The trail­er for Shin Ultra­man keeps Japan at the top of the reboot game

In the Eng­lish-speak­ing world, the aver­age kid’s strongest famil­iar­i­ty with the Japan­ese tra­di­tion of SFX-dri­ven live-action known as tokusat­su would prob­a­bly be Pow­er Rangers, the long-run­ning TV show about a group of mech-pilot­ing super­heroes. That show was derived from a Japan­ese pro­gram called Super Sen­tai, which was itself a take­off from the ​’60s clas­sic Ultra­man – an impor­tant lin­eage in light of the recent news that Ultra­man will soon get a sil­ver-screen reboot.

A trail­er appeared over the week­end for Toho Stu­dios’ upcom­ing Shin Ultra­man, which will give the big-bud­get treat­ment to the alien char­ac­ter. (He’s tech­ni­cal­ly a sym­biote who takes over a host’s body, turns 50 storeys tall, and fights gar­gan­tu­an mon­sters called kai­ju. Some­where, Ven­om is seething with jeal­ousy.) In the brief 30-sec­ond clip below, he tan­gles with a large mutant tur­tle and does his trade­mark rock­et-jump into the sky, all of it buffed to a shiny CGI polish.

Hopes for the project are high, in part because enthu­si­asts of this par­tic­u­lar genre remem­ber how well Shin Godzil­la turned out back in 2016, with the same cre­ative team (Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion cre­ator Hidea­ki Anno being the secret-weapon screen­writer) and the same aes­thet­ic of tech­ni­cal sophis­ti­ca­tion with­in throw­back fun. Unlike the recent Amer­i­can-made Godzil­la films, there was no po-faced sense of momen­tous­ness, as Toho stuck to the unse­ri­ous tone of the orig­i­nal while intro­duc­ing new wrin­kles to the time-test­ed formula.

Toho now has designs for a whole ​‘Shin Japan Heroes Uni­verse’ con­nect­ing the recent­ly refreshed Godzil­la, Ultra­man, and an upcom­ing reboot of Kamen Rid­er (the smash ​’70s TV series about an insect-themed motor­cy­cling bat­tler of beasts). They’re clear­ly tak­ing cues from their equiv­a­lents in the West, con­sol­i­dat­ing rec­og­niz­able brands under a sin­gle ban­ner that the pub­lic can iden­ti­fy and trust to deliv­er com­pa­ra­ble enjoy­ment in future releases.

Maybe it’s just because Toho’s grand under­tak­ing is still in its infan­cy, but they seem to be off to a bet­ter start than their Hol­ly­wood com­peti­tors, well aware of the appeal their prop­er­ties had in the first place and not get­ting bogged down in mythol­o­gy for its own sake. The most impor­tant part of giv­ing the peo­ple what they want is actu­al­ly giv­ing it to them, as fate would have it.