Directed by Hirochika Muraishi. Written by Minoru Kawasaki and Hirochika Muraishi. Airdate Nov. 30, 1996.
Young Shinichi is walking home alone one night — not an activity I recommend for third graders — when he sees a strange “crow man” using a ray gun to shrink and capture a pedestrian on the street. Thankfully, Shinichi is Shinjoh’s cousin, so he can call GUTS headquarters directly to inform them of the new threat. Because of a recent spate of vanishings in the area, Shinjoh and Daigo go to check out the kid’s story. They encounter the mystery crow-headed man, who uses his shrinking ray to nab Shinichi and then escape.
And so the setup for another alien invasion story is underway. As GUTS discovers when they track the crow aliens to their headquarters, Alien Raybeak is seeking to replenish the dwindling slave-labor race on their home planet. Humans are the best substitute slave stock they’ve found. They’ve got a collection of captured humans they’ve shrunk down for easy transport and possibly savings on shipping costs.
But the episode has a cool trick up its sleeve to make it stand apart from other invasion stories. It’s not a plot twist or an Akio Jissoji-style reality warp; the story proceeds in a straight line as Alien Raybeak follows the Ultra series Handbook for Alien Invaders. No, the surprise is … no giant monster! This is a kaiju-less episode. That doesn’t mean it isn’t action-packed. The action is just at human scale (and Raybeak scale). When Daigo transforms into Tiga, he stays at human size and takes on the Raybeaks in a martial arts tussle.
This type of fight sequence is what we expect from a Kamen Rider show, but the Ultraman Tiga team does an excellent job making their version exciting. Tiga kicks and punches a whole bunch of these bird-headed nitwits and knocks them over railings and into piles of boxes placed strategically around a classic Action Movie Abandoned Factory. All the good ol’ 1990s punch-punch-flip-kick stuff. Other GUTS team members get involved in the battle by shooting laser guns and throwing a few punches of their own. It’s a nice change to see GUTS working directly beside Tiga on something closer to equal footing.
Alien Raybeak is fairly silly-looking, but in a charming way. They were obviously designed as cost-effective creatures: stuntmen in off-the-rack black suits and wearing bird-shaped heads with glowing eyes. But they’re cost-effective memorable. They make enjoyably snide and humorous villains, one of the many species of petty aliens in the Ultra universe who cackle a lot but have bitten off far more than they can chew.
Tiga does eventually take on his giant form for the finale (sorry, Alien Raybeak, you can’t successfully shrink someone who has growth powers), but he doesn’t battle a giant monster. The Raybeaks apparently can’t afford a guardian kaiju, so they try to take on Tiga with their spaceship. The sequence is an exciting throwback to some Ultraseven episodes where alien craft were the final bosses. I can’t imagine anyone finding the action disappointing just because no kaiju shows up.
Even without a giant monster, “Human Collection” doesn’t depart radically from what viewers want in an Ultraman Tiga episode. It promises buoyant entertainment and delivers. There’s no science mystery, just GUTS and Tiga attempting to rescue Shinjoh’s cousin (and those other shrunken people, whoever they are) from funny-looking aliens running a casual interplanetary slavery racket. Shinjoh gets some character focus — I like the running joke that he has to keep demanding that Shinichi not call him “Uncle” — but it’s primarily a team effort until Tiga begins kicking crow.
This is a great example of Ultraman Tiga at its most streamlined fun. Nothing heavy, no big science-fiction ideas, just “go for it!” energy. The story zips past with an action-adventure pulse and has amusing villains you enjoy seeing get punched. They get punched a lot.
I admire the willingness of the creative team to try anything for at least one episode. This freedom gives Ultraman Tiga a freshness that later shows often lack. But I wish they’d done a few more episodes with Tiga at human size smacking around aliens using whatever martial art Ultra warriors learn. It expands the type of action scenarios Tiga can get involved in and lets him interact on a face-to-face level with the rest of the cast, even if it’s just to grunt and point somewhere.
Rating: Great
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