Captain Ultra

A friend found an online retailer announcing what looks like a May '07 reissue (?) of the Captian Ultra soundtrack. But I've not found it pressing enough to try to track down more info after not finding it pre-release listed at a Japanese online place. I still don't know if it's the same contents as the 1990s double CD.

Seeing "ultra" in the name "Captain Ultra" I suspected there had to be some connection. It turns out "Captain Ultra" might be called a companion series. It's not made by the same company or story but the same network ordered the episodes so they'd have a second show to hold the audience after watching the second season of "Ultraman". Tomita did the score which has all sorts of electronic effects but isn't a synth score. Maybe it was a sort of giveback for not doing the other scores though this series didn't become the 4 decade long success Ultraman has been

 

It looks like a reissue of the double CD from the 90s. Then again not many people bought that one outside of Japan.
A friend noticed the reissue without an apparent import fee here
http://www.dustygroove.com
I have no idea why they decided to carry just this one and no other Tomita albums.

 

Hi Nick,
Thanks for the info.

Interesting that the original date of release is shown as 1967. The summary mentions use of electronic noises, but Tomita didn't aquire his Moog III until 1971.

I wonder what was used for the electronic noises in the soundtrack? Maybe that aspect of the score wasn't done by Tomita?

 

Hard to say if he did the electronic sounds himself or asked some one to do it for him. He's not playing melodies with the electronics. It's like "swishes" and sound effects that are timed to embelish the music. Of course in those days one couldn't create an orchestral score with just one person doing it all, so there certainly was a team involved as with nearly all film scores at least in those days. I haven't played the CD in a few years so I only remember various sparkling sounds and whooshes as well as heavy echoed effects. By the way, Tomita's theme song to "Aerial City 009" a puppet science fiction series (easiest to find on the Tomita at NHK album) has a lot of Tomita's trademark effects processing, most notably his ultra deep flange. Anyway so as what did he use? He likely ran sounds through tape echo machines and generally prior to synthesizers electronic composers used test tone oscillators to to create manual sweepung sounds and tones. Tools like ring modulators and filters also existed. What a synthesizer brought was the ability to play melodies in realtime and fairly precise and generally repeatable control of far more parameters of the sound.