Susumu Kurobe

Susumu Kurobe played Shin Hayata, the Science Special Search Party member who transforms into Ultraman, across the original 1966 series. Speaking at Monsterpalooza 2013 in Burbank, California, a convention that ran April 12 to 14, Kurobe appeared alongside fellow original cast members Hiroko Sakurai and suit actor Bin Furuya for an audience Q&A that drew a packed room.

Asked how he came to the role, Kurobe said the path was direct: staff at Toho and Tsuburaya, the production companies behind Ultraman, approached him about playing Hayata rather than putting him through an open casting process. That’s a different account than Sakurai gave on the same panel; she said she had auditioned for Ultra Q twice before landing the role that led into Ultraman, a contrast in how the two leads arrived at the same show.

Kurobe also joined Sakurai and Furuya in describing the practical realities of shooting a weekly tokusatsu series in the mid-1960s. Production recorded picture without sound, which meant the entire cast had to loop their dialogue afterward in a separate session. Working within the equipment and budget available at the time, a typical two-episode block took seven to ten days to film, a pace that reflected the constraints of the era rather than any shortcut in ambition.

By 2013, Kurobe was looking back on a show he pointed out had turned 47 years old. He reflected candidly on Ultraman’s uneven path to the international recognition it held at the time of the panel, describing a period where the franchise’s popularity seemed to fade before it resurged. He didn’t frame that resurgence as automatic or inevitable. Nearly five decades on from playing Hayata, Kurobe was still addressing the basic question of why a 1966 tokusatsu series was still being discussed at a Los Angeles-area convention in 2013, and the dip-then-recovery answer he gave suggested he had turned the question over more than once before that afternoon in Burbank.