DAY NINETEEN:
HIGH-DIMENSIONAL PREDATOR BOGAR
Written by Jonathan Wojcik
Some monsters are scarier the bigger they are, but today's monster is scarier the bigger
you are! First disguising herself as a human woman, Bogar, or at least a member of the Bogar
species, acted as a major villain for several episodes of
Ultraman Mebius, hiding among our kind as she awakened or summoned various other monsters to attack the Earth. Also demonstrating psychic abilities and teleportation, she seems almost unstoppable and her motivations not entirely clear...
As it turns out, Bogar is a creature that specializes in preying upon other monsters and even Ultras, swallowing them up in the huge, wing-like jaws that sprout out of her sides and absorbing their spirit as energy. She is also capable of extending her prehensile tail to snag prey, she can charge herself with electricity, she can molt out of her skin to escape danger and she even has a "Life Cycle Acceleration Blast" that can force another monster to hatch from its egg and develop at a rapid pace.
Most troubling of all, Bogar's feeding process makes her
extremely unstable, by which we mean that if she's killed while still "digesting" a monster's energy, she might explode with doomsday-weapon force.
Long time fans were even in for a shock twist on a series tradition, as Bogar showed up to interfere with a battle between
Twin Tail and
Gudon; two kaiju already famous in the franchise for their predator/prey relationship! That's Twin Tail she's got wrapped up in her non-twin tail, and Gudon, left, just had his iconic dinner stolen by a bigger badass.
Before we finish with another form of the "original" Bogar, let's also enjoy the absurdity of the
"lesser" Bogar that appear to invade Earth several episodes after Bogar's apparent defeat. This is how we find out there were more of her species out there, but as you can see, their design is
quite a bit different, appearing to have normal, actual mouths on their more beaky, turtle-like heads until those mouths
impossibly and rather comically erupt into a big, scaly fly-trap almost rivaling the rest of their body in size!
The lesser Bogar exist primarily to prepare Earth for the arrival of their "king,"
Ark Bogar, but very little of him is shown in the television series before he's destroyed; instead, he gets much more expansion in a side story and even a manga, where we also get to see what
his primary mouth looks like.
Now going back to the
superior, original Bogar, it also seems as though her own weakness is exposure to excess electricity, but while it does immobilize her at first, that's only because it initiates a metamorphosis into
Bogarmons. This extremely powered-up form comes with all the features of regular Bogar, but now she can
fly, plus she has a pair of energy whips generated from the yellow orbs (...additional eyes???) on that weird horn behind her head. And if you miss the fly-trap mouth, don't worry, all it did was
flip around:
In any form, Bogar is a truly killer concept and suitably sinister design. Once you know that she's a kaiju-killing super-hunter, you can see it in her design, which evokes aspects of a carnivorous plant and in particular a
snake without even being snake-shaped. The huge, weird jaws in both incarnations are a fascinating design twist for any kaiju, and even her mitten-like hands in her default form are evocative of fanged, reptilian heads!
NAVIGATION:
