“In Rebuild of Evangelion, Misato also drives a white Mazda Cosmo Sport 110 (with a red racing stripe). It’s possible that Hideaki Anno, being a fan, purposely used the Mazda Cosmo as a nod to Return of Ultraman, where the car was often featured.”
License plate with digits “1971”? Guess what year “Return of Ultraman” was!
That’s pretty boss.
Great post! Great Tumblr!In 2001, the lead actor of ULTRAMAN COSMOS, Takayasu Sugiura, was involved in a scandal. He’d been accused of extorting money from and assaulting an unknown person. Unfortunately, once this came out and Japanese media caught wind, Tsuburaya initiated a Scorched Earth maneuver.
It’s not entirely surprising, nor is this the first time this has ever happened; just ask L’arc~en~ciel or Ami Suzuki. In this case, the final episodes of COSMOS which had already been filmed were condensed into two compilation specials with Musashi (Sugiura’s character and alter-ego of Cosmos) edited out. This would have extended to the second Cosmos movie, ULTRAMAN COSMOS 2: THE BLUE PLANET, which was then about to hit Japanese theaters. That is until the worst possible thing happened: Sugiura was cleared of all charges.
Yep, turns out the unknown person recanted a lot of the story, fearing retribution from a gang, and leaving Tsuburaya in a bit of a jam. To rectify the whole thing, the original final episodes were aired, making COSMOS the 2nd longest Ultra Series with 63 episodes, and the unaltered cut of BLUE PLANET was released. This was a bit of a shame since in its wake, they’d started to air episodes of ULTRAMAN NEOS. (The show was ironically supposed to be made for TV but after being kicked around for years, it ended up as a straight-to-DVD series.) However, upon his return, Musashi started the episode with this message to kids everywhere.
For extensive information on the scandal, check out this page. Though ever since this happened, I’ve always wondered what the Musashi-less edit of BLUE PLANET looks like….
