011: SoraRabbit Watches: Grow up! Little Turtle

Okay, remember the post I recently did about the Ultra Series? Well, I'm working on an entire post for Ultra Q, but in my review of the episodes, I came across what I believe to be one of the two most bonkers episodes in the series. (Of course, I'm not all the way through yet, so prove me wrong, Ultra Q. Prove me wrong!) So I figured this would be the perfect first installment of my new series SoraRabbit Watches. My intention with these posts is to give a summary of an episode or season of television and my thoughts on it. (Any ensuing snark is done with love.) I am currently working on full season reviews of three shows. One, obviously, is Ultra Q. The others will remain surprises for now.

In my Ultra Q post I'll fill you all in on the premise and characters. You don't need to know much of that for this post. Basically the series is a black and white anthology from 1966 that follows a reporter and two pilots on adventures involving the supernatural, aliens, and Kaiju. It's an excellent show, very entertaining and ahead of its time.

With that said, forget all that because today we're not going to be talking about a serious sci fi adventure show. No, today we're going to be talking about a bratty kid, his inexplicably magical turtle, and an adventure with an uncertain moral. This post is about the very strange Ultra Q Episode 6: Grow up! Little Turtle.

Humph. Turtle nerds. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

The episode begins in a classroom. An intense teacher is scribbling all over a blackboard while a boy is goofing off with his pet turtle who's on a string for some reason. The kid, Taro, is obsessed with his turtle's length and weight. (And... shell gloss? Well alrighty then.) The other kids seem oddly interested too. Maybe they're just humoring him? At any rate, Taro is a strange one and could use all the humoring he could get. The one person with zero humor is the teacher, who’s sick of Taro and his turtle.

How DARE you have a turtle? (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

Taro explains his turtle fixation. He believes if he grows his turtle to 99 cm, the turtle (which is never given a name in the episode-- more on that later) will fly him to the Dragon Palace. (Ooookay.) Poor delusional kid. (Hmm, his only wish is for his turtle to get huge. I wonder what's going to happen?) The teacher is having none of this whimsical shit. He calls Taro a liar and confiscates his turtle. The kids turn on him, as kids do, laughing at his delusion.

Ha ha, you have hopes and dreams! (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

Taro's punishment for having an imagination is to stand on the roof without his turtle. The turtle's punishment is to be hung on the wall from his string.

This can't be safe. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

On the roof, Taro witnesses a robbery. A gun fight ensues. There's some weird fast motion action and repeating stills of the kid being shocked.

Settle down Taro, you're gonna rupture something. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

Taro rushes to tell the teacher about the robbery and is promptly called a liar again. (Because no one heard the gun shots?) Apparently Taro has a habit of making up stories. He's sent home, but first he fetches his beloved nameless turtle.

At this point it becomes evident that this episode is not like the others. For one thing, the narrator is absent. Usually he starts out the episode with an ominous monologue about how fucked up everything is. Also, the theme song is different. We see Taro playing with his turtle while upbeat music plays. After this fun sequence, the turtle wanders off. I didn't know turtles could run away, but this one does. (Maybe… and I’m just going out on a limb here… maybe the turtle doesn’t like being dangled from a string?) The turtle ends up in the bag of one of the bank robbers. (Side note, one of the robbers is Masanari Nihei, who plays Ide on Ultraman.)

So they accidentally steal the turtle and Taro basically kidnaps himself. He follows them around screeching that he wants his turtle back. They grab him for being too loud and stow away aboard a truck. With Taro screaming the whole way.

The main characters show up briefly and are completely ineffectual. They were investigating the bank robbery and everyone has just figured out that Taro is missing.

If I ever go missing, this is all they’ll find of me, too. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

Since Taro left all his turtle paraphernalia behind, they know he must be in danger. You would think that the heroes of the series would bravely go off in search of him, right? Well, you'd be wrong. So, so wrong.

Yes, that's the boy's only defining feature. A turtle on a string. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

Meanwhile, Taro and his turtle are making pests of themselves. The turtle bites the thieves. The kid is yelling and falling around and generally being annoying. He's basically a Japanese Jar Jar Binks.

