Mill Creek Entertainment announced this past week
that the company had acquired domestic distribution rights to the entire
Tsuburaya Productions Co., Ltd Ultraman
library. Over 50 years of programming,
which represents in excess of 1,100 series episodes and 20 feature films.
This is a big one and Mill Creek wasted no time in
setting Oct. 15 as the street date for Blu-ray sets of both Ultra Q:
Complete Series 01 and Ultraman:
Complete Series 02 … Steelbook special editions
will be available on Oct. 15 as well.
When domestic audiences were gathered around their
TV sets in 1966 to watch Star Trek,
half a world away Japanese audiences were treated to Ultra Q, a
“Kaiju” (literally translated as giant monsters or beasts … think along the
lines of Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra and you will be in the right ball park)
anthology of stories and weird tales featuring exotic beasts, dragons, aliens,
you name it and Ultra Q
threw in just about everything, including ghostly aberrations.
A reporter (Hiroko Sakurai) and a sci-fi writer/aviator
(Kenji Sahara) are the forerunners to the X Files’
Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, who investigate and report on the various creatures
that are among us.
All 28 episodes in the Ultra Q
series will be available on Blu-ray as a four-disc collection … with Digital
Copy as a bonus. These are the original
Japanese-language broadcast episodes (with optional English subtitles).
Also arriving on Oct. 15 is the first installment in
the Ultraman
series. With the huge success of Ultra Q, Tsuburaya
Productions sprung into action and quickly developed a slew of “Ultra” series adventures
that continue to run to this day.
The
first of these was a 39-episode series titled Ultraman,
which starred Susumu Kurobe as “Ultraman,” Akiji Kobayashi as the leader of “The
Science Patrol” and both Kenji Sahara and Hiroko Sakurai are back, but in
different personas.
More monsters, more aliens … bigger, bigger, bigger
and even more exciting with a member of Earth’s defense force, “The Space
Patrol,” as the hero who is the very mysterious “Ultraman” — he can who grow to
a giant size in order to battle monsters and save the earth!!!
Ultraman will
be available as a six-disc collection on Blu-ray, with Digital Copy as a
bonus. Ultraman is
also presented in its original Japanese broadcast form, with English subtitles.
67 episodes down … Mill Creek Entertainment is just
getting started. Stay tuned fans!!!
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