From what I can gather the Ultraman festival is an annual event sponsored by Tsuburaya Productions for fans of the Ultra family. The festival includes a live stage show featuring the various Ultra heroes fighting an army of monsters and interacting with the audience. Just forget everyone is oddly human-sized. This takes place in Japan and to my knowledge they don’t do this elsewhere. It would be like the BBC sponsoring a Doctor Who festival in Japan. It’s probably not happening.
The official Ultraman YouTube channel has a subtitled version of 2018’s stage show. I don’t know why it’s the only one, but I thought I had already posted it here for a Saturday Night Showcase. I was going to link to it in last night’s Art Of Storytelling discussion on plays, so this isn’t going to be a trend of following an AOS article with a sample in SNS. However, since I haven’t posted it and it’s a good fit why not do so tonight? This highlights the use of virtual sets and how they use the video walls to showcase the energy blast powers of the various Ultramen. It also shows how the play manages to get the audience involved, and since kids make up the majority of the audience this is a very good thing.
Ultra Live Stage for 2018 actually features two adventures but they do tie together. The first story has the studio audience visiting the Land Of Light, where they meet some of the latest Ultra Heroes of the time as well as an Ultrawoman scientist who has created a device that can turn cheers into light energy the heroes need. (It makes more sense when she describes it.) It will be put to the test when the visit is interrupted by evil monsters. The second has a group out for revenge against the champions of Nebula M-78, which will also bring in the audience and their magic cheer power. Now the video itself is in Japanese, but there are subtitles if you turn on the closed caption settings on the player, for those of us English-speakers who don’t understand Japanese. The songs are not translated, like in the previous official Ultraman videos, but at least you can follow the story and cheer on our heroes. Enjoy!
