death, which seems a little weird, if Yullian is supposed to be the princess. And when she's kidnapped and ransomed for the entire fucking planet in Absolute Conspiracy/Destined Crossroad, it really feels like nobody fucking cares other than the Inter Galactic Defense Force and Galaxy Rescue Force. So it seems like she's got a hereditary role or maybe just money, but no actual standing or power, and thus literally nobody takes her seriously.
This is the beginning of my issues with this character.
So the bad guys kidnap Jouno and torture her for information about 80, who she quickly puts together is Yamato. When Hoshi regains her memories and goes with Yamato to try to rescue her, Jouno realizes that it's a trap laid to kill Yamato.
80.
Ultraman 80.
The guy who can transform and fight giant monsters.
That Yamato.
So Jouno's brilliant plan is to leap into the path of a spear, do a pointless flip in the air...apparently just to show off to Hoshi that she can do it too?...and get impaled, all because she has been in love with Yamato all this time and he is a fucking idiot.
Hoshi stays with Jouno and admits to Yamato that there's nothing she can do to save her life. Jouno lives long enough to tell her to take her place in UGM, and then she dies, with Yamato having to report that she lost her life in the line of duty.
Part two of my issues with Yullian/Hoshi is that, whatever the reason Jouno's actress wanted to leave the show or needed to be written out, it feels like a "kill and replace" situation. Hoshi was obviously introduced in order to kill off Jouno and still have her role filled, but the fact that she's also Yullian just seems so badly connected to it. You see, soon after the school plot was dropped, the actress who played the school secretary remained on staff to play Yuriko, the staff meteorologist who spends most of the series not doing anything other than updating Yamato on the weather. Yamato even comments on the similarity between them, when multiple actors have returned from season to season without anyone commenting on how much they look like someone else (Yuri from Ultra Q to Akiko in Ultraman, Arashi from Ultraman to Furuhashi in Ultra Seven, Nao from Ultraman Zero: The Movie to Riku from Ultraman Geed, etc.). Honestly, it is to the point where unless a character is played by Kohji Moritsugu (Dan Moroboshi and Jiro Sasaki in Ultra Seven and beyond), nobody notices. And even then, Dan got lucky that somehow nobody fucking noticed that he looked exactly like Jiro and got away with it until 2023's IF Story: The Future 55 Years Ago. And even then, it was only Jiro himself who noticed!
My point is that if Yamato thinks it's weird that the meteorologist looks like someone he used to know, that's probably a good way to work in Yullian. That like Seven before her, she borrowed the appearance of someone else and used it to start working with the local defense team. And that she actually did a better job blending in than Yamato had, to the point that he didn't even notice. It would have felt more natural. Or even do like Power Rangers Lost Galaxy would later do with Karone from Power Rangers in Space taking over for Kendrix while her actress was recovering from cancer.
But in any case, Hoshi begins working at UGM, and despite everyone already knowing that she's an alien, suddenly her not acting like a human is a big deal. And this is where Yamato's characterization really goes off the rails, with him constantly lecturing her on not using her powers or alien devices, despite the fact that A) he's used his powers and alien devices in human form before, B) he is fighting as Ultraman 80, and C) the alien device in question is a fucking medical gun, a laser that can cure almost every illness or injury! And Yamato has the gall to suggest that humans would use it as a shortcut. Dude, one of your teammates died in your arms. I THINK SHE WOULD HAVE LIKED THE MEDICAL GUN. Not to mention everyone who has a chronic illness or pain--things that might, you know, increase the amount of Minus Energy on Earth!
Yamato really becomes insufferable here, and I hate it. Hoshi literally has to ask if it's okay to use her powers, and he's constantly lecturing her. Never mind that she is supposed to be a princess--he's a man, so he gets to tell her off. I genuinely think that this was someone on the writing staff (although I'm not sure who, considering that most of the original writing staff ended up being changed out about midway through the series) wanting to recreate the dynamic between Dan and Gen. Except that they were very confused about the boner they got while watching Dan yell at a crying Gen and figured they had to fix everything by making this a straight relationship. Thus, Hoshi constantly being told off.
