Directed by Yasushi Okada. Written by Yasushi Hirano. Airdate Feb. 15, 1997.
Children have appeared in several key roles in Ultraman Tiga so far, but this is the first episode to give kids the starring roles. In a return to the style of the Showa era — those wild days when mobs of unsupervised children roamed freely among the monster-haunted cities — we have a child gang at the center of the story. These monster-hunting kids don’t capture the anarchic spirit of the Golden Age child mobs, but they add touches of interest and humor to what’s otherwise a tame, routine monster-of-the-week affair.
Horii and Daigo meet the Monster Expedition Squad while investigating an occurrence of acidic fog in the small city of Ritoma. (Yes, we’re already back to deadly fog as a plot device.) The Squad is a mix of ages: the oldest, Yuya, is a teen, and the youngest, his sister Yuka, looks to be about six. Yuka wears a stereotypical Native American headdress and costume, and the two 12-year-old boys are dressed like a pirate and cowboy. Let’s get those Village People jokes out of our systems now. We good? Okay, moving on…
The story treads familiar “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” territory. The townspeople think these imaginative kids are troublesome delinquents and liars. When the kids say they heard the roar of a monster in the acid fog, the town doesn’t believe them. Horii and Daigo are willing to give the Squad an opportunity to prove themselves. Unfortunately, little Yuka playing around the firecrackers ends up rousing the giant monster that wants to consume the exhaust fumes from cars.
I’m inclined to enjoy child-centered Ultra episodes. They often travel in strange directions with bizarre, surreal slants, such as Ultraman’s “Terrifying Cosmic Rays,” Ultra Q’s “Kanegon’s Cocoon,” and Return of Ultraman’s “In Between a Devil and an Angel.” So I’m willing to give the kids in this episode some leeway. I don’t think they’re that annoying, even when they act like pests and get in the way of Horii and Daigo’s job.
There’s an offbeat charm to the Squad’s antics, which are accompanied by a whimsical woodwind theme. Yuka playing with the buttons in the GUTS SUV, triggering a laser cannon to fire and blow up a sign, is the type of kid slapstick I can enjoy. That laser cannon gag comes back in an important way in the finale when the kids get to take part in battling the giant monster they accidentally woke up. It’s the least they can do after Yuka messed up with those firecrackers.
Putting the kids in an episode where Horii plays a large part was a smart move. Horii’s essentially a big kid himself, with similar energy. Even as he acts exasperated with the pack of children, he’s in rhythm with their performances.
The monster action of the episode is tepid. The technical execution is fine, but nothing about it is noteworthy. The kaiju, Litomalus, is an “upside-down” monster costume where the head and mouth are on the ground, and the stunt performer is in the body and tail that rise over the head. Twin Tail from Return of Ultraman is the most famous of these flipped designs. Litomalus is far more awkward than Twin Tail, however, and the fight with Tiga makes only an occasional use of the upside-down look.
The episode wraps up with a simplistic message about pollution, one of the classic thematic villains in children’s media, especially in Japan during its pollution crisis (see: Godzilla vs. Hedorah). In Ultraman Tiga’s utopian future, pollution has been eliminated. Shinjoh remarks he hasn’t heard the word “pollution” in years. This interesting bit of world-building makes me more forgiving of the trite way the script trots out its little moral. Well, if we’ve got a kid-centric episode, we might as well have a kid-tested environmental message.
Rating: Mediocre
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