Recently Watched Shows

[Benjamin Haines]

So, did anyone else check out any shows over the past two years?

When MZ broke in March 2020, I had just finished watching Ultra Q for the first time and I had just started watching Ultraman. I hadn't dipped my toes in the vast ocean of tokusatsu TV shows prior to then, other than watching Ultraman Nexus as a teen and the first two episodes of Ultraman in college. As a young kid, I was mainly interested in seeking out all of the Godzilla movies. I didn't really broaden my attention to Gamera and other monsters until my teen years and then I was pretty exclusively interested in the film side of Japanese sci-fi throughout my twenties. Once the pandemic lockdowns began, there was obviously a lot more time to watch things at home, and between Mill Creek releasing most of the Ultra series on BRD and Shout Factory streaming multiple Kamen Rider and Super Sentai shows on Tubi, I figured it was time to take the plunge into this side of tokusatsu that I had mostly ignored.

Through the rest of 2020, I watched all of UltraSeven, Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger, Kamen Rider Kuuga, Return of Ultraman, UltraSeven X, Zone Fighter, Neo Ultra Q, Ultraman Max and Ultraman Ace. I also rewatched all of Ultraman Nexus and the film Ultraman: The Next, and I started watching Kamen Rider, Ultraman Tiga, Seiju Sentai Gingaman and the Heisei-era UltraSeven specials.

I finished those latter four in 2021 and I proceeded to watch all of Ultraman Taro, Kamen Rider Agito, Ultraman Leo, Iron King, Gosei Sentai Dairanger, the new anime series Godzilla: Singular Point on Netflix, Gridman, the first season of the Ultraman anime on Netflix, Super Robot Red Baron and Kamen Rider Black. I also started watching Ultraman 80 and Ninja Sentai Kakuranger.

So far this year, I've finished those two shows and I've watched all of Kamen Rider Ryuki, Ultraman: Towards the Future, Mirrorman and Space Sheriff Gavan. I'm currently watching Himitsu Sentai Goranger, Space Sheriff Sharivan, Ultraman Dyna and Kamen Rider 555, four shows from different franchises and different decades!

It has been a revelatory two years. I've seen so much tokusatsu that I had never seen before and there's still so much more that I haven't seen yet!

[lhb412]

^ I haven't been as proficient as you, but in these past 2 years I've roughly followed the same course! I'd already finished the new Blu-rays of Ultra Q, Ultraman and Ultraseven and I was in the middle of Return of Ultraman when lockdown hit.

By the way, watching Return of Ultraman was revelatory. That series has some of the greatest tokusatsu effects I've ever seen. The way they use foreground and background miniatures to frame Ultraman and the monsters to make practically every shot an interesting looking composition? It really feels like this is the series where they crack the formula, too. Ultraman and Ultraseven get all the press, but most subsequent series feel more like Return of Ultraman.

So... watched Return, Ace (quality varies wildly with this one, when it's at its best it's brilliant pop art) Taro, Ginga, Ginga S, X, Orb, Orb Origin, Geed, R/B, Z (on YouTube, natch - best modern show, too), rewatched Ultra Q, Neo Ultra Q (why doesn't anyone talk about this series? It's excellent), Gridman, was 30 episodes deep into 80 when I got too antsy about getting to the '90s shows, watched Tiga and now am almost done with Dyna. Tiga is great... but I gotta say; prefer Dyna!

The only Kamen Rider I've watched, besides the first few episodes of the OG series, is Kuuga - the first Rider series I've completed, and an excellent one at that! I suppose I'll get the Zero-One blu-ray soon. Want to at least dip into sentai. I'm thinking Jetman?

Honestly, I've git a terrifyingly tall pile of blu-rays bought in the last 8 months or so that I need to get to. Mostly movies, but I see Future Boy Conan and Kolchak:The Night Stalker in there.

[Benjamin Haines]

^ My favorite Ultra series that I’ve seen is UltraSeven but Return of Ultraman is a very close second! It really does feel just as cinematic as its predecessors. UltraSeven took the core elements of Ultraman and made them part of a broader sci-fi premise, whereas Return went back to the core concepts of Ultraman and built on them in a contemporary setting.

Both Tiga and Dyna are terrific. I’m almost done with the fourth disc of Dyna but I’m not sure which series I prefer. The monsters, characters and stories in both shows by and large are very inspired, and they have a visual aesthetic (shot on video at a higher frame rate) that reminds me of a lot of live-action kids shows that I watched in the ‘90s. The Heisei-era UltraSeven specials are definitely worth checking out! They’re a direct continuation of the original UltraSeven series, ignoring the retconning of Seven into the world of Ultraman and any connection to the Ultra Brothers or any later shows. There are fansubbed versions that are easy to find on YouTube. The two NTV specials from 1994 are pretty good, then the three ‘30th Anniversary Memorial Trilogy’ specials from 1998 are really good, and then the six ‘The Final Chapters’ specials from 1999 are really freaking awesome, but then the five ‘35th Anniversary Evolution’ specials from 2002 are just decent.

The only Ultraman movie that I’ve seen is still The Next and the only Ultra shows I’ve seen past Max are the shorter standalones: UltraSeven X, Neo Ultra Q and the Netflix anime. Neo Ultra Q is indeed fantastic! If Ultra Q is the Japanese counterpart to The Twilight Zone then Neo Ultra Q is like the Japanese counterpart to Black Mirror. I was tempted to watch Ultraman Z on YouTube when TPC streamed it with subtitles in 2020 but I’d rather watch all of the shows, films and side stories from Mebius onward in sequence.

Regarding the original Kamen Rider, I watched 26 episodes before taking a break from it to watch all of Kuuga (which is awesome), and then I took another break from it after episode 53. It’s a fun show but it’s incredibly repetitious and it barely shakes things up as it goes on. Of course it wasn’t made to be binge-watched in the streaming era, and it’s easy to see why it struck a chord with Japanese kids in the early ‘70s, but the fact that this show catapulted Kamen Rider to rivaling Ultraman in popularity seems similar to how Daiei’s Gamera vs. Viras was able to stand toe-to-toe with Toho’s Destroy All Monsters despite having a lot less money and creativity put into it. The Ultra shows from the beginning seem to have tried to present viewers with different things happening from one episode to the next as much as they could, whereas the original Kamen Rider made about 5% of that effort to not be repetitive, and yet it lasted for 98 episodes over two years. One highlight of the show is Hideo Amamoto showing up midway through in a recurring role as a new Shocker general named Doctor Death.

Kuuga made me want to watch more Heisei-era Kamen Rider, so I watched Agito on Prime Video via the Toku streaming channel, and Ryuki on Tubi courtesy of Shout Factory. I really liked Agito. It starts off as a bit of a Kuuga rehash, making brief references to the events of Kuuga and presenting a new lead hero and a new race of villainous monsters with little development, but it finds its own identity as it continues. I’d rank it below Kuuga overall but it is worth watching. I liked Ryuki even more than Agito. It takes a couple of the broad concepts that Agito explored and builds a very different premise around them. Ryuki is set in its own world, not a continuation of any prior series, and while it retains the same visual aesthetic and serialized soap-opera structure as Kuuga and Agito, it’s also a bit more episodic. There are more clearly defined mini-sagas and even some stories contained to single episodes, and the focus of the series also shifts as characters are introduced and as they’re killed off, so Ryuki delivers more variety than either of its predecessors. I’d say Kuuga is better overall but I heartily recommend Ryuki.

I got the Kamen Rider Zero-One set from Shout but I haven’t watched it yet. I’m only five episodes into 555 on Toku and I’m liking it. It has a pretty different premise from Kuuga, Agito or Ryuki.

Black is the best Kamen Rider series that I’ve seen. After Toei went through a similar trajectory with the Showa-era shows as TPC did with the Ultra franchise (on the air from 1971-1975 and back on the air from 1979-1981), Kamen Rider Black was a complete reboot that debuted in 1987. It reminds me of Gamera:GotU in how it’s a new origin story that does a better and more thorough job of defining the character than the original work. The first four episodes along with the twelfth were written by Shozo Uehara, who was the head writer on Return of Ultraman, and Susumu Kurobe has a recurring role as an evil scientist. Black is like a bridge between the repetitiously episodic style of the original Kamen Rider and the heavily serialized approach of the Heisei-era shows. Most of the episodes tell self-contained stories but there’s an overarching, personal conflict between lead character Kotaro Minami and the sinister Golgom cult that transformed him, a conflict which escalates brilliantly in the show’s later episodes.

As for Super Sentai, did you watch any Power Rangers as a kid? I was into the original Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers so that made me really curious to check out the three Sentai shows it was sourced from: Zyuranger, Dairanger and Kakuranger, all of which are just delightful. Jetman was the series that immediately preceded Zyuranger but I haven’t seen that one yet. I watched the 1998-1999 series Gingaman because it was adapted into Power Rangers: Lost Galaxy, which was the one I watched the most after the original as a kid and which (probably not coincidentally) was the Power Rangers series that Fox Kids was airing during the majority of Godzilla: The Series’ run. Gingaman is fun but it’s also a lot less inspired and more generic compared to those earlier three that I’ve seen.

One thing about the Super Sentai shows of the ‘90s is that every episode runs almost exactly 20 minutes long including their end credits and next-episode previews, so their episodes are a few minutes shorter than those of most other tokusatsu series. That isn’t to their detriment at all, as it’s possible to watch a whole series in less time than other shows that have around 50 episodes. I’m about 30 episodes into the original Goranger series from 1975-1977 and it has 25-minute episodes, so I wonder when the Sentai episodes started getting shorter. Goranger’s action is less like that of the ‘90s Sentai shows and more like the action in the original Kamen Rider, with the heroes punching and kicking lots of faceless henchmen, the villains of the week exploding when they’re defeated, and no giant transforming robots or rampaging kaiju in sight. It’s much more fun than the original Kamen Rider, though, with a lot less repetition in the storytelling and a varied cast of heroes. Shozo Uehara was also the head writer on Goranger, having penned 51 of the show’s 84 episodes.

One other show I absolutely have to recommend is Space Sheriff Gavan, the first show in Toei’s Metal Hero franchise from 1982-1983. The toku shows that Japanese networks scrambled to put on the air in the ‘70s were generally mixing and matching tropes from Ultraman and Kamen Rider to varying degrees of success. Space Sheriff Gavan is built on the Kamen Rider template and the head writer, yet again, was Shozo Uehara! He wrote 37 of the show’s 44 episodes and he clearly understood the importance of offering viewers as much variety as possible within the framework of the show’s formula. Whenever Gavan battles a monster sent by the evil Makuu Empire, they’re able to manipulate the Earth’s axis to create a type of black hole known as a Makuu Space, wherein their monsters are three times as powerful and Gavan is forced to do battle amid trippy, nightmarish imagery. The customary fights shot on location in quarries and fields are supplemented with wide composite shots establishing them as fighting within Makuu Space under multicolored skies, a clever way of making the most of budget limits. Space Sheriff Gavan is an action-packed series filled with hand-to-hand combat, wire-fu stunts, spaceship laser battles, giant transforming starbeast action and swordplay. Being produced right in the thick of Star Wars mania between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, the climax of each episode is Gavan having a swordfight with that week’s villain and activating his “Laser Blade” to give it a shiny blue glow. Lead actor Kenji Ohba carries the series as Gavan but the show also gets a lot out of the Makuu villains and their internal drama. Oh, and the music rocks!

I know we could get away with posting links to fansubbed downloads at this point but I'll just stick with forum tradition and say PM me if you'd like to be pointed in the direction of any of these shows (even though such archives aren't hard to find).

[lhb412]

^ I'm vaguely aware of where the fansubs and such are, but with so many official releases I'm concentrating (and can barely keep up) with those.

I didn't watch Power Rangers as a kid (actually preferred Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad!), but watched some of the reruns as a teenager when Disney had the rights. I don't really have any strong nostalgic connection with a particular PR season. Jetman seems attractive because I hear it's a bit more character/melodrama focused!

I don't know too much about the Ultraseven direct to video series, but I actually have an interesting connection to it: walking in on the episode where Seven fights King Joe in the G-Fest viewing room circa 2001 was my introduction to the franchise! I hope we get them licensed for release. The clips I've seen certainly look cool, and the idea of a series more aimed at an older audience is appealing.

(edit)

Oh, and a couple of months ago I scored this 20 year old Japanese DVD set of all the showa era Kamen Rider movies (theatrical special is a better term, since they're only 40 minutes long and a few of them are just re-edits of TV episodes). It's an English friendly release! Admittedly, the subtitles are a tad wonky - but still! I haven't watched them yet, but I fast forwarded to make sure this old import DVD even worked and everything plays except for the final Kamen Rider Black movie, which gets unwatchable glitchy. That was the one I most wanted to see!

[Benjamin Haines]

^ That is awesome! Is that Japanese DVD a licensed release? It's so unusual for them to have English subtitles. I actually haven't seen any of the theater specials or side media yet for Kamen Rider Black or any other show that I've watched. I should check them out soon.

If you like UltraSeven, you'll definitely like the Heisei-era specials, especially the ones from '98-'99. They're a worthy continuation of the original series with thought-provoking stories. Koji Moritsugu returns as Dan and Sandayu Dokamumushi reprises his role as Furuhashi.

[lhb412]

^ I was amazed the release was English friendly. I assumed it was a bootleg, albeit a fancy (book packaging holding two discs with a clear plastic slipcover) bootleg! But no; this was the rare official Japanese release we should have all imported two decades ago without having to go region free or rip the file and add downloaded subs or whatever.

There were a few releases at the bookstore that I imagine were traded in by the same person: a HK DVD of the Tiga movie, the first of Generation Kikaida's Kikaida volumes, and Japanese DVDs of the second Cosmos movie and a random volume of Cosmos episodes... oh, and the first Funimation Tiga volume!

[Benjamin Haines]

In the time since I finished Ultraman Dyna, I've watched all 13 episodes of the 1993 Japan-US co-production Ultraman: The Ultimate Hero (aka Ultraman Powered). What a drag. Every episode is a remake of a specific episode of the original Ultraman, which invites direct comparisons that don't do this show any favors. The redesigned monster suits look really cool but the monster action scenes are pathetic and the miniatures look terrible. The cast isn't bad though. The lead character Kenichi Kai is played by Kane Kosugi, who went on to play Jiraiya (NinjaBlack) in Ninja Sentai Kakuranger as well as mutant EDF soldier Kazama in Godzilla: Final Wars. The music that plays during the episodes is good too, although the opening theme and end credits songs are not good. The show overall is not good. It's no surprise that this never aired on American television.

I finished watching Himitsu Sentai Goranger, which has become my favorite Super Sentai series that I've watched so far. It's so delightfully insane! It's rooted in the spy thriller genre, without any of the giant combining robots battling kaiju that had become the norm by the '90s. The Gorangers are specialized soldiers of the organization EAGLE who stand against the Black Cross Army's evil operations. The names of the Gorangers are combinations of Japanese words for their colors with the English word ranger: Akaranger, Aoranger, Kiranger, Momoranger and Midoranger. The five leads who play the Gorangers outside of their suits are terrific. The villains of the week are a rotating cycle of Black Cross Army officers who aren't quite human, each sporting a unique and often ridiculous motif to their masks and their names: Diamond Mask, Gear Mask, Fork Mask, Baseball Mask, etc. The show's music is so catchy and the action is gloriously goofy. At 84 episodes, it's the second-longest tokusatsu series after the original Kamen Rider (98 episodes), but whereas I had to take breaks from Kamen Rider before I could get through it all, I devoured all of Goranger in under five months. The lunacy of '90s Sentai makes more sense to me now that I've seen where it all came from. Goranger reflects a unique time in toku history because it started airing just weeks after the release of Terror of Mechagodzilla and the end of Ultraman Leo's run, as though Godzilla and Ultraman were tapping out and passing the ball to the Gorangers.

I also finished watching Space Sheriff Sharivan. It's a direct follow-up to Space Sheriff Gavan featuring several returning cast members in supporting roles. The formula is unchanged from Gavan, just starring a new hero with new weapons who takes on a new overarching evil organization. While that makes it less fresh than Gavan, and while some of the plot turns are a bit more contrived, Sharivan is just as much fun as its predecessor and I do appreciate how they didn't just recycle the same running plot threads as Gavan.

I also finished watching Kamen Rider 555, the fourth Heisei-Era series after Kuuga, Agito and Ryuki. It's not as good as its predecessors but I liked how it took its characters in some new and unexpected directions.

Along with rewatching Godzilla: Singular Point, I'm currently watching Chikyu Sentai Fiveman, Space Sheriff Shaider and Kamen Rider Black RX. I intend to start watching Ultraman Gaia later this week. I'm hitting the '80s and '90s shows hard right now.

[Benjamin Haines]

Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities - I've seen all eight episodes of this anthology series on Netflix and it is just as awesome as you'd expect! The episodes are all self-contained horror stories with different directors and casts. Each of these stories is best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible, and I didn't even watch any trailers or ads for this show. My favorites are episodes three and seven but the whole series is fantastic!

[Benjamin Haines]

Kamen Rider Black RX (1988-1989) - I've watched all 47 episodes of this series, which was airing on Japanese television when I was born. It's a direct follow-up to Kamen Rider Black with Tetsuo Kurata reprising the lead role of Kotaro Minami.

While Black was still a very traditionally formulaic tokusatsu series, it brought a lot of inspiration and an inventive approach to the material. Like Toei's Metal Hero series that had debuted during Kamen Rider's hiatus, Black mined a lot of drama between its villain characters, which really enhanced the show's overarching narrative because of the personal connection between Kotaro and the evil Gorgom cult. Black RX's core premise isn't as compelling because there isn't a personal connection like that between Kotaro and the Crisis Empire here. This show comes across as exactly what it is, a show that was made to try to carry on the popularity of its predecessor even though that series reached its logical narrative conclusion. Even though it stars the same lead character played by the same actor, it's not so much a continuation of Black and more like Kotaro just went on to get caught up in the events of a whole different tokusatsu series after his show finished. Some of the show's specific inter-villain dramatic twists are reminiscent of what occurred a few years prior on Space Sheriff Sharivan, and like the lead heroes on the three Space Sheriff series, Kamen Rider Black RX often finishes off his monstrous opponents by using a not-lightsaber beam sword.

All that being said, it's still a very enjoyable series. The action, music and character designs are steeped in late-'80s style, and the cast always gives it their all. Also, although I haven't yet seen any of the Showa-era Kamen Rider series between the original and Black, the impression I got from watching Black was that it was a complete reboot that wasn't set in the same continuity as any prior show. Without going into details, Black RX makes it clear that's not the case toward the end of the series. It's fun to see what unfolds but it does seem like a retcon.


I'm currently three episodes into Kamen Rider Black Sun. I'll wait until I finish the series to post my thoughts, but...

[Benjamin Haines]

Chikyu Sentai Fiveman (1990-1991) - I've watched all 48 episodes of this Sentai series that Shout Factory released on DVD back in September. It's such a wholesome and heartfelt show. The premise is that the five heroes are a team of brothers and sisters who work as elementary school teachers. Gaku (FiveRed) is the oldest of the Hoshikawa siblings, followed by Ken (FiveBlue) and Kazumi (FivePink), with twins Fumiya (FiveBlack) and Remi (FiveYellow) being the youngest. When Gaku, Ken and Kazumi are children, their scientist parents travel with them into outer space on a quest to restore life to planets that have mysteriously died. They land on planet Shidon, where Fumiya and Remi are later born, and they live there together with their robot assistant Arthur G6 while working to help a pair of surviving native Shidonians grow flowers again on their planet. When forces from the ruthless Zone Empire return to Shidon to ensure that the planet they destroyed will remain dead, the Hoshikawa children are horrified to see their parents die. Arthur G6 escapes with the children to Earth and raises them as a surrogate parent. Twenty years later, the children have grown up to become elementary school teachers. When the Zone Empire reaches Earth intending to make it the thousandth dead planet that they offer to their Galactic Empress Meadow, the Hoshikawa siblings ride into action together with the Earth Squadron Fiveman battle technology that they've developed to defend the planet.

Everything about this show is just so endearingly wholesome. It's all about bonds between siblings, between parents and their children, and between teachers and students. The cast totally carries it. The villains are a motley bunch and Arthur G6 is voiced by Rica Matsumoto. The action is dynamic and colorful and the music is very catchy. It's a fun and heartfelt series through and through.


Space Sheriff Shaider (1984-1985) - I've also watched all 49 episodes of this third series in Toei's Metal Hero franchise, which was also the final series in the franchise's initial Space Sheriff saga. Just as Sharivan didn't stray from the formula that Gavan established, Shaider likewise doesn't break from the mold of its predecessors. I've watched all three of these shows in sequence throughout this year and it really is like watching one continuous series. Each show has a different lead hero with a different female sidekick who battle a different villainous organization headed by a different grand master seemingly built into the wall of his base.

