July 10, 1966 –
The follow-up to the Japanese science fiction television series produced by Tsuburaya Productions, Ultra Q, Ultraman, premiered in Japan on this date. (I have seen it listed as having first aired one week later July 17, 1966. Who knows, I wasn’t in Japan at he time.)
The sequences of Ultraman battling monsters were so expensive to film, that the producers needed a way to limit the scenes to only a few minutes for each episode. The solution was to give the character the weakness that he can not survive in his true self for more than roughly three minutes before he runs out of energy. This is marked with his warning chest light, called the Colortimer, which begins to blink with increasing speed as his energy runs out.
The Haus of Dcaligari 