DAY TWENTY FOUR:
GHOST SPACESHIP MONSTER ZOMBAYU
Written by Jonathan Wojcik
Now it's time for GHOSTS! Kind of! In this episode of
Dyna, a strange, almost "wooden" looking alien spacecraft enters the Earth's atmosphere, and wherever it goes, it emits a ray that draws the "plasma energy" from people's bodies, leaving them grey and comatose. It's a nonsense technobabble way of saying the ship basically takes people's souls, and nobody's sure why, because no communication or even any sign of life is detected from the vessel.
When the ship is finally grounded, our hero team launches a mission to explore it, but they find only the mummified corpses of its alien crew and the sentient but imprisoned "ghosts" of the ship's human victims! A translation of the captain's log raves only about a mythical monster from their culture,
Zombayu, which is said to have devoured the souls of entire worlds, and the "plasma ghost" of their former teammate confirms that "Zombayu" is a presence aboard the ship.
That's when the rotten carcass of the captain itself abruptly stands up and begins to suck the souls of the intruders, but Zombayu isn't counting on one of those intruders being the human host of
Ultraman Dyna. Once he transforms and escapes, the ship appears to make a crash landing...but rises back from the Earth!
We will never know Zombayu's true form, because we only ever see what the creature looks like possessing and animating the spaceship, but the ship now sports four legs, a pair of fish-like fins, a single blue eye and a toothy maw with a pair of large hand-like "mandibles."
The ensuing battle is
extremely goofy, including sped-up footage of Dyna riding the ship-monster like a bull and a superimposed sequence of them flying through the sky before the creature explodes and the "plasma" is returned to its rightful owners. Campy presentation aside however, Zombayu is still a monster so frightening that even an advanced alien race believed it to be nothing but a scary story, it animates an entire interplanetary vessel as essentially a gigantic
yokai, and the inside a high-tech haunted house complete with energy ghosts and an alien zombie! The episode could have easily been played for serious horror, and it easily would have worked. Zombayu feels so threatening and so "epic" of a concept, I'm surprised it wasn't saved for a multi-parter, a series finale or a movie special!
NAVIGATION:
