Halloween is a holiday that has and still is evolving to this day. Having its origins in Europe but then very much becoming what it is in the Americas and coming back to Europe. But what of other countries ? They do see it primarily as an American holiday and it’s having its ups and downs. So let’s see how a giant of light deals with the holiday and what it might use it for its own ends.

Ultraman Tiga is an important series for the Ultra franchise. It’s the first series in Japan in the Hesei period and the first one since the hiatus following the underperformance of Ultraman 80, there were smaller works and attempts at international shows but Tiga is viewed as the big return series. Ultraman Tiga is also one of the few series with a Halloween episode. The episode on Halloween night aired in 1996 and the holiday is still a bit of a iffy one in Japan not fully integrated but it’s a fun little holiday, to go through the ins and outs of how they treat it would be going way past what is needed for this review. But maybe look into it yourself if you are intrigued.

The first thing  (after the opening and… oh the can of worms trying to explain what happened with that) that occurs in this episode is GUTS ( Global Unlimited Task Squad ) detecting a strange magnetic field. They are going to go out and investigate it but their boss points out that will cause panic at this time when people are just out to have fun, therefore go in Halloween costumes so people aren’t tipped off.  Our lead Daigo (another can of worms there) while having a bit of childish fun, notices that the witch handing out big lollipops has no shadow and chases after her, finding himself in a strange mansion that while the rest of GUTS can detect, they can’t see.

For you see this Witch is actually the evil entity Gilanbo that every Halloween has been kidnapping children around the world, devouring their dreams leaving them white skinned husks… if you have seen some J Horror with ghost kids, they look like that.

It’s worth noting in my point about Japan and Halloween, that we don’t get another Ultraman Halloween episode till R/B 2018 over 20 years later.

I liked this episode. It does keep the slightly creepy nature of the holiday though with entirely western used designs for the iconography rather than incorporating some of the many nightmarish creatures from Japanese myths. The monster’s lair takes the form of a big pumpkin that then gets lifted up during Tiga’s rise sequence. And this is a Hesiei era design of the monsters that just had a different feel to them bit more scary that I don’t see as the standard in modern Ultraman shows with the exception of Blazar.

Well there’s one more week of Halloween reviews, and I need to think of something… then again this talk about Halloween and Japan reminded me of something, there was a second episode of Digimon Ghost Game set during the Holiday.

Rating: 🧙🧙🧙