This leads to the penultimate episode, which is her one and only transformation. 80 is getting his ass kicked, and Hoshi keeps insisting she'll help. But he tells her no, that if he falls, there needs to be an Ultra protecting it--which, again, feels very Dan/Gen, except somehow less healthy. But she does end up transforming, and then 80's able to figure out some kind of bullshit strategy that they use to defeat the monsters.
That is Yullian's only battle in this series. She appears again in the finale, but only so she and 80 can fly away, because the entire plot of the finale is that Cap Oyama suddenly wants to stick to the whole "humans must protect Earth themselves" thing from Ultra Seven that was explicitly called out later in Mebius as misrepresenting Captain Kiriyama's original meaning (because, you know, Seven/Dan was dying and the entire Ultra Guard felt horrible that he was refusing to go home for proper medical treatment because he didn't believe they could defeat Pandon or any of these alien invaders without him, thus humans had to prove they were able to protect Earth so that the Ultras would never risk dying in battle in order to protect them ever again). And so because he and Chief Ito have finally put together that Yamato and Hoshi are 80 and Yullian, he refuses to let them take part in the battle because they are aliens and the rest of the team are humans. Nicely, Yamato does point out that this is a bullshit point of view, because from their perspective, it's the humans who are aliens; therefore, Earthlings and Ultras should cooperate as fellow aliens. But no.
What's more, the final enemy and battle are incredibly disappointing. After facing Zetton, Pandon, and Alien Bat, Yapool, and the Black Star itself in the finales of Ultraman, RoU, Seven, Ace, and Leo, we get a kaiju that freezes things. And the entire plan to defeat him is a fucking wrecking ball.
You bet I was mockingly singing Miley Cyrus when I saw it.
I get that they were trying to do something like Taro's brilliant finale, where Kotaro abruptly decides to stop being Ultraman Taro and returns the Ultra Badge to Mother of Ultra. This means that the final bad guy, Alien Valky, can't be too menacing because it has to be believable that Kotaro could defeat him all on his own with just his wits and a gun. And an exploding oil refinery, but I digress. But where 80 fails is that they don't go for "we lure him into an oil refinery and blow it the fuck up"; they use tactics more suited to those used on Skydon, a kaiju from Ultraman that featured in a crack episode where Cap Muramatsu literally orders them to shoot it in the butthole. I sat there and went, "Oh god, this is why it took 15 years to get another regular series."
But no, that's not the worst part. Because this being the final episode, they needed to bring back the original UGM cast. And it was nice to see Tajima and Harada come in at the last second, all the way from Australia, to refuel their successors' jet in midair to ensure that the plan went off successfully, no matter how dumb it was. But they managed to destroy all of their goodwill with one last appearance: an android replica of Emi Jouno.
This is the most insensitive way to bring her in. Everyone comes back for a big going-away party Cap decides to throw for Yamato and Hoshi (wherein he also outs them as Ultras), and Yuriko and Sera reveal they've been secretly building an android that looks just like Jouno, "because everyone misses Emi."
Fuck. You.
I genuinely cannot put this into words. There are so many ways they could have given her actress a space where she could take part in the finale. Hell, going back to my Power Rangers reference before, they managed to do just that with Kendrix--when the Rangers return their swords to the stone altar they came from, they manage to resurrect the dead planet and Kendrix, whose spirit was implied to have remained in the sword to try and protect it from falling into evil hands and then trusted Karone with her power. Is it explained? Hell no. Does it work? Yes. And to this day, both Kendrix and Karone are honored as the Pink Ranger of that season. But instead, 80 goes with the stupidest, most insensitive option, in a franchise that is big on the importance of life and how it cannot be replaced--in his own finale, Ultraman tells Zoffy that if Hayata is dying, then he will give up his own life force in exchange, because it is unfair that a human who has only lived for about a quarter of a century should die while an Ultra who has lived for twenty millennia lives. And I've already talked at length about Leo, about how his and Astra's entire species was wiped off the face of the universe, and how Gen kept losing everyone he loved, thus him being willing to just let Black Star kill him if there was the chance it could keep the people he still had safe.
