Hyper Agent Gridman, or Gridman: The Hyper Agent depending on your translation, was a 1993 Japanese TV series in which someone at Tsuburaya Productions decided to meld Ultraman with Tron. A group of kids build their own computer, Junk (named after what it was made out of), that accidentally connected to the computer Hyper World. There they teamed with the Hyper Agent Gridman, one member even combining with him, to fight monsters in the digital domain and challenge a villain working with an Earthling boy who is also their fellow student who takes his aggressions out by creating monsters for the enemy. If that sounds familiar, the show was reworked by DIC in the style of Power Rangers to create Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad. Yes, they spelled “cyber” wrong to keep a theme going.
If you’re curious about either show, Gridman is up on Tubi and Pluto TV as of this writing, while SSSS is just on Sling. They used to have it on YouTube, but that’s no longer the case legally.
SSSS Gridman, and you can guess what inspired that title, was the first in the Gridman Universe series proper, spinning off from the live-action series into anime. This 2018 anime decides to bring the monsters into the real world, with a new group of kids teaming with Gridman. Only now, Gridman can also journey to our world, which frankly takes away what set it apart from it’s Ultra-cousins. Crunchyroll has this series and it’s spinoff as Funimation did the original English dub, and that’s now owned by Crunchyroll. However, that requires a subscription.
Since they own the dub, I’m surprise the subtitled version just recently popped up on the Japanese Ultraman YouTube channel, but I’m not surprised the dub isn’t on their English channel, nor is there a dub track on the Japanese channel like they’ve done with Ultraman. You’ll need to turn on the closed captions, and since they took down the original series a long time ago, you may want to watch fast. Episode one introduces Yuta Hibiki, a new character who has lost his memories and can connect to Gridman, who needs him to complete his mission. Luckily he makes some friends who can help him in his fight when a kaiju enters the real world, and brings a host of other questions along with it. Enjoy it while you can, as it may only be here long enough to promote the booster pack for the Ultraman card game. Hopefully it’s still up at post time. Sorry to disappoint if it isn’t.
It’s pretty cool that despite being an anime it still frames the battles as it would in live-action, giving it a unique look in anime while paying tribute to the source material. (US studios should take notes, but they won’t.) I hope that SSSS Dynazenon and Gridman Universe, continued the trend, but I can’t watch either of them to find out. Dynazenon also have a live-action spin-off of its own, Gridnight Fight, bringing the franchise full circle. I only know it exists as a DVD bonus feature and from the sample video at the Ultraman Fandom wiki, I’m not all that impressed.
