DAY TWENTY:
FOUR DIMENSIONAL MONSTER BULLTON (AND FRIENDS)

Written by Jonathan Wojcik

One of my personal favorites today! Just look at it! Really drink it in and appreciate the fact that this is a kaiju! Bullton is a truly "alien" creature, so unlike any recognized form of life that it's initially mistaken for nothing more than a strange mineral. It initially falls to Earth in two fragments, one red and one blue, but when the stones are found to interact with our reality in unpredictable ways, they're locked up together for safekeeping. Unfortunately, this allows them to merge into one piece and begin to grow!

It's impossible to know what, if anything, Bullton "wants" or even if there's anything it requires as sustenance. Once fully formed however, it begins to distort time and space in increasingly dangerous ways, and when attempts are made to destroy it, it responds with alarming intelligence. It can alter gravity, warp people and objects to different locations or even different realities, phase solid matter into other solid matter and more. It causes missiles to explode far away from where they actually hit, it teleports planes back to the ground and teleports tanks up into the air. It is also remarkably mobile considering its appearance, able to roll itself about or even levitate as needed.

Bullton's design reflects its behavior quite well. At a glance it evokes a craterous, cartoon meteorite, but its details look a little too uniform to be a mere rock, while just a little too organic to just be a machine. It rather looks like a clump of huge, artificial barnacles or tubular corals, and its strange powers seem to be emitted from different types of "antennae" that emerge from its assorted pipes, which look entirely mechanical in origin. It's the kind of alien that really feels ALIEN, really making you wonder just what the heck you're looking at and what else could be out there.

To top it all off, the thing emits an eerie, heart-like pulsing.

The weirdness of Bullton would be lovingly homaged at least a couple other times in the franchise, one instance being Light Monster Pris-Ma from Return of Ultraman. This intriguing entity's true origins are unknown, but it is thawed from a glacier in Antarctica and begins to drift the sea very much like an iceberg. Attracted to light sources of every variety, it attempts to absorb anything it encounters into its mass, and can even fire a sort of "tractor beam" from its upper crystal to reel in whatever it wants.

Hungry baby!!!

Pris-Ma is also capable of manipulating light, momentarily turning back time to get out of danger, converting itself entirely into vapir, and Any living thing that touches it can become covered in a crystalline layer. While I'm still a slightly bigger fan of Bullton, it at least didn't devour things in any sense, and there's something particularly terrifying about a gigantic crystal floating in the ocean, looking for things to suck inside. Just listen to those creepy, siren-like sounds it makes in its "battle" scene, and enjoy how completely useless Ultraman Jack is against an opponent like this until the final, dangerous gambit of attacking it from the inside.

In the later Ultraman Tiga, Bullton would get an even more overt successor in the form of Biological Weapon Desimonia. Created by the tiny grey aliens known as Desimo to conquer Earth, knowing its origin perhaps removes a lot of the fun we had with Pris-Ma or Bullton, but it's a beautifully weird design regardless, resembling some sort of surrealist metal harp wrapped around a gooey blue and red core of living tissue. Desimonia itself merely levitates and fires energy beams, but its true threat is in the tiny Desimonia it can produce:

These lovely little nodules, also called Desimonia, are fully intelligent cybernetic monsters no larger than baseballs, and not only have their mommy's ability to shoot lasers and fly, but can morph into duplicates of any human being, their only flaw being that they are unable to replicate clothing. More bizarrely, and more alarmingly, it is demonstrated that a single wee Desimonia can attach itself to any kaiju and function as a makeshift "cockpit," allowing one of the little Desimo aliens to hop inside and take control of the entire monster!

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