This, however, spits in the face of that legacy and continues to emphasize how little the Ultra series at that point cared about its female characters. Because it definitely reemphasizes that "kill and replace" feeling that Jouno's departure and Hoshi's entrance had.
Sayoko Hagiwara, the actress who played Hoshi, would later go on to Super Sentai and play Rei Tachibana in Dynaman, as well as a villain role in Changeman and Souji's mother in Kyouryuger. I genuinely hope that those gave her much more of a chance than Hoshi/Yullian did. Because sadly, I feel like Yullian's legacy continues to be just "the girl," or "the princess." She doesn't have anything to draw on from before, like 80 does; and unlike Astra in Leo, she doesn't get enough time as a warrior to become fascinating and intriguing. Ironically, Astra's the one who does come away with much more in the 2020s, when he had less overall screentime, less personality development, and decidedly less time speaking. And so, I can't really get mad that Yullian gets kidnapped, held hostage, and doesn't get to contribute to the heroics of Ultra Galaxy Fight because her own show wouldn't let her be a hero, be an Ultra, or be anything more than the girl. It's disappointing, and with UGF being directed by Koichi Sakamoto, a guy who would like you to know how much he likes strong female characters, the fact that even he can't manage to give her a role in the action makes me think that I might not be the only one who saw the problem there.
But yeah. That is the sad saga of Ultraman 80, and I can at least be glad that Mebius saw fit to repair its legacy and give a proper sendoff to the kids of Sakuragaoka Middle School, 26 years later. Down the line, I will discuss Mebius and its tributes (especially its...less loving and understanding tribute to Leo). But at the same time, I do have to wonder if we should be remembering this show for something it didn't want to be. Has it earned it? Maybe there's more we should be seeing out of 80, as well as Yullian, to truly make him out to be the teacher Ultraman that Tsuburaya is trying to set him up to be. His next major anniversary will be in 2025, for his 45th. Maybe TsuPro will see fit to give him more time to build that legacy--maybe have an Ultra who is a student of his (I am not counting Zett), or have another Ultra host who is a teacher and actually stick to it this time. Just...something that will put a better taste in my mouth, I beg. Because right now, all I can say is just to skip this one.
I think probably the best comparison I can make for my feelings toward Ultraman 80 are my feelings toward Kamen Rider Kabuto. Now, while the two shows are nothing alike, I have the same feeling of disappointment that grew over time with Kabuto. I'd started Kabuto with some skepticism, mid-way through discovered I was really starting to like it, and then in the final arc it just shot down any and all goodwill I ever felt for it. And the same is true of 80: I approached it with some wariness, since I'd learned from watching Mebius that the premise I thought it had, it dropped. Then I was enjoying it a lot for a while. And then it just blew it.
The short version: Skip 80. Or if you want to see what Mebius was talking about in its beautiful tribute episode, watch through episode...12 or so. And then drop the show like a hot potato.
The long version?
Ultraman 80 is remembered for what it is not: the story of an Ultraman who theorized that monsters grew more powerful due to absorbing Minus Energy--the negative emotions of humans--and that the best way to resolve the problem was to become a middle school science teacher and try to help the kids cope with the intense, negative emotions that come with adolescence, fighting monsters when they get bad.
The truth is that the show isn't about that at all. The concept of Minus Energy is actually discovered by humans, and Takeshi Yamato has come to the same conclusion. But it's largely dropped after episode 3, where 80 fights Hoe--which in turn explains why Hoe is usually the go-to kaiju for Minus Energy plots, like in Orb episode 7. And the first 12 episodes build up a really good story of Yamato developing relationships with his students, learning that he does need to be strict at times and that trying to be their friends isn't going to give the kids what they need, and teasing a relationship with another new teacher, Ms. Kyoko. But episode 13 unceremoniously drops the Sakuragaoka Middle School plot, with a murder mystery forcing the UGM team to temporarily split up and be reassigned to other units, presumably forcing Yamato to quit his day job.
So what is it about? Quite honestly, I don't know. It falls into a rhythm of the basic, like Leo fell into, but unlike Leo it doesn't take a hard reset back to its original tone. And in a way, it feels "like" the rest of its '70s predecessors, but without managing to learn from them. Like Return of Ultraman and Taro, it has major characters from the team just leave the show. Like Ace, it introduces a female character who's supposed to be Yamato's equal and fellow warrior and acts as his "Watson," so to speak. Like Taro, it spends quite a bit of time focusing on mythical creatures, and for the finale, it tries to have its final battle be a victory for humans by keeping the Ultras out of it. Like Leo, it sometimes has to go for the most depressing resolution to the monster of the week's plot.
It ends up losing everything that made it unique. The others all have something to them to help them stand out: Return of Ultraman was the first time where the Ultra/host had to balance a civilian life with his heroics, the first time that he had to deal with the danger coming home, and the first time the human and Ultra were able to communicate with one another outside of their initial merge; Ace was two people becoming a single Ultraman, the beginning of the Ultras being a family, and the first time that there was an overarching plot, with a main villain that had to be defeated at the end; Taro was about a much younger Ultra, helping develop the family and build on the Land of Light's mythos, typically more light-hearted, and the first time the Ultra's host had the choice to leave it all behind and grow up; and Leo was about surviving, trauma, legacy, and pain, the first time we had Ultras from outside M78, and the first time that an Ultraman had to fight on his own, without a defense team to back him up.
And in trying to take elements from its older brothers over the past decade, 80 fails to improve upon them. It builds up the characters from Sakuragaoka and from UGM and fucks them over--the entire middle school cast being dropped; the Captain, the Chief, and PR officer Sera getting flanderized over time and being completely unrecognizable from when they were first introduced; silently reassigning Tajima and Harada to Australia when they were beginning to get some development (or Harada was, anyway); building up Jouno as a new potential love interest for Yamato only to just kill her in the fucking stupidest way--more on that in a bit, because good gravy that is not even the most insulting part about this--and the treatment it gives to Ryoko Hoshi/Yullian is just awful. And while Yamato does eventually develop from a naive non-combatant science teacher who suddenly joins UGM into a mature and respected member of the team, it makes him lose something that comes across really strongly in his treatment of Yullian and Jouno.
So to start, let's address the elephant in the room: Ultraman developed competition when it first returned after Eiji Tsuburaya's death. And while I see a lot of exposition about how mecha anime was becoming more popular and threatening their ratings, I can definitely feel the threat that Toei's new tokusatsu properties were.
Kamen Rider premiered in 1971, alongside RoU, and it's clear that Ace felt the pressure of its enormously popular rival, given that Hokuto and Minami spent an episode riding motorcycles, acted as a two-person team that was also mostly just one person doing all of the fighting at one time, and both wore scarves that were very reminiscent of the original Riders' scarves. Presumably, by the time Taro started airing in 1973, they felt a little less threatened by Kamen Rider V3 and proceeded to just be insane, and by '74, both Leo and Amazon were doing their own things that would later inspire new legacy characters.
Incidentally, Chaiyo would later fuck over both Ultraman and Kamen Rider with unauthorized content and stolen intellectual property, but that's neither here nor there.
However, while Kamen Rider was still on the air during 1980, Super-1 wasn't what was threatening 80 so much. It was the relatively new Super Sentai, a franchise known for heroes in multicolored spandex, giant robots, an organized villain threat, and big-ass explosions.
The focus shifting onto UGM and its team dynamics feel like a direct result of competing with Denshi Sentai Denjiman and Sentai in general. I'll admit that I'm fuzzy on the franchise's full history, but it looks like up until 1980, the teams worked under larger, Ultra-style organizations (such as EAGLE in Goranger). Denjiman seems to have begun the idea of recruiting five ordinary young people who just happen to have wardrobes full of the appropriate ranger color. I don't know if that helped influence the push toward putting Yamato on the UGM team full-time, to help restore some essential Ultra element that would differentiate it from "five young adults with attitude," but I will say that there was suddenly a massive increase in Sentai-style explosions when it came to UGM training and stuff. And Yamato was also suddenly showing off his athletic skills a lot more, despite having been defeated by preteens in karate class at the middle school. And it also started trying to focus a little more on having an "action girl" for a little while, by building up Emi Jouno, maybe to compete with the various Pink Rangers.
So initially, Jouno did what most women in previous Ultra series (barring Minami, who was half of Ace, and Anne, who was the team medic) did: working communication and radar and all of the non-combat roles. But when they dropped Yamato's budding romance with Kyoko, they decided to build up a...not a romance, exactly, but a close relationship between Yamato and Jouno that was definitely intended as ship tease. So now she was out with him all the time on patrol, much like we'd had with Hokuto and Minami back in Ace, and when Harada and Tajima were dropped, they were now the senior members of the team, other than the command staff, Cap Oyama and Chief Ito (who had joined in episode 14). Now Jouno was an inspiration to other women in UNDA's academy, as the first female officer to join UGM; and she was sometimes pulled along with Yamato on crazy bullshit like the time they ended up in an old timey Japan that was also the realm of the dead...for some reason.
But in episode 43, UGM comes across a crashed spaceship with a single survivor--a young amnesiac woman in a fancy white dress and expensive jewelry, who is being pursued by dangerous aliens. Yamato realizes that this woman is someone who was telepathically contacting him shortly before the crash, trying to warn him of something, but the shock and head trauma have prevented her from remembering anything. Jouno takes to her immediately, and the team decides to call her "Ryoko Hoshi," since she obviously came from the stars. Hoshi recovers from her injuries remarkably fast, and she shows athletic abilities that surprise Jouno and make her just a little bit jealous. Still, Hoshi is intensely grateful to her for her kindness and gives one of her bracelets as a gift. However, it turns out that the aliens were onto Hoshi and suspected she was hiding out among UGM in human form. When they see her bracelet on Jouno, they assume she's their target, Yullian, a princess from the Land of Light who came here to warn Ultraman 80 of a revenge plot against him.
Now, please know that although Yullian is identified as a "princess" within her series and across later ones, there is no indication that the Land of Light has a monarchy. In fact, the first actual indication of any kind of governmental system there is in Ultra Galaxy Fight: The Absolute Conspiracy chapter 2, "The Divergence," where the early version of Father of Ultra discusses a congress (at least this is the English translation given). The aliens who attacked her ship in episode 34 are specifically after 80 for revenge against their crown prince's death, which seems a little weird, if Yullian is supposed to be the princess. And when she's kidnapped and ransomed for the entire fucking planet in Absolute Conspiracy/Destined Crossroad, it really feels like nobody fucking cares other than the Inter Galactic Defense Force and Galaxy Rescue Force. So it seems like she's got a hereditary role or maybe just money, but no actual standing or power, and thus literally nobody takes her seriously.
This is the beginning of my issues with this character.
So the bad guys kidnap Jouno and torture her for information about 80, who she quickly puts together is Yamato. When Hoshi regains her memories and goes with Yamato to try to rescue her, Jouno realizes that it's a trap laid to kill Yamato.
80.
Ultraman 80.
The guy who can transform and fight giant monsters.
That Yamato.
So Jouno's brilliant plan is to leap into the path of a spear, do a pointless flip in the air...apparently just to show off to Hoshi that she can do it too?...and get impaled, all because she has been in love with Yamato all this time and he is a fucking idiot.
Hoshi stays with Jouno and admits to Yamato that there's nothing she can do to save her life. Jouno lives long enough to tell her to take her place in UGM, and then she dies, with Yamato having to report that she lost her life in the line of duty.
Part two of my issues with Yullian/Hoshi is that, whatever the reason Jouno's actress wanted to leave the show or needed to be written out, it feels like a "kill and replace" situation. Hoshi was obviously introduced in order to kill off Jouno and still have her role filled, but the fact that she's also Yullian just seems so badly connected to it. You see, soon after the school plot was dropped, the actress who played the school secretary remained on staff to play Yuriko, the staff meteorologist who spends most of the series not doing anything other than updating Yamato on the weather. Yamato even comments on the similarity between them, when multiple actors have returned from season to season without anyone commenting on how much they look like someone else (Yuri from Ultra Q to Akiko in Ultraman, Arashi from Ultraman to Furuhashi in Ultra Seven, Nao from Ultraman Zero: The Movie to Riku from Ultraman Geed, etc.). Honestly, it is to the point where unless a character is played by Kohji Moritsugu (Dan Moroboshi and Jiro Sasaki in Ultra Seven and beyond), nobody notices. And even then, Dan got lucky that somehow nobody fucking noticed that he looked exactly like Jiro and got away with it until 2023's IF Story: The Future 55 Years Ago. And even then, it was only Jiro himself who noticed!
