Bonus: The boys and I were Big Friends in a New Jersey shopping mall at Ultraman Live
I can’t deny that Ultraman Live was a pretend superhero show for little tiny babies. It was also the coolest shit I ever saw in my life.
(This was going to be a part of the Anime NJ++ feature from a while back, but the Amemiya stuff got rather long, and so did the Ultraman stuff… so I cut it out into its own thing. And I concluded that really, if I wrote over 2000 words on a single weekend, the rest should only go to people who pay me.)
Ultraman is a kids’ superhero. You must remember this simple fact. My middle-aged pals and I were reminded over and over again, as we followed Ultraman Live from New Jersey to New York.
I feel like Western tokusatsu fans don’t have to face up to this fact the way their Japanese counterparts do, because we’re largely online. As with anime in the old days, we experience these series outside of their original cultural context. We’re among other nerdy adults, raving about costume design and choreography, speculating about what the series writer is up to this time, and bitching about ugly CG. We don’t have to admit that we’re among six-year-olds, because we don't see them. But it's the six-year-olds who run the show. And we forget that.
Over a decade ago, for a Kawaiikochans project that never fully came to be, two friends who worked at M2 at the time (thank you Mandi! Thank you Chibi!) introduced me to Pripara, the addictive idol dress-up-and-dance arcade game made for real little girls. First, they took me to arcades with amenities for Pripara-loving adults: adult-size seating for the tiny cabinets, even cabs wired up to capture cards to stream or record your performance. I even exchanged friend tickets with other Pripara nerds at a bar with a “take one, leave one” tray for the game.
And then, as a final trial, the ladies took me to the kids’ floor at Yodobashi Camera in Akiba, a place where actual children play. “This is the real experience,” they told me, as I, a six-foot something, twenty-something man, stood politely in line with Japanese elementary school children in order to crouch before a Pripara. Understand you’re an adult playing with kids’ toys, accept that you love it anyway, and own it in front of the world. But above all, remember that it’s there for them. You’re a Big Friend.
I feel like you should have to perform a ritual like this to be inducted as a toku fan. Of course, the scene would have to be the traditional hero live show, where guys in costumes perform choreographed battles in front of a cheering audience of little ones and their parents, typically at a mall. The real kid stuff, the kind of thing where at the end we all cheer “GO ULTRA HEROES” to give the good guys the power to win. Something exactly like Ultraman Live.
I can’t deny that Ultraman Live was a pretend superhero show for little tiny babies. It was also the coolest shit I ever saw in my life.
