Tsuburaya Productions has had a great anime year reviving one of its Tokusatsu franchises with SSSS.Gridman, and they hope to keep that going strong with a brand new anime version of Ultraman as well.
Videos by ComicBook.com
To help amp up the finale of SSSS.Gridman and the upcoming release of Ultraman, Tsuburaya shared a new promo for the two series crossing over the two central heroes in a cool way.
The new crossover promo sees Gridman (Hikaru Midorikawa) introducing himself to the newest hero, and essentially passing on the torch. Ultraman (Ryohei Kimura) is unsure about his mission as of this point, but the two heroes confide in one another as they prepare for the future. The rest of the promo reveals footage from the upcoming Ultraman, which is releasing on Netflix in 2019.
Debuting on Netflix worldwide on April 1, 2019, Netflix officially describes Ultraman as such, “Several years have passed since the events of Ultraman, with the legendary “Giant of Light” now a memory, as it is believed he returned home after fighting the many giant aliens that invaded the Earth. Shin Hayata’s son Shinjiro seems to possess a strange ability, and it is this ability, along with his father’s revelation that he was Ultraman, that leads Shinjiro to battle the new aliens invading the Earth as the new Ultraman.”
Ultraman will be directed by Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex) and Shinji Aramaki (Appleseed Alpha) for Production I.G and SOLA Digital Arts. Nobuko Toda and Kazuma Jinnouchi will compose the music for the series, and the initial voice cast for the series includes Ryohei Kimura, Takuya Eguchi, Megumi Han, and Hideyuki Tanaka.
The new series is based off of Eiichi Shimizu and Tomohiro Shiguchi’s ULTRAMAN manga, which is a sequel to the 1966 Ultraman television series and began running in Shogakukan’s Monthly Hero magazine November 2011, and has been collected into ten volumes as of 2017. The manga has been licensed by Viz Media for an English language release in 2015.
As for SSSS.Gridman, the series has officially wrapped and currently can be found streaming on Crunchyroll and FunimationNOW (with English dub). It’s described as such:
“You’re not alone. On any day, anywhere. Yuta Hibiki, a first-year high school student living in Tsutsujidai, one day wakes up to find he has lost his memories. He meets the “Hyper Agent Gridman” on his old computer, and Gridman says that Yuta has a mission he must fulfill, so Yuta sets out to find the meaning to those words and his memory loss. Yuta’s friends, Sho Utsumi, Rikka Takarada, and Akane Shinjo, would always help him and spend their days with him. But, their tranquil days are suddenly and easily crushed with the appearance of kaiju.”