Like its predecessors, most episodes of Space Sheriff Shaider follow the template of Shaider and Annie investigating mysterious events until they uncover Fuuma's scheme, then they battle Fuuma's latest Strange Beast and Great Emperor Kubilai orders his forces to open Strange Space, in which Shaider continues the battle amid trippy imagery until he finishes off the Strange Beast and saves the day. Also like its predecessors, there are occasional episodes that largely forgo any story and are primarily about putting Shaider through the ringer in a series of bizarre, over-the-top settings.

While that approach isn't original, I can't say it's a bad thing. If Space Sheriff Gavan had remained on the air for three years from 1982 to 1985 instead of being replaced by Sharivan and later Shaider, it still would have stuck with that same formula that it established. While it may be contrived for each successive series to introduce a brand new organization of villains bent on galactic conquest out of nowhere, it is better to let each series reach its logical conclusion instead of dragging one series out for several years.

As far as broad series arcs go, without going into spoilers, Gavan certainly had the most natural one from the outset. Sharivan's series arc was more contrived but still a lot of fun. Shaider's series arc also has some really contrived elements but it's more creative than Sharivan overall. That's all just nitpicking, though, as all three Space Sheriff shows are equally fun to watch. I hadn't seen any of Toei's Metal Hero shows before this year and I'm glad that I started from the beginning.

[lhb412]

^ You're certainly making your way through big chunks of toku history. I'm making a New Year's resolution to do something similar in '23 (I'd better get on it!).

[Benjamin Haines]

^ I figure it's better late than never. This whole television side of toku is something I neglected prior to my thirties so this is all just me catching up.

Throughout 2022, I finished watching Ultraman 80 and Ninja Sentai Kakuranger and I watched all of Kamen Rider Ryuki, Ultraman: Towards the Future, Mirrorman, Space Sheriff Gavan, Ultraman Dyna, Kamen Rider 555, Himitsu Sentai Goranger, Space Sheriff Sharivan, Ultraman: The Ultimate Hero, Kamen Rider Black RX, Chikyu Sentai Fiveman, Space Sheriff Shaider and Kamen Rider Black Sun, and I’m midway through Ultraman Gaia.

This year, I want to try to watch more movies that I've never seen before, both classic and modern. That's been the trade-off for spending so much of my limited home entertainment time since 2020 watching all of these toku shows that I've never seen before. Even in prior years, I've never been able to keep up with most new films that I want to see but I've gotten even worse at it in this decade so far. It's easier to make time for 25-minute episodes than for movies that run 90 minutes or longer but I do want to catch up on more films this year. Still, I'm not going to stop watching new-to-me toku series and I won't run out of shows to check out for years to come. I'm really eager to start watching Ultraman Mebius before this year is over but I still want to watch the Zearth films, Neos, Cosmos and the Cosmos film trilogy first. I recently picked up Discotek's standard-definition BRD release of the fourth Metal Hero series, Megabeast Investigator Juspion, which I'll start watching this weekend. The next Sentai series that I'll start soon will be the second series, JAKQ Dengekitai. The next Kamen Rider series that I watch will likewise be the second series, Kamen Rider V3. I still haven't seen any of the Showa-era Kamen Rider shows that aired between the original series and Black, and I'm curious to see more of the older takes on Kamen Rider now that I've seen several of the more modern shows. Speaking of which...

Kamen Rider Black Sun (2022) - I finished watching this on Prime Video last Saturday. People, this show is a landmark in tokusatsu production quality! Seriously, this 10-episode series stands toe-to-toe with any of the serialized Marvel shows made for Netflix or Disney+. It's bold, inspired, adult-oriented, powerfully acted and it just goes for it, with a brilliant mix of practical and visual effects helmed by Kiyotaka Taguchi.

You don't need to have seen the original Kamen Rider Black to enjoy or understand this show but I do recommend watching that classic series first because you will appreciate what this new series does even more. Kamen Rider Black Sun is a reboot that takes a lot of the core elements and characters of Kamen Rider Black and reimagines them in a new, modern-day story. It doesn't have anything to do with Kamen Rider Black RX, so it won't make a difference if you watch Black Sun without having seen Black RX.

These 10 episodes tell a single, serialized story that's ambitious in scope and unflinchingly political. Kamen Rider Black Sun is like the antithesis of Shin Godzilla in a lot of ways.

Let me provide a little context for what I mean by that. Unlike the United States, in which there are still two major political parties that are both dominant electoral forces, Japan's bicameral legislature (the National Diet) has been dominated almost exclusively by one political party since 1955, the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The LDP lost control of the House of Representatives in the 1993 election to the left-wing Japan Socialist Party (JSP) but the LDP regained majority control in 1996 when the JSP dissolved. The LDP lost control of both the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors in 2009 to the center-left Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). The DPJ's Naoto Kan was Prime Minister of Japan during the Fukushima nuclear disaster on March 11, 2011 when it took the government hours to declare a state of emergency and even longer to order evacuations of the affected areas. Kan resigned in August 2011 and the LDP regained majority control of Japanese government in 2012, which it has maintained in elections ever since.

The LDP has long been the party of Japanese nationalism. For decades, one of the most notorious trends among Japanese nationalists has been a predilection for historical revisionism, specifically regarding the Empire of Japan's culpability in perpetuating colonial and military atrocities before and during WWII. In the 1990s, a right-wing movement devoted to school textbook reform produced new textbooks which denied that the Nanjing Massacre ever happened or that the Japanese military ever forced women into sexual slavery. It took the Japanese government until the late 1990s just to finally acknowledge the existence of Unit 731, the covert unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that carried out horrific and lethal experiments on hundreds of thousands of people, and detailed information about Unit 731 has rarely ever been taught in Japanese schools. When the 2001 Hollywood film Pearl Harbor opened in Japan, a news crew outside of a theater interviewed people waiting in line who were excited to see the new Ben Affleck movie but genuinely knew nothing about the real historical event on which it was based. As time has passed, more and more Japanese people have grown to think of their country's role in WWII as being nothing but the victim of devastating atomic bombings by the United States, without recognizing the years of Japanese imperial invasion, slaughter and human rights abuses that led to that outcome.

