Ultra Seven

remember the days when we watched our Japanese superheroes on grainy VHS tapes in raw Japanese?

Dan watches Miclas battle Eleking

these days we can see them in great quality and many times with subtitles provided by some talented fans.

we have here Ultra Seven episode #3, "The Secret of the Lake" which is one of the more popular episodes in the series.  it has Eleking as the main monster and it's a great design for this beast.  Eleking was created by the Pitt aliens (two young girls) intent on conquering the Earth.  which most of the aliens in the series were intent upon.

we also get to see Miclas in action, who is the second of Seven's capsule monsters. he's pretty cool looking, sort of like a big ol' monster buffalo.

energy bolts from Eleking

Ultra Seven is a really good series, some fans consider it superior to the original Ultraman.  it's been dubbed into English twice, once in the 70s in Hawai'i.  this dub is not very good, but it is very faithful to the original scripts, as opposed to the Cinar/TNT dub from the 90s which had better actors but didn't do justice to the original tone of the series.

having just seen them these ways, I wouldn't have said it was my favorite Ultra Show.  but now, thanks to the fansubs it's really quite good.  it's a fine combination between superheroes and science fiction, which is not an easy thing to do for the most part.  Eleking did show up later on, in Ultra Fight, Ultraman Taro and Ultraman Mebius.

the battle between Seven and Eleking