My point is that if Yamato thinks it's weird that the meteorologist looks like someone he used to know, that's probably a good way to work in Yullian. That like Seven before her, she borrowed the appearance of someone else and used it to start working with the local defense team. And that she actually did a better job blending in than Yamato had, to the point that he didn't even notice. It would have felt more natural. Or even do like Power Rangers Lost Galaxy would later do with Karone from Power Rangers in Space taking over for Kendrix while her actress was recovering from cancer.
But in any case, Hoshi begins working at UGM, and despite everyone already knowing that she's an alien, suddenly her not acting like a human is a big deal. And this is where Yamato's characterization really goes off the rails, with him constantly lecturing her on not using her powers or alien devices, despite the fact that A) he's used his powers and alien devices in human form before, B) he is fighting as Ultraman 80, and C) the alien device in question is a fucking medical gun, a laser that can cure almost every illness or injury! And Yamato has the gall to suggest that humans would use it as a shortcut. Dude, one of your teammates died in your arms. I THINK SHE WOULD HAVE LIKED THE MEDICAL GUN. Not to mention everyone who has a chronic illness or pain--things that might, you know, increase the amount of Minus Energy on Earth!
Yamato really becomes insufferable here, and I hate it. Hoshi literally has to ask if it's okay to use her powers, and he's constantly lecturing her. Never mind that she is supposed to be a princess--he's a man, so he gets to tell her off. I genuinely think that this was someone on the writing staff (although I'm not sure who, considering that most of the original writing staff ended up being changed out about midway through the series) wanting to recreate the dynamic between Dan and Gen. Except that they were very confused about the boner they got while watching Dan yell at a crying Gen and figured they had to fix everything by making this a straight relationship. Thus, Hoshi constantly being told off.
This leads to the penultimate episode, which is her one and only transformation. 80 is getting his ass kicked, and Hoshi keeps insisting she'll help. But he tells her no, that if he falls, there needs to be an Ultra protecting it--which, again, feels very Dan/Gen, except somehow less healthy. But she does end up transforming, and then 80's able to figure out some kind of bullshit strategy that they use to defeat the monsters.
That is Yullian's only battle in this series. She appears again in the finale, but only so she and 80 can fly away, because the entire plot of the finale is that Cap Oyama suddenly wants to stick to the whole "humans must protect Earth themselves" thing from Ultra Seven that was explicitly called out later in Mebius as misrepresenting Captain Kiriyama's original meaning (because, you know, Seven/Dan was dying and the entire Ultra Guard felt horrible that he was refusing to go home for proper medical treatment because he didn't believe they could defeat Pandon or any of these alien invaders without him, thus humans had to prove they were able to protect Earth so that the Ultras would never risk dying in battle in order to protect them ever again). And so because he and Chief Ito have finally put together that Yamato and Hoshi are 80 and Yullian, he refuses to let them take part in the battle because they are aliens and the rest of the team are humans. Nicely, Yamato does point out that this is a bullshit point of view, because from their perspective, it's the humans who are aliens; therefore, Earthlings and Ultras should cooperate as fellow aliens. But no.
What's more, the final enemy and battle are incredibly disappointing. After facing Zetton, Pandon, and Alien Bat, Yapool, and the Black Star itself in the finales of Ultraman, RoU, Seven, Ace, and Leo, we get a kaiju that freezes things. And the entire plan to defeat him is a fucking wrecking ball.
You bet I was mockingly singing Miley Cyrus when I saw it.
I get that they were trying to do something like Taro's brilliant finale, where Kotaro abruptly decides to stop being Ultraman Taro and returns the Ultra Badge to Mother of Ultra. This means that the final bad guy, Alien Valky, can't be too menacing because it has to be believable that Kotaro could defeat him all on his own with just his wits and a gun. And an exploding oil refinery, but I digress. But where 80 fails is that they don't go for "we lure him into an oil refinery and blow it the fuck up"; they use tactics more suited to those used on Skydon, a kaiju from Ultraman that featured in a crack episode where Cap Muramatsu literally orders them to shoot it in the butthole. I sat there and went, "Oh god, this is why it took 15 years to get another regular series."