When the LDP regained power in December 2012, the Diet re-elected Shinzo Abe as prime minister later that month. Abe had previously been prime minister for a year from 2006 to 2007 but his second tenure lasted nearly eight years until he eventually resigned in September 2020. Abe himself was the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, who mercilessly ruled Japan's Manchurian colony in the 1930s, was subsequently imprisoned by the US for three years after WWII as a suspected Class-A war criminal, and still went on to help form the LDP and then was Japan's prime minister from 1957 to 1960. Abe also served as a special adviser to the far-right ultranationalist lobbying group Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), formed in 1997, which holds historical revisionism and Japanese constitutional reform among its official goals and is deeply entwined with the LDP. Along with opposition to civil rights for women and LGBT people, some of the core beliefs of Nippon Kaigi are that "Japan should be applauded for liberating much of East Asia from Western colonial powers; that the 1946–1948 Tokyo War Crimes tribunals were illegitimate; and that killings by Imperial Japanese troops during the 1937 Nanjing Massacre were exaggerated or fabricated." Although nationalists in Japan generally value the United States as an ally against the threat of aggression by China, Russia or North Korea, they also resent what they have long seen as Japan being kept on a leash by the US rather than the two nations standing on equal footing with each other. The push for reforming Japan's post-WWII constitution is primarily focused on amending or abolishing Article 9, which renounces Japan's right to wage war and prohibits Japan's military from engaging in any kind of collective self-defense operations on behalf of the country's allies. Although the constitution still has never been formally amended, Abe's cabinet in 2014 circumvented the Diet and the public by issuing a declaration which reinterpreted the principle of minimum necessary force described in Article 9 as allowing Japan to participate in collective self-defense operations in the event that one of Japan's allies is attacked.

Shin Godzilla was made to resonate with the Japanese voting populace who largely swung back to the LDP after 2011. The movie's first act is an allegory for the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. More specifically, the first act of Shin Godzilla completely flays the real-time response to that disaster by the DPJ and Prime Minister Kan's cabinet five years prior. The movie doesn't have to specify which party or which administration it's lambasting because audiences in Japan had lived through that disaster and they recognized the allegory immediately. The rest of the movie is a parable for the common people of Japan reasserting their will through the government to save the country from a major nuclear crisis. When the Japanese government receives a diagram of the US military's proposed zone for bombing Godzilla in Tokyo, characters remark that the damage would be worse than Godzilla. Yaguchi at one point cites the 3 million Japanese lives lost during WWII after the old Imperial Army's unfounded optimism, and later there are two historical photographs that fill the screen to remind viewers that Japan was once the victim of two atomic bombings, but the movie avoids even broaching the subject of the many millions of noncombatant lives in the Asia-Pacific theater who were slaughtered by the Empire of Japan. Ultimately, Godzilla is defeated by an international military operation that is very decidedly led by Japan, which the film depicts as the alternative to having Tokyo nuked by Japan's international allies should the country fall in line with their way of handling things. From beginning to end, Shin Godzilla is a story that was tailored to Japanese people of the nationalist, LDP and/or Nippon Kaigi persuasion.

Kamen Rider Black Sun goes hard in the complete opposite direction. The show's premise is that people known as kaijin, who have the ability to transform into anthropomorphic animal forms, have lived in Japan for decades and are treated as second-class citizens. The story begins with a teen activist named Aoi Izumi delivering an impassioned speech at the United Nations urging the countries of the world to recognize the civil rights of kaijin. "The value of human and kaijin lives outweighs that of the Earth. There isn't even one gram of difference in their worth," she says. Back in Tokyo, a throng of anti-kaijin protesters led by an angry man with a megaphone marches through the streets calling for kaijin to be expelled from Japan or exterminated altogether. A smaller group of counterprotesters follows them, calling for equal rights and the end of discrimination against kaijin, with police struggling to keep the groups separated as they walk. When two officers restrain a counterprotester who ran toward the protesters, he asks them "What are you doing? Are police officers being violent against citizens now?" to which one of the officers replies, "Citizen? What are you saying, you kaijin?" When the man then transforms into his fly kaijin form in front of them, the other officer shoots him in a panic. Several other counterprotesters transform into their kaijin forms and briefly riot against the police before being forced to scatter, as the anti-kaijin protesters continue marching through the streets.

In the original Kamen Rider Black, Gorgom is an ancient cult bent on world domination that serves as the show's central antagonists, ruled by the unseen Creation King and led by the Three High Priests, Darom, Bishum and Baraom. In Kamen Rider Black Sun, Gorgom is originally formed by eight student protesters, both human & kaijin, in 1972 as a Zenkyoto group to push for equality between humans and kaijin. When Darom, Bishum and Baraom present the group's formal proposal for improving treatment of kaijin to Prime Minister Michinosuke Dounami, he surprises them by accepting their terms and agreeing to provide kaijin with equal opportunities for education and work. However, he then reveals that this is just the position his administration will take with the public, and that he agreed to meet with them for the purpose of forming a new political party together. "Sooner or later," he explains, "I plan to reform the constitution so that I can use military power overseas. When that day comes, the 200,000 votes from the kaijin will be helpful." He continues, "It's also worth mentioning, that when we start a war with another country, I'll have the kaijin fight at the frontlines as military weapons."

By 2022, the Gorgom Party is the long-dominant party in Japan's government and it's led by Prime Minister Shinichi Dounami, the grandson of former Prime Minister Michinosuke Dounami. He publicly maintains the party's position that kaijin deserve to live in harmony with humans but there is no real check on his power. During a legislative session on a bill proposed by Dounami, a member of the opposition party calls it a war bill and declares that it would prevent security and put Japanese citizens and the self-defense force at higher risk. She demands to hear answers from the prime minister but he directs his chief cabinet secretary to the microphone, who insists that they would halt all military activity to focus on safety if, by any chance, a battle were to erupt in a location where Japan's self-defense force is deployed. He also insists that the bill is not a war bill and should be called peaceful security legislation. When the opposition member still insists that Prime Minister Dounami answer in his own words, he approaches the microphone, puts on his reading glasses and reads the exact same response from a page. She criticizes him for repeating it word for word and says he'll never get the approval of citizens like that. Afterward, when Dounami walks with his cabinet through the Diet while ignoring the press, he turns to his chief cabinet secretary and says, "Getting the citizens' approval? I never intended to. The majority of this world was created without getting their approval. They don't get that, and that's why they'll always be the opposing party."

There's a lot more to scrutinize but I don't want to get into too much detail about the plot. Suffice to say that when the show eventually touches on the origins of the kaijin, the parallels to Unit 731 are undeniable. The Gorgom Party is a brazen allegory for the real-life LDP and the show shines a light on the party's link to Japan's imperial past, a point exemplified by a scene in which the Creation King sits inside an old shrine with the Imperial Seal of Japan adorned over the entrance. Kamen Rider Black Sun is a fearlessly political series and it doesn't pull its punches. It also boasts memorable characters, brutal action sequences and a beautiful score. This series is fantastic!

[lhb412]

^ I'll come back to read all that in a few months. Decided to hold off on watching Black Sun when the tantalizingly close February release date of the original Kamen Rider Black on Blu-ray was an announced. I'll see the original, then the reboot. I know this new version is very different, but I also hear it reappropriates elements of the original in clever ways.

[Benjamin Haines]

^ I would never spoil a show without warning! The only spoilers in my last post are regarding Shin Godzilla. I typed all that for readers who haven't yet seen Kamen Rider Black Sun. I look forward to discussing the show's story and characters in detail once you and more people have seen it but I couldn't wait to ruminate on some of the show's political subtext.

Yes, definitely watch Black first. It isn't necessary in order to understand or enjoy Black Sun but it will be so much more rewarding.