Don't let Taro have a gun. I beg you. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

He gets super excited when he sees the criminals have a machine gun and manages to steal it from them. (For real, he just plucks it right out of the criminal’s hand.) So Taro blunders around, points the gun at them, makes gun sounds, and then nearly shoots himself in the face.

See, this is what happens when you don't listen to me. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

After Taro unexpectedly shoots a bunch of shit, the criminals run away. Of course he chases them. He really has no interest in getting away. He just wants his turtle back. A wacky chase scene ensues through an amusement park. Taro could have gotten away a dozen times, but he's not going anywhere without his turtle.

Well, this is going right up on the fridge. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

They hide out in a sewer where we get more of Taro's wild rambling about his adventure to the Dragon Palace. He explains that he wants to ride his turtle to the Dragon Palace and make friends with Princess Otohime and become the CEO. (Of what, Taro doesn't say.) He will have a lot of servants and learn how to shoot guns and have 800 pistols and a bazooka. (This kid isn't just obsessed with turtles. He's also really into guns.)

Taro is a sharp one. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

For some reason that is never explained, while they all slept, the turtle grew to exactly the size Taro needed him to grow to. And, I’ve got to say, he looks a tad… odd…

Okay, I take it back. Turtle is a majestic beast. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

He must've gotten into the Mutagen. I wonder if the Ninja Turtles have a vacation sewer in Japan. Anyway, the crooks get scared and turn themselves in to the police. I guess a bratty kid waving their gun around wasn't enough, but a perfectly docile mutant turtle? That's the line right there.

Taro tries to ride the turtle and is bucked off somehow. The turtle is not only huge, but he can also crawl through walls. Which is... okay, we've gone beyond suspension of disbelief at this point. This is what life is now.

You can tell the turtle costume has someone in it crawling around and it looks really creepy. After a bit Taro manages to tame him and off they go on their grand adventure to the Dragon Palace!

This is honestly one of the best things I have ever seen. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

The duo fly around Japan. This is where things get weird. (Haha get it? It's funny because there's nothing weird about an obnoxious kid riding a flying turtle high above Japan!) The turtle’s shell flips up and he has a speedometer under there. They're going Mach 2. (Which is okay for a turtle, I guess.) Taro decides his magical flying turtle isn’t going fast enough. (Talk about ungrateful. Kids today! In my day however fast a turtle was flying was good enough for us.) Taro demands they punch it up to Mach 3.

I'm not even going to ask. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

Also, this was my third viewing of this episode and this was the first time I noticed that the turtle has blinkers on the back of his shell that flash when they turn. That’s just awesome. The two of them fly into the ocean where they swim around for a while. Taro can breathe just fine underwater, because of course he can.

I love Japan. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

In a wave of bubbles, the turtle is gone and Taro approaches a creepy little girl on a swing. (Around this time I started to suspect our buddy Taro was dead and had found his way into the afterlife. That theory still is not off the table.) The little girl informs him that she's Princess Otohime and he's at the Dragon Palace. Well, this wasn't what he expected at all. I'm sure Taro will take this disappointment in stride.

Nope. Hissy fit it is. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

He decides he wants to ride the swing and the little girl manifests ice cream. She's either magical or a Q... (But Q hadn't been invented yet, so we'll go with magical.) Even though they're underwater, they can breath fine and there's a smoke machine. I guess they're going with Spongebob logic. Otohime makes the swing go away and laughs. Taro pretends a bottle is an atomic bomb and threatens to blow up everything. There’s no reason for this. He states no terms. He doesn’t even give her a chance to surrender. Nope, not our Taro. Taro just wants to see the world burn.

His carefully thought out plan backfires and Taro gets blown up. Otohime of course thinks this is hilarious.

Very Looney Tunes. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

After this stunt, Otohime decides to ride a missile around underwater. The turtle comes back and Taro gives chase.

I really do love Japan. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

Before long the missile becomes a dragon. You know, like they do.

Taro didn’t even have to find a single Dragon Ball. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

The dragon shoots down Taro and he's drowning. Yeah... drowning in a pool of water at the bottom of the ocean. Otohime makes him promise to never lie again, which he agrees to. (Was this entire thing to teach him a lesson?) She heals him and gives him a magical jeweled hand box. (Which doesn't seem to have any jewels on it.) She tells him to only open it when he's in trouble.

Things spin around and Taro is surrounded by adults, somehow back in the classroom. He promises his parents that he'll never lie again and promptly tells them he was at the Dragon Palace. He gets yelled at for lying and everyone awkwardly wanders off so they can talk behind his back. He opens the box and the little girl mocks him telepathically, turning him into a grandpa.

This is what I see when I close my eyes. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

Grandpa Taro is haunted by those who have mocked him. (This part felt like a Goosebumps ending, except Goosebumps probably would have left him old.) I have no idea the significance of him turning into a grandpa, but whatever. Why question things now?

Taro turns back to normal and everyone is laughing at his near-death kidnapping experience. No one will believe he went on an epic journey under the sea. Poor dumb kid.

Cut back to the classroom where all the kids have turtles now, some on strings. So I guess they believed Taro? The only one without a turtle is poor, traumatized Taro. He sits alone, the only one who can hear the taunting laughter of Princess Otohime. The end.

Many turtles were likely harmed in the making of this episode. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

So yeah. That was Grow up! Little Turtle. A very odd episode of Ultra Q. I've now watched this episode three times and I still don't know what to make of it. It's enjoyable, sure. But the themes and tone do not fit in with the rest of the series. It's wacky and strange. The fast motion and exaggerated expressions are a little disorienting.

The oddest thing is that I can't nail down the moral. (Seriously, was there a moral?) It was sort of like a bunch of stuff happened, then stopped happening, and the episode ended. No one learned anything or grew. Everyone still thinks Taro's a liar, even though he went on a grand (and weird) adventure. Or did he? Was it all in his imagination? If so, what about the bank robbers? They were real enough for the heroes to investigate. The robbers saw the turtle too. (I guess it could have been sewer fumes.)

Speaking of imagination, throughout the episode Taro is referred to as a liar. He really just seemed imaginative to me. Are they equating imagination with lying? The teacher said that he'd gotten in trouble before, so maybe he actually does lie all the time, he just wasn't during this episode. Which makes it even more confusing. If you're going to call someone a liar, shouldn't you show them lying? Maybe I'm just nit picking.

If the moral was to not lie, and Taro told the truth about his adventure only to have no one believe him… then how did he learn anything?

So the turtle was never named in the episode, but according to the book that came with my Blu Ray collection, the turtle's name is Gameron. If this sounds familiar, it's because there's a better-known flying turtle named Gamera. The first Gamera movie came out the year before this episode aired, so clearly they were referencing Gamera with this whole thing.

The thing that bothers me the most about this episode? No one wondered where the turtle went. He didn't come back with Taro and wasn't mentioned again. I assume Gameron lives at the bottom of the ocean now at the Dragon Palace with little Otohime and her dragon missile. Does Taro care? Did he love that turtle at all, or was the turtle just his ticket to adventure and lots of guns? No one will ever know.

I wonder what kind of mileage Gameron gets. (Credit: Tsuburaya Productions)

I know I spent a lot of this post making jokes, but I really did enjoy this episode. It was fun, surreal, and campy to the extreme. It operated on its own sort of logic... kid logic. For all of its oddity, this episode has stuck with me. And hopefully now it will stick with you.

I mentioned in the beginning that there was another bonkers episode of Ultra Q. I may cover that one at a later date, if anyone is interested in more Japanese weirdness. As a tantalizing hint, that episode involves a boy turning into a monster with a coin purse for a head. Yes, you read that right. Let me know in the comments if you want to know more. (I know you do!)

Thank you all for reading my first edition of SoraRabbit Watches! This will be a regular feature on the blog. In fact my next post will be an entire season of something. You'll have to tune in next time to find out what. Until then, keep feeding those turtles or they'll never get big enough to fly!