GHWP Live Tweet Tuesday, September 22, 2015 - Ulysses 31 Test Run & More The Hypnotic Eye

     I've been thinking ahead about what I intend to do when Spectreman eventually runs its course. There are 16 episodes until the finale as of this writing, and padding them out with reruns doesn't prevent the fact that the series will be done in November. My rerun Tuesdays don't get a lot of traffic, and although I imagine I will run the entire series through a second time, there is a lot more out there. It's hard to top Spectreman with the weird and obscure, and there is almost no other tokusatsu material available on YouTube in a complete form to suggest it being worth making a new live tweet subject.

     I would very much like to do the series Kamen Rider Black, but doing so would require going outside the boundaries of YouTube and downloading fan-subtitled versions ahead of time. This might be a problem for some of the audience, especially when some tweeters show up late or right on time expecting a simple link. This was my first pure Japanese introduction to the Kamen Rider franchise (I say "pure Japanese" because I saw it just a few short years after the American Masked Rider had run its rocky and overly childish course), and I grew to love it rather quickly. I only had a bootleg fansub VHS of the first four episodes for many years before centurykings.com created fansubs for the entire series, and it still remains close to my heart. It would be a nice follow-up in the Japanese superhero genre to Spectreman, but, again, I don't know how everyone would accept something that doesn't use YouTube as a viewing source. I might give it a test run in the near future and see how well it works.

Nevertheless, the entire series with fan subtitles is available for download at centurykings.com.

     In the meantime, I am going to pull something else out of my weird childhood from around the same time as Spectreman. The television channel Nickelodeon and I are almost exactly the same age. My peculiar childhood had me watching the early years of cable fairly frequently, waking up in the morning to the preschool teachings of Pinwheel and moving on to premium channels like HBO and The Movie Channel to see Filipino-made Vietnam War movies and even some Italian zombie gore. I was terribly under-supervised as a child, but I do remember beginning to watch the movie My Tutor and my stepfather putting his foot down and changing the channel. He was a little late with that sort of parenting because I'd seen movies like that already, not to mention that he never really was much of a parent in general. I'd piss on him if he were on fire, but I'd probably toast a marshmallow first. The topic of sex in television went over my head completely at that age anyway (and stayed there until I was about nineteen). But I digress.
     I covered the spectrum of television early, and what didn't make sense just went in one eye and out the other. I was an active outdoor child, believe it or not, but I probably took in about 25 hours of television or more a week. Sunday mornings, I typically was not up very early, but I still remember one Sunday morning that I tuned in to Nickelodeon (?) to see what was on. I wasn't much a fan of Nick programming on weekends, but I woke up to a gem. I never woke up early enough again to see more than that one episode, but Ulysses 31 stuck with me for years.

     In my online research, I have not found anything about Ulysses 31 airing on Nickelodeon at all, so my memory just might be skewed at to which channel I watched it on in the first place. I only remember for certain that it was a Sunday. Kideo TV sure doesn't ring any bells, but I might have run across it on a local station some Sunday morning. Ulysses 31 was one of several co-French/Japanese anime series that--I thought--aired on Nickelodeon with its brethren such as Belle and Sebastien, The Little Prince, and The Mysterious Cities of Gold, but I suppose that I might be less positive of the broadcast details than I realized. In any case, Ulysses 31 was the first series to come out of DiC Entertainment in 1981, and it aired in several countries and languages. It didn't however, make it to the United States until 1986, and even that was a short-lived run. However and whenever I saw it, the theme song and the futuristic space action jumped out at me immediately. I was attending Sunday School a lot in those early years, and it always struck me odd that Ulysses looked a lot like Jesus Christ in a space suit.

Though I always would question which disciple the robot was supposed to represent.

     The premise was simple: take the Greek mythology of The Odyssey and throw it into the 31st Century. In this story, the gods of Olympus rule the far reaches of space, and they are the same old gods out of the old storybooks: vengeful, selfish, and arrogant. Ulysses, in his spaceship The Odyssey (of course) has lost his son Telemachus, and he discovers that the cult of the giant robotic Cyclops has abducted Telemachus and several other children with intent to sacrifice them to the mechanical beast in exchange for prolonged life. Ulysses and his crew manage to save the children and destroy the Cyclops, but they don't realize until it is too late that they have defied the will of the gods. You know how the old Greek gods were with their love of sacrifices. Zeus himself appears before Ulysses, telling him of his folly, and he turns the crew of the Odyssey to stone. Ulysses is cursed with the quest to roam the galaxy without the help of his crew until he finds the kingdom of Hades. Only then will Ulysses' people be restored and allowed to return home. Thus begins this strange space journey that follows a number of updated mythological stories across twenty-six episodes.

     Like Spectreman, I think Ulysses 31 wanders away from being a children's show just enough to make it a good riffing subject, but it will be up to you, the viewers, to decide whether or not you think this could be a worthy successor to the exploits of the cyborg hero and his space ape nemesis. Tune in to the #GHWP hashtag at 11PM EST on Tuesday, September 22, 2015, for the single-episode Spectreman story "Titanic Battle Seven Giant Monsters," and then stick around for the first episode of Ulysses 31.

Addendum: If, for some reason, Ulysses 31 doesn't go over well, I'm going to toss another episode of The Hypnotic Eye on the playlist, so we've got a full two hours if you feel like staying up late.