[Benjamin Haines]

Ultraman Gaia (1998-1999) - WOW! I had no idea there was an Ultraman series like this!

The episode plots aren't completely serialized like Nexus later would be but Gaia really develops its characters and its overarching conflict as the series unfolds. It's still episodic in the sense that it maintains that classic monster(s)-of-the-week approach but it also builds on its own continuity with each episode. It's a very unique approach and it works brilliantly because this show has an expansive ensemble cast of characters who are introduced and developed at a gradual pace, as the lead character Gamu meets the members of GUARD and each individual XIG Team. The cast also includes the KCB News trio of reporter Reiko, director Tabata (Hiroshi Tsuburaya AKA Space Sheriff Shaider!) and cameraman Rinbun.

On top of all that, the show is centered around not one Ultraman but two: Gaia and Agul. Gamu as Gaia wants to protect people while Fujimiya as Agul is determined to protect planet Earth itself, and the show really goes deep as it explores their clashing approaches to being Ultraman. Everything that plays out has an impact on the ongoing conflict between humanity and the Radical Destruction Bringer. It all makes for a series that just blossoms from beginning to end.

I haven't yet watched the 1999 Tiga/Dyna/Gaia film, the 2000 Tiga film or the 2001 Tiga, Dyna & Gaia specials but I'm looking forward to watching them this month because all three of these series have been highlights of the Ultra franchise to me. TPC really assembled strong teams of writers when they revived Ultraman in the late '90s and these shows just kept getting better.

[Benjamin Haines]

JAKQ Dengekitai (1977) - I've watched all 35 episodes of this series, which was Toei & Shotaro Ishinomori's follow-up to the original Himitsu Sentai Goranger. The team name JAKQ stands for Jack, Ace, King, Queen, reflecting the four members' names and their playing card motif.

A terrorist organization known as Crime threatens the world, led by the sinister madman Iron Claw, so Interpol forms a special division called ISSIS. Commander Kujirai of ISSIS' Japan branch recruits four young people to undergo cybernetic enhancement surgery, turning each of them into a cyborg powered by a different form of energy. Olympic gold medalist Goro Sakurai becomes the nuclear-powered Spade Ace. Ryu Higashi, a boxing champion framed for murder, becomes the electric-powered Diamond Jack. Police detective Karen Mizuki becomes the magnetic-powered Heart Queen. Bunta Daichi, an oceanographer who suffocated to death when his submersible ran out of oxygen, gets taken out of cryogenic freezing and revived as the gravitational-powered Clover King. Led by Commander Kujirai, who adopts the name Joker, together they fight Crime as JAKQ, Blitzkrieg Corps!

Compared to the more familiar sci-fi/fantasy styles of later Super Sentai shows, the original Goranger was much more grounded in the spy thriller genre, and JAKQ leans even harder into it. This series is darker and more grim than Goranger, which was already quite violent and brutal. JAKQ from the outset features Crime doing things like shooting random civilian motorists and crashing a passenger airplane with children onboard. I think Toei & Ishinomori might have been trying to appeal to a slightly older demographic of kids with this series, although Iron Claw always comes across as more goofy than menacing.

The four members of JAKQ must step into special high-tech energy capsules in order to transform into their cyborg forms, so they don't have the convenience of transforming at will in any dangerous situation, although they can open skin panels on their forearms to access their own wiring for various cybernetic and energy-specific functions, and they have their cyborg strength even in their human forms. All of that brings different stakes to the drama, and the team's playing card motif is fun, but the show is clearly a redressed version of Goranger at its core.

I dug this show from the beginning even though it didn't displace Goranger as my favorite Sentai series. Japanese kids in 1977 must have been tuning out, though, because the 23rd episode of JAKQ marks a major creative overhaul for the series. Joker was written out of the show and replaced with a new acting commander, Soukichi Bamba, played by Hiroshi Miyauchi, who previously co-starred in Goranger as Akira Shinmei, the alter ego of Aoranger, and before that starred as the lead character Shiro Kazami in Kamen Rider V3. In contrast to Joker, Bamba gets directly involved in the action as both a skilled detective and a master of disguise. Decked in a white suit with white gloves, white shoes, a white fedora and a rainbow-colored ascot, Bamba is also a cyborg who can transform at will into the caped hero Big One, acting as the fifth member of JAKQ in the field. Along with Bamba/Big One, the show starts to add more comic relief, often through a new character named Tamasaburou who acts as JAKQ's chef and has a recurring gag of telling bad jokes and getting thrown out of the room by Higashi. Another inane change is the revelation that Iron Claw is not actually the head of Crime but that he serves an alien master named Shine.

While I still thoroughly enjoyed the series after these creative shifts, the addition of Miyauchi as Bamba and the lighter tone come across as desperate behind-the-scenes moves to attract more viewers, and perhaps even an acknowledgment that the show's four lead heroes hadn't become very popular with kids. Big One really does steal a lot of JAKQ's thunder, from the copious shots of Bamba/Big One injected into the show's opening title sequence (before he's even introduced in the episode proper) to the various episodes in which he rescues JAKQ from danger by distracting the villains with his over-the-top disguises, sometimes with a little help from Tamasaburou. It only takes until episode 29 for Bamba to take center-stage with a story that remakes the premise of Goranger's 57th episode, in which Peggy/Momoranger stayed one step ahead of the villains by changing through five different disguises, which she climactically recounted when confronting the villains toward the end. In episode 29 of JAKQ, Bamba and Iron Claw chase each other around town in a game of cat-and-also-cat while both of them change through a series of disguises, which they recount to each other toward the end when they finally reveal themselves. (Years later, Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger did another episode like this, and I'm sure there are other Sentai shows I haven't seen yet that have done episodes like this too.)

It really is surreal to watch this show starring a team of four superheroes as they suddenly become subordinates to a newly-introduced hero character midway through the series, and a character played by a two-time veteran toku hero actor no less. Never mind how adding a fifth member disrupts the team's theme of four playing card suits, not to mention how Big One has a big number "1" on his forehead when that number isn't part of a standard deck of cards. Even the new interstitial illustrations that serve as bumpers for each episode's commercial break posit Big One as the show's main draw, with one illustration depicting the four members of JAKQ reflected in the stripes of Big One's rainbow-colored helmet, and the other depicting a giant image of Big One towering over the rest of the team. These creative shifts still must have not been enough to save the series from cancellation, as it only lasted 13 more episodes with the addition of Big One.

JAKQ Dengekitai is a very entertaining and unique series in the Super Sentai franchise. It may have struggled in the shadow of its predecessor but I certainly appreciate how distinguishable these four heroes are from each of the Gorangers. JAKQ is a lot of fun, both before and after the creative shifts.

[lhb412]

^ Really enjoying your overviews of these shows! I adore Gaia especially; one of my top Ultra shows: the TDG trilogy and the original run of Q through Return is my idea of 'Peak Ultra' (I'd put Shin in there, too!)

It's been a long time coming, but I've finally finished Kamen Rider Black. This is something I've been meaning to do for 22 years, when I first got my hands on the initial dozen or so episodes on bootleg, fansubbed tapes. I loved those tapes as a kid! For all intents and purposes, those earlier episodes of Black were the entirety of Kamen Rider for me. This stuff was hard to get, so you savored what you had access to.

I've now finished it.

It was okay.

It's really a case of my relationship with this show. I've grown up with those early episodes and their gothic horror atmosphere and sharp production value. When I saw that as a kid I felt it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. The truth is, as the series progresses it has trouble maintaining those elements that made it unique and it can feel like a generic Toei hero show. The kind of episodes that made Black so cool in the beginning; ones that feel like a little horror movie (kid friendly, but still sufficiently spooky) with a superhero barging in partway? They become more and more infrequent. Instead of a creepy, illuminati-esque cult that seems inescapable, Gorgom eventually becomes just another villain group with a few monster guys in a secret hideout. Even the killer setup for the ending showdown of brother vs. brother is let down somewhat by a production that feels stretched too thin. In the final story arc the characters begin to lapse into spells of flashbacks so the episodes can become clipshows and eat up some runtime!

Part of the trouble is, in the intervening years I have seen things like Kuuga and the two Amemiya films, which in their own way fulfilled the promise of those early episodes of Kamen Rider Black thar made such an impression on my young mind... as it turns out, in a way the actual rest of Kamen Rider Black has not!

I don't hate it! Actually, I look forward to revisiting it in a few years with different expectations. On to the next in my growing pile of tokusatsu I haven't watched yet. Keep 'em coming!

[Benjamin Haines]

^ I totally agree about Peak Ultra! Of the Ultra hero series that I've seen, my top five favorites are Seven, Return, Tiga, Dyna and Gaia.

Your reasons for being let down by the rest of Kamen Rider Black are understandable. The show did shift gears behind the scenes after that first cours of episodes. Shozo Uehara was the show's initial head writer, having scripted episodes 1-4 and 12, but then Noboru Sugimura scripted a dozen episodes starting with 13, including the episodes when Shadow Moon awakens and the two-part finale. This show sort of marks a passing of the torch in terms of tokusatsu series writers. Uehara's work on Kamen Rider Black came at the tail end of a decadeslong streak during which he was the head writer for a number of shows including Return of Ultraman, the first five Sentai series and the first five Metal Hero series, but then he mostly retired from the genre after this. Conversely, Sugimura was an experienced TV writer who had only written for a few other toku shows before this, and then he went on to be the head writer for three Metal Hero series and four Sentai series. Still, this show also had some consistency in its writers, with Junichi Miyashita having written a dozen episodes from 5 and 9 all the way to 48 and 49.

For me personally, when I first watched Kamen Rider Black in late 2021, I had already seen all of the original series as well as Kuuga and its follow-up, Agito. That was the extent of my Kamen Rider exposure prior to Black, so I knew how repetitiously episodic and hugely influential the original series was, and I also knew how tightly serialized and continuity-driven the Heisei-era shows were. To me, Black was the best of both worlds, a Kamen Rider series from the late '80s with episodes that tell their own stories but an overarching plot connecting the characters that unfolds throughout the series.

I will say that if the rest of Black seemed like a generic Toei hero show to you, then you really might not like Black RX. That sequel series, fun as it is, seems like Kotaro Minami just stumbled into a completely different and generic Toei hero show with an invading alien empire that has nothing to do with him prior to that first episode. I think a big part of what makes Black such a riveting series is the deeply personal connection between Kotaro, Nobuhiko, Kyoko, Katsumi and the Gorgom cult. That gives the drama a very effective pathos that isn't common among shows like this. When Shadow Moon emerged and killed Bilgenia in episode 35, I was on the edge of my seat! Ditto episode 45 when Bishum put herself in the line of Shadow Moon's beam to keep Black restrained and then Kyoko jumped in. Ditto everything involving poor Whale Kaijin.

[lhb412]

^ I might find RX easier going down if it's consistently its own thing for the duration. The problem with Black is that I feel it doesn't live up to the promises it makes. The two girls leaving before the final episode is especially egregious.

Anyway, I'm three episodes in to Space Sheriff Gavan and I totally dig the vibe. Think I'm gonna pump the breaks on binging these Toei hero shows, though. They adhere so closely to templates, they collapse in on themselves if you watch a bunch at once. Ultra shows almost always avoid this because they're always mixing up the kinds of threats and (hopefully) focusing on different team members from episode to episode.

[Benjamin Haines]

^ Oh yeah, these are shows that were made to be watched once per week, and I don't like binge-watching anything. Space Sheriff Gavan is one of my favorite toku shows that I've seen but I rarely ever watched more than one episode per day and it took me three months to finish the series. I like to watch up to four different new-to-me shows from different franchises at the same time, preferably shows from various eras and with distinct styles, and I don't always have time to watch four shows every day so that helps shake things up.


Kamen Rider V3 (1973-1974) - I've watched all 52 episodes of the second-ever Kamen Rider series, a direct continuation of the original. After the destruction of Gel-Shocker by Kamen Riders 1 and 2, the Shocker Leader is revealed to have survived and now leads a new evil organization called Destron. When Destron mortally wounds a young man named Shiro Kazami and murders his family, the two Kamen Riders work together to convert him into a cyborg, giving him new life as Kamen Rider V3.

The original show had lasted two years and already featured two different Kamen Riders, so with this series being a direct narrative sequel that started airing the very next week, and with Takeshi Hongo, Hayato Ichimonji and Tobei Tachibana all present from the outset and still played by the same actors, this feels less like a whole new show and more like the original series got a much-needed creative overhaul.

There's no denying how successful the original Kamen Rider series was and what a huge influence it had on the genre, as much as or even more than the original Ultraman series. I'm still amazed by that because, compared to Ultraman, the original Kamen Rider is an incredibly repetitious series that makes only a small fraction of the effort to offer viewers different things from one episode to the next. It took me about a year to watch all 98 episodes of the original series and that included taking extended breaks from it to watch all of Kuuga and Zone Fighter.

With Kamen Rider V3, what a world of difference a little storytelling variety makes! This show is great! I watched it all this year in under three months. I'd rank it up with the likes of Himitsu Sentai Goranger and Space Sheriff Gavan in terms of early toku shows that did a terrific job of building their own identities on the original Kamen Rider template.

For one thing, most of the episodes of Kamen Rider V3 are two-part stories. That means that for every episode that ends with Kazami riding his motorcycle away victoriously as the narrator encourages him to keep up his fight against Destron, there are almost as many episodes that end on tense cliffhangers. That alone goes a long way toward adding some variety to the stories.

For another thing, a big part of this series is Kazami gradually discovering everything that his newly acquired cyborg body can do. The first two Kamen Riders turn him into a cyborg but then they aren't around to explain everything to him, so we the audience learn new things about V3 at the same time as he does. V3 has 26 secret powers as well as four key weaknesses and they're each revealed at a gradual pace rather than all at once.

