So at this point it’s a common piece of knowledge that nexus had an absolutely insane development and that it was basically set up for failure. The previous Ultraman Timeslot was a prime time 6pm Saturday timeslot. Parents would be home, kids would be off school (yeah Saturday school is a thing in Japan but not for everyone). However because of a variety of reasons. Such as the main actor of Ultraman Cosmos being accused of assault causing the show to be cancelled early (yeah Cosmos was going to be even longer if you can believe it). And the lowering of toy sales causing difficulty in paying back money to the banks and other companies (possibly TBS itself although I cannot confirm this). The timeslot was changed to just a TBS affiliate station, Chubu Japan broadcast. This is a smaller station than the main TBS station. On top of that instead of a prime time slot. Ultraman was relegated to a 7:30am timeslot. When parents and kids are just waking up and getting ready to get off to work/school. Making this even more hyper competitive than the 6pm timeslot. I actually did some digging and found out that Nexus’s low viewership is not completely the result of the shows mature tone! The timeslot is likely a big part of the reason for the low viewership. It wasn’t just the type of audience as many previously thought. It is the exact same slot that Kirby and the Live action sailor moon aired on. So you might be wondering then how those shows compare. Well Sailor Moon (which was a light hearted kids show like Kirby) had similarly poor ratings. 3.5% vs 3.2% for Nexus. Kirby had a 5.2% and was considered to be a big success. Now keep in mind that Tiga-Cosmos was already a “disappointment” in viewership with its 7.3%-5.6% average range on the bigger TBS network. Ultraman had not had viewership that TBS was pleased with since Taro with its 17%. Mind you like America there were more and more channels being created around this time driving ratings to fall for all of television however this does not account for all the difference. So this leads the question. What if Nexus had aired on TBS? Why is it such a problem for Ultraman to have similar viewership to shows like Kirby? Ultraman is very expensive to produce. Finding figures on the cost of tokusatsu is very difficult. However throughout the last few years I have found sources to give us some references. Toei’s 1978 tokusatsu hero show message from space galactic wars had a budget of 10 million yen per episode. This was considered to be high for toei. With inflation this equals around $10,000 per episode. Hideaki Tsuburaya (the man responsible for lowering nexus’s budget) claims he forced a hard cap of around $500,000 per episode during Nexus. And he claims that episodes of TDG could reach a million dollars each. Mind you this guy has major biases against the company since these quotes were well after his brother was fired and Hideaki himself left the company. According to an Australian news broadcaster Ultraman towards the future had around $700,000 per episode (inflation adjusted usd) so it would seem that at the very least Hideaki’s quotes are in line with what is realistic. When you compare this to American shows this may seem small but you can already see a massive problem here with how many episodes were being made and the cost. However from Bandai’s sales alone Ultraman during its peak with Gaia was making around 66 million dollars a year just in in merchandise. So this could be sustained at that time. Every time a show was made. Loans were taken from various companies and banks. This worked for a long time until they were not able to get more loans due to internal company family drama. So we know why it’s a problem now. But now we have to answer the “what if” well full metal alchemist aired from 2003-2004 right before nexus aired and I can’t find ratings for it but some people on Japanese message boards claim they weren’t good? Wouldn’t put much stake in that. However 2002-2003 Gunndam seed had a 6.1% ratings and 2004-2005 Gundam seed destiny had 5.32% this was all on the same 6pm timeslot. With cosmos having 5.6% on average in 2001-2002 it would seem to suggest that Ultraman while not exceeding TBS average viewership could have held steady if Nexus had not jumped onto Chubu station. When you realize that the lighter Max only had a mild increase up to 4% it makes you really wonder. What could have been. With a name as big as Sailor Moon failing it makes you wonder if kids just didn’t want live action at all anymore. This has been a very long and rambly post. Mainly just an info dump post for me to reference later. Quite frankly I could make a whole book on this topic. If you have any questions or objections to this information please comment. The main point of this post originally was to comment on how Ultraman needs TBS to truly thrive. However despise Ultraman having an absolutely tiny viewership now of around 1-2% the toy sales are increasing. Perhaps we may see another peak like Gaia again soon? I’ll probably write more long posts like this in the future. Maybe next time a little more concise and to the point. Here’s some of my sources:

https://w.atwiki.jp/shichouseiko/pages/15.html Ultraman/sailor moon ratings

https://youtu.be/jXti5NLAOXM?si=J37WZ7UGuzE7Imc0 Ultraman Towards the future budget. The rest can be found on the associated Japanese wikipedias although if you want more clarification on the subject feel free to ask me.

(Last minute edit) higher ratings=more people watching=higher sponsorship rates and more people who might buy the toy line in case that relationship wasn’t clear.