ULTRAMAN TARO: GREAT MONSTER THE 30 (Bandai, 1991)

 

Here is an item that took me by surprise.  You may recall that we reviewed both the ULTRAMAN and ULTRASEVEN "Great Monster the 30" figure sets, a while back, but I didn't know this existed!

So these are 30-figure sets that are basically "keshi," a category of soft rubber, gashapon-type Japanese figures (sometimes even including erasers). Each set includes the hero Ultra, and 29 kaiju from his series.

To American eyes, these are highly reminiscent of the awesome M.U.S.C.L.E. 28-packs that we had over here (and hey, those were connected to Bandai too, so there you go):

Back to our set at hand, here is the back of the box:

While the previous two sets included a die and a colorful game board, enabling you to play a board game with the figures (because Japan), this one does not, and instead gives you a heavy sheet of die-cut labels:

Interestingly, there isn't very much "Taro" content in the stickers...in fact, all of the kaiju pictured are from other shows.  There is good reason for this, because by this point in the lineage, the shows were beginning to show some fatigue, and the enemy designs were starting to suffer.  There were still some high points, but some were just forgettable. Lots of feathers and dangly things.

Here are the contents of the set.  How many can you name? The answer for me is, "precious few." And I will admit it!

After puzzling over these, I went to the booklet for the blu-rays, and then realized lots of the spellings are pretty knackered up, so I resorted to correcting as many of these as I could via online sources...so here are the names:

So my main take-away from this is:  does this mean there is a RETURN OF ULTRAMAN set (Jack, that is) that exists somewhere? If so, sign me up.  The first three shows were the best. It makes me wonder how many of the classic shows had sets in this line.  It's extremely hard to find any information online about these, but I am digging away.

As you can probably tell, I have sort of a love-hate relationship with the last few classic Ultra shows.  They tend to be hit-and-miss sometimes.  With Taro, it seems like he is always having to be rescued by his mama. I was still very happy to discover this one, though.  I will always take more classic Ultra!