EVERY ULTRAMAN KAIJU WORTH KNOWING

I got into Ultraman sideways. I'd been watching Shin Ultraman after loving Shin Godzilla, figured it would be the same kind of thing, and within twenty minutes I was staring at a monster called Neronga that turns invisible and eats electricity. Not nuclear metaphor electricity. Just regular power line electricity. And I thought, okay, this is a completely different vibe from Godzilla. I was right, and I was not prepared for how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Most people who are into kaiju know Godzilla's roster. Mothra, King Ghidorah, Mechagodzilla, Rodan. Maybe twenty to thirty creatures that rotate through the films. Ultraman's monster roster is in the hundreds. Plural. Over sixty years of television, with most series running 25 to 50 episodes and nearly every episode introducing a new monster, the franchise has accumulated a kaiju catalog that makes Toho's look like a pamphlet. And because Ultraman is a weekly show rather than a film franchise, the designers had to keep inventing. They couldn't rely on Ghidorah showing up again every three years. They had to fill a new slot every seven days.

That constraint produced some of the wildest creature designs in all of tokusatsu. It also produced a lot of guys in rubber suits fighting in gravel pits, but the hit rate is way higher than you'd expect. If you're still fuzzy on where the term itself comes from, I wrote a primer on what is a kaiju that covers the basics before we get into the deep cuts.

The ones you need to know

Bemular holds the distinction of being the first. Episode one of the original Ultraman, 1966. A reptilian creature that escapes from a monster graveyard in space (yes, there's a monster graveyard in space) and crashes into a lake on Earth. Bemular's design is simple, upright dinosaur with a sail-like ridge, but that simplicity set the template. Ultraman kaiju tend to be more alien and more varied than Godzilla kaiju. They aren't all dinosaurs and moths. Bemular was just the starting point.

Alien Baltan showed up in episode two, and honestly, he might be more iconic to Japanese audiences than any single Godzilla monster outside of Godzilla himself. Think of a humanoid cicada with giant lobster claws and the ability to clone itself into thousands of copies. Baltan's laugh, this weird high-pitched cackle, is one of those sounds that anyone who grew up in Japan recognizes instantly. The design walks a line between creepy and goofy that the franchise has been perfecting ever since. Baltan has appeared in more Ultraman series than I can count, always redesigned, always recognizable. If Ultraman has an arch-nemesis species, it's the Baltans.

Then there's Zetton. If you only learn one Ultraman kaiju's name, it should probably be this one. Zetton is the monster that killed the original Ultraman. Full stop. The hero lost. In the final episode of the 1966 series, Zetton showed up and systematically dismantled Ultraman, shrugging off the Specium Ray like it was nothing. For context, that's like if a Godzilla movie ended with Godzilla getting absolutely bodied and dying. It doesn't happen. But Ultraman did it in 1966, and Zetton's reputation has been untouchable ever since. Every time Zetton reappears in a new series, there's this weight to it. The audience knows what this thing did.

Red King is the franchise's brawler. No special powers, no energy beams, no tricks. Just a big, aggressive, territorial monster that fights everything it sees. Red King solves problems by hitting them. The design is great, a stocky dinosaur-like creature with bumpy skin and small arms that somehow still conveys raw physical menace. Red King has become the go-to "this monster is tough" benchmark across multiple series. When a new Ultraman needs to prove himself, Red King is often the opponent.

The fan favorite

Gomora deserves its own section because Gomora might be the most beloved kaiju in the entire franchise. First appearing in 1967, Gomora is a burrowing dinosaur monster with a massive horn and enough brute strength to go toe-to-toe with Ultraman himself. The original two-part Gomora episode was notable because the monster wasn't evil. It was a rare prehistoric creature that got disturbed and started rampaging, and the human characters debated whether they should be trying to capture it rather than kill it. That moral complexity, in a children's show in the 1960s, set Gomora apart.

Gomora keeps coming back. In Ultraman Mebius, Ultra Galaxy Mega Monster Battle, Ultraman X, and more. Sometimes as a villain, sometimes as an ally. In one series Gomora becomes the hero's partner monster, fighting alongside the human cast. The fan attachment is real. Ask someone who grew up watching Ultraman which kaiju they'd want on their team, and Gomora comes up constantly. There's a warmth to the creature that other franchise heavy-hitters like Zetton don't have.

The deep roster

This is where Ultraman separates itself from basically everything else in kaiju media. Godzilla has a deep roster. Ultraman has an absurdly deep roster.

Eleking is an electric eel-like kaiju controlled by alien invaders, with a long tail it uses as a whip and the ability to discharge electricity. The design is almost cute, big round eyes on a serpentine body, which makes it more unsettling when it starts wrecking things. King Joe is one of the franchise's most famous mecha-kaiju, a robot built by the Pedanians (an alien race) out of four separate spacecraft that combine. King Joe's gimmick is that it's nearly indestructible, and its first appearance required Ultraseven to get creative to beat it. The design, a blocky humanoid robot with no visible eyes, influenced a ton of later mecha designs in tokusatsu.

