Directed by Akio Jissoji. Written by Mamoru Sasaki. Airdate March 5, 1967.
Have you ever watched an episode of Ultraman and thought, “This is fun, but I wish the show was structured more like a Road Runner cartoon?” Good news, there’s an episode just for you! Really, an episode for everyone, because “A Gift From the Sky” is a hilarious farce that flattens the show’s formula into a prolonged Sisyphean comedy. It’s the episode with the line “Aim for its butthole” and where Hayata mistakenly tries to use a spoon to transform into Ultraman.
Instead of a standard story, we just have a premise: a big, apparently indestructible monster has fallen from the sky, and the SSSP can’t move the damn thing. They try one plan after another to push the heavy kaiju back into space and keep failing. Ultraman doesn’t fare any better than the Science Patrol.
We open with scenes of possible “gifts” from the sky: snow, rain, umbrellas, and suicide jumpers. Fuji delights in a pretty snowfall outside HQ windows. Captain Muramatsu gets caught in a downpour. Hayata takes a Jet VTOL to drop an umbrella down to the captain, a spectacular waste of SSSP funds and a potential danger to bystanders. And Ide watches a man leap to his death from a building. It’s an extremely weird, dark moment. Yet, because of the general absurdity of the episode, it doesn’t detract from the overall tone. It certainly prepares viewers to have their normal expectations shattered.
The next thing to fall from the sky is the problem kaiju: Skydon, a large quadruped that resembles an Ankylosaurus. Skydon is slow-moving and spends most of its time sleeping, creating sporadic danger. More of an annoyance. After a conventional scene where the SSSP discovers that their weapons can’t harm Skydon, they decide they must lift the monster off into space. Now — how to do that?
The rest of the episode is one failed attempt after another to get Skydon up into the sky where it came from. Each of these operations is introduced with a title card:
- Operation Wire Lock: Basic attempt to airlift Skydon using the Jet VTOLs and wires. When that doesn’t work, Ultraman jumps in to solve everything. He doesn’t.
- Operation Autogyro: Attach a propeller device, like a giant propeller beanie, onto Skydon to lift it up.
- Operation Rocket: Shoot a rocket into Skydon to blast it up into space. This is the trick the SSSP used on Gamakugira in “The Pearl Defense Directive.” It worked there. It doesn’t here.
- Operation Monster Balloonization: Inflate Skydon with lighter-than-air gas. This is where the “aim for the butthole” line comes in.
Each operation is a humorous dance of frustration. The Science Patrol teeters on the edge of success several times, only to have it collapse and send them dashing away to think up the next scheme that won’t work. Operation Rocket is the funniest of the segments: great kaiju slapstick and accompanying music.
Ultraman’s intervention arrives earlier than usual, which signals to viewers that our hero isn’t going to be able to solve the Skydon problem either, at least not with his normal battle tactics. The “fight” with Skydon is the episode’s best piece of self-parody: Skydon doesn’t fight, it just lies there as Ultraman pounds it futilely with his fists or tries to lift it or flip it over. Ultraman essentially loses the fight by forfeit.
A lot of the humor comes from small character moments when the Science Patrol members are sitting around, tired and irritated. The cast plays these parts perfectly. There’s one priceless shot of the SSSP in a tableau of exhaustion in HQ where Ide is trimming his nose hairs. Hayata’s spoon mistake is an iconic moment that’s often been referenced in later shows. And there’s plenty more; I could be here for a long time going through all the jokes, but you should just go watch them for yourself.
I won’t spoil the solution that actually works, but it isn’t spectacularly clever. I don’t think anything could provide a punch line that would live up to the jokes before it. It’s better for the event to just end, the same way Road Runner cartoons do. Like the black comedy touch at the beginning, this shrug of an ending doesn’t diminish the episode’s success.
At the helm of this farce is, no surprise, Akio Jissoji. After directing two intense episodes in a row, he must have enjoyed working again with outright comedy. It’s one of the less visually idiosyncratic of his Ultraman episodes, but it’s the most narratively experimental — because it largely tosses the narrative out. Prime Jissoji.
I wrote this review in the middle of working on the first run of Ultraman Ginga episodes, and it made me realize how much we need episodes like this in the Ultra Series — and how rarely we get them now. These experimental episodes are a reason I fell in love with the franchise in the first place. Ultraman can have an absurdist comedy like “A Gift From the Sky” and an emotional tragedy like “My Home Is Earth” (with the same director!) and have both end up as masterpieces. That’s one of the marvels of the Showa era Ultra Series.
Rating: Classic
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