But no, that's not the worst part. Because this being the final episode, they needed to bring back the original UGM cast. And it was nice to see Tajima and Harada come in at the last second, all the way from Australia, to refuel their successors' jet in midair to ensure that the plan went off successfully, no matter how dumb it was. But they managed to destroy all of their goodwill with one last appearance: an android replica of Emi Jouno.
This is the most insensitive way to bring her in. Everyone comes back for a big going-away party Cap decides to throw for Yamato and Hoshi (wherein he also outs them as Ultras), and Yuriko and Sera reveal they've been secretly building an android that looks just like Jouno, "because everyone misses Emi."
Fuck. You.
I genuinely cannot put this into words. There are so many ways they could have given her actress a space where she could take part in the finale. Hell, going back to my Power Rangers reference before, they managed to do just that with Kendrix--when the Rangers return their swords to the stone altar they came from, they manage to resurrect the dead planet and Kendrix, whose spirit was implied to have remained in the sword to try and protect it from falling into evil hands and then trusted Karone with her power. Is it explained? Hell no. Does it work? Yes. And to this day, both Kendrix and Karone are honored as the Pink Ranger of that season. But instead, 80 goes with the stupidest, most insensitive option, in a franchise that is big on the importance of life and how it cannot be replaced--in his own finale, Ultraman tells Zoffy that if Hayata is dying, then he will give up his own life force in exchange, because it is unfair that a human who has only lived for about a quarter of a century should die while an Ultra who has lived for twenty millennia lives. And I've already talked at length about Leo, about how his and Astra's entire species was wiped off the face of the universe, and how Gen kept losing everyone he loved, thus him being willing to just let Black Star kill him if there was the chance it could keep the people he still had safe.
This, however, spits in the face of that legacy and continues to emphasize how little the Ultra series at that point cared about its female characters. Because it definitely reemphasizes that "kill and replace" feeling that Jouno's departure and Hoshi's entrance had.
Sayoko Hagiwara, the actress who played Hoshi, would later go on to Super Sentai and play Rei Tachibana in Dynaman, as well as a villain role in Changeman and Souji's mother in Kyouryuger. I genuinely hope that those gave her much more of a chance than Hoshi/Yullian did. Because sadly, I feel like Yullian's legacy continues to be just "the girl," or "the princess." She doesn't have anything to draw on from before, like 80 does; and unlike Astra in Leo, she doesn't get enough time as a warrior to become fascinating and intriguing. Ironically, Astra's the one who does come away with much more in the 2020s, when he had less overall screentime, less personality development, and decidedly less time speaking. And so, I can't really get mad that Yullian gets kidnapped, held hostage, and doesn't get to contribute to the heroics of Ultra Galaxy Fight because her own show wouldn't let her be a hero, be an Ultra, or be anything more than the girl. It's disappointing, and with UGF being directed by Koichi Sakamoto, a guy who would like you to know how much he likes strong female characters, the fact that even he can't manage to give her a role in the action makes me think that I might not be the only one who saw the problem there.
But yeah. That is the sad saga of Ultraman 80, and I can at least be glad that Mebius saw fit to repair its legacy and give a proper sendoff to the kids of Sakuragaoka Middle School, 26 years later. Down the line, I will discuss Mebius and its tributes (especially its...less loving and understanding tribute to Leo). But at the same time, I do have to wonder if we should be remembering this show for something it didn't want to be. Has it earned it? Maybe there's more we should be seeing out of 80, as well as Yullian, to truly make him out to be the teacher Ultraman that Tsuburaya is trying to set him up to be. His next major anniversary will be in 2025, for his 45th. Maybe TsuPro will see fit to give him more time to build that legacy--maybe have an Ultra who is a student of his (I am not counting Zett), or have another Ultra host who is a teacher and actually stick to it this time. Just...something that will put a better taste in my mouth, I beg. Because right now, all I can say is just to skip this one.