Alien Mefilas is interesting because it doesn't want to fight Ultraman at all. Mefilas is a diplomat, an alien who tries to conquer Earth through manipulation and persuasion rather than brute force. The original Mefilas episode has this genuinely creepy moment where it tries to convince a child to hand over the Earth voluntarily. When the kid says no, Mefilas just leaves. No tantrum, no destruction. It respects the decision and goes home. That kind of villain writing in a 1960s monster show still surprises me.

Birdon is a pteranodon-type kaiju that's famous for one thing: it killed Ultraman Taro. Twice. In the same series. Birdon's beak is so strong it can pierce Ultra flesh, which in the franchise's lore is supposed to be nearly impervious. The episodes where Birdon appears are genuinely tense because the show had already established that this creature could do what most kaiju can't. Taro had to be revived both times by the other Ultra Brothers, which tells you how seriously the writers took Birdon as a threat.

Tyrant is a chimera monster assembled from parts of other famous kaiju, including Bemular, Baraba, Red King, Seagorath, and Hanzagiran. The concept is a greatest hits of Ultraman threats combined into one body. It beat five Ultra Brothers in sequence before Taro finally took it down. The design is busy, almost overdesigned, but that's the point. Every part of its body references a different monster, and fans who know the franchise can identify each piece.

Pandon, from the final episode of Ultraseven, is another "final boss" type monster with a two-headed design and fire breath from both heads. Ultraseven's fight with Pandon is one of the most beloved sequences in the franchise because Seven was already weakened and exhausted, and the fight has a desperation to it that you don't usually get in tokusatsu.

Why the roster is so different from Godzilla

The fundamental difference is format. Godzilla is a film franchise. Each movie takes years to produce, features one or two monsters as antagonists, and those monsters become iconic through repetition across films. Ghidorah gets used again because Ghidorah is a proven box office draw.

Ultraman is television. A new episode every week, a new monster most weeks, and no guarantee that any individual creature will ever appear again. The design team at Tsuburaya Productions has been inventing monsters on a weekly schedule for six decades. Some of those designs are forgettable, sure. But the sheer volume means that the hits keep piling up. For every generic dinosaur suit, there's a Baltan or a Zetton or a Gomora that sticks in people's memories for decades.

The variety is also different in kind, not just quantity. Godzilla kaiju tend to be variations on a theme. Big animals, dinosaurs, insects, maybe a plant or a robot. Ultraman kaiju range from traditional giant monsters to shapeshifting aliens to cosmic horrors to literal objects brought to life. One famous kaiju, Dada, is basically a humanoid alien with an Op Art face pattern that rotates between three different designs. Another, Bullton, is a meteorite that warps space and time around it. You won't find anything like that in the Godzilla canon because the Godzilla films don't need to invent a new thing every single week.

The relationship between the hero and the monsters is different too. In Godzilla films, the military fights the kaiju or Godzilla fights the kaiju. Ultraman is a single being, roughly the same size as the monsters he fights. It's personal. It's a one-on-one fight with a three-minute time limit (Ultraman can only maintain his giant form for three minutes in most series). That constraint, the ticking clock, changes the dynamic completely. Every fight has built-in tension because the audience knows that if Ultraman can't finish this quickly, he's done.

Where to start watching

If you've never watched any Ultraman and this article has you curious, I'd say start with Ultraman Z (2020). It's a modern series with strong production values, a likable main character, and it pulls from the franchise's deep history while being completely accessible to newcomers. The kaiju designs are excellent, and the show has a sense of humor about itself without being a comedy.

Shin Ultraman (2022) is also a good entry point if you prefer films. It's a reimagining of the original 1966 series by Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno, the same team behind Shin Godzilla. It moves fast and assumes you'll keep up, and the kaiju redesigns are stunning.

For the classic stuff, the original Ultraman (1966) and Ultraseven (1967) are worth watching even though the effects are dated. The storytelling, especially in Ultraseven, is sharper and more mature than you'd expect from a show about a guy in a silver suit fighting rubber monsters. Some of those episodes are genuine science fiction.

The roster of Ultraman kaiju is so vast that entire wikis and fan databases exist just to catalog them all. I've covered maybe a dozen here, and that's barely scratching the surface. There are kaiju from Ultraman Ace, Ultraman Leo, Ultraman Gaia, Ultraman Nexus, Ultraman Decker, and dozens of other series I haven't even mentioned. If you're the kind of person who likes knowing that a fictional universe goes deep, really deep, in a direction you haven't looked yet, Ultraman's monster roster is exactly that. It's been growing for sixty years and it shows no sign of stopping.