The whole cast is great. Lead actor Hiroshi Miyauchi really sells the personal growth of Shiro Kazami, from the guy who has his whole world upended when he loses his family to the steely warrior of the show's later episodes. Akiji Kobayashi reprises his role as Tobei Tachibana, now running a sporting goods store which he also uses as the base for the Kamen Rider Scouts, the network of kids formed late in the original series to help Kamen Rider by relaying information across Japan. Hizuru Ono plays Junko Tama, a young woman whose accidental discovery of Destron's base sets the show's tragic events in motion. Kazami and Junko develop unspoken feelings for one another but he refuses to get close to her and he doesn't want her to find out that he's a cyborg. Junko's younger brother Shigeru is a Kamen Rider Scout and he's played by Hideki Kawaguchi, the same kid who previously played Jiro on Return of Ultraman.

Whereas each of Shocker's kaijin was based on a single animal, and then every Gel-Shocker kaijin was a hybrid of two different and seemingly incompatible animals, all of Destron's kaijin are hybrids of an animal and an object (Scissors-Jaguar, Turtle-Bazooka, etc.). As in the original series, the Destron Leader eventually appoints commandants to lead the group's operations in Japan, replacing each of them as he grows impatient with their losses to V3. Doktor G is the commandant who shows up at the end of episode 13 and remains in charge through episode 30. He wears knight armor and he always enunciates "Kamen RAAAIIIDA V3" with villainous gusto. The next two commandants are only in charge for five episodes each, with Baron Tusk bringing his Tusk Tribe with him from Africa, and then Archbishop Wing and his WInged Corps coming in from Tibet. Marshal Armor becomes the commandant in charge of Destron's Japan branch from episode 41 through the rest of the series.

One really cool change occurs late in the show's run with the introduction of Riderman, also known as Joji Yuki, a loyal Destron scientist whom Marshal Armor tries to execute in a dramatic act of palace intrigue. The circumstances of how Yuki becomes Riderman are quite unique from the stories of any of the Kamen Riders. Furthermore, Riderman doesn't simply become an ally to V3, as Yuki is a lifelong Destron loyalist at heart and he has a hard time deprogramming and understanding the truth about Destron. The clash of values between Kazami and Yuki really helps the series stick the landing in its final stretch.

[lhb412]

^ If the AMC Theaters listing is to be believed, we'll be getting a US theatrical release for Shin Kamen Rider on May 31. I briefly considered attempting to marathon all 98 episodes of the OG Rider in the less that two months we have 'till then... but decided against it for reasons we've both stated! I've got the hardcover of the original manga, though. I'll read that and maybe watch Ryuki or Black Son (maybe!) as prep for the movie.

Really digging Gavan. Property the only show where the lead actor looks a bit more muscular than the one in the hero suit! Any scene where Gavan isn't fighting in his power armor is a scene if him ighting as a normal human, and in the rare non-fighting scenes he's either taking care of horses or tooling around in his sweet Jeep with him and his girl in cool outfits. It's a show made of only cool bits! Almost through disc 1 (of 4) and I think I'll pace myself by taking breaks between discs to avoid Toei hero burnout.

[lhb412]

Ha, in a totally different reaction to episodic Toei hero shows - I've been blasting through (the more serialized in structure) Kamen Rider Ryuki! I'm thinking the early '00s is my fav period for Rider; a great combo of toku hero stuff and slightly older-skewing melodrama.

Man, they must've had to have filmed a lot of new hero footage for KR Dragon Knight, because many episodes of Ryuki are mostly un-henshined soap opera stuff with very little tokusatsu footage at all.

And there's more gay subtext than I expected!

[Benjamin Haines]

^ Ryuki is great! It's one of my favorite Kamen Rider series (along with V3, Black, Kuuga and Black Sun) of the ones that I've seen.

I, too, am a big fan of the early-2000s style of Heisei Kamen Rider. If you have the Toku streaming channel on Prime Video, they have both Agito and 555 available to stream fully subtitled. Even though I like Kuuga and Ryuki more than those two series, they're both totally worth watching.

Right now I'm watching Kamen Rider X (the follow-up to V3) and Toei's late-'70s Spider-Man series. I intend to start Ultraman Cosmos after I watch the two Zearth films.


Ultraman Neos (2000-2001) - I've watched all 12 episodes of this direct-to-DVD series. The opening narration to each episode sums up the premise: "About once every 3 million years, out solar system passes an obscure space where the Dark Matter drifts. It is a world where anything can happen. You're now going to experience that Unbalance Zone." After that, each episode's opening theme song depicts how the lead character got into the predicament that led him to merge with Ultraman Neos: a space shuttle crew was repairing a satellite in space when a meteor shower from the Unbalance Zone hit them, sending one of the astronauts spinning off into space. A young man on the shuttle quickly put on a suit and went out to rescue his comrade, safely sending him and his partner back to the shuttle, only to get hurled out into space himself when the satellite exploded.

There's really not much to say about this series. The premise is built on a few of the ideas behind Ultra Q and it features simplified, reimagined versions of Ultraman and UltraSeven. It's short and isn't innovative or original at all. The monster suits and miniatures are fine but the production values for the HEART defense team are the cheapest of any Ultraman show that I've seen. The cast does what they can but the characters are generic. The episode stories range from solid to just bad. Most of the episodes are standalone stories but there is a running arc involving the Alien Zamu. Robert Scott Field has a guest role in the sixth episode!

Mill Creek's DVD set doesn't include a booklet, and what little info on this series is available on the Ultraman Wiki and other websites just makes me wonder why TPC made it at all. It was originally planned as a TV series, with a 7-minute pilot short (not included on Mill Creek's set) produced in 1995, but the project was shelved. Years later, after the Ultraman franchise had already made its big TV comeback with Tiga, Dyna and Gaia from 1996 to 1999, the project was revived as this 12-episode series, released straight to DVD from November 2000 to January 2001. What was the point of going back to this half-baked pre-Tiga concept? The Australian co-production Ultraman: Towards the Future had already done a take on the concept of an evil entity in space acting as the show's primary antagonist by causing different kinds of monsters to rampage on Earth, and then Ultraman Gaia later refined that concept into something epic and ambitious, so to see that concept rehashed again here for Neos in this most rudimentary form just comes across as uninspired. What was the point of making Neos a short Ultraman series specifically for DVD instead of TV? Was TPC just desperate to produce and sell any new Ultraman content to fill the gap while they came up with what eventually became Cosmos? Did they produce these 12 episodes with the intent of airing the show on TV as the follow-up to Gaia and then decide not to air it when they realized it wasn't up to snuff, making its eventual DVD release a simple means of getting a return on the project in a way that devoted fans could seek out? It definitely seems like it was made just for the devoted fans with the way it bypasses an origin-story episode for the title character and just sums that up in the opening title sequence, and then it never even shows Kagura's first meeting with Ultraman Neos. It seems like they knew that they didn't need to bother with that for anybody who would end up watching this series on DVD.


Megabeast Investigator Juspion (1985-1986) - I've also watched all 46 episodes of this fourth entry in Toei's Metal Hero franchise. Compared to Space Sheriff Sharivan and Space Sheriff Shaider, this show certainly does more to differentiate itself from the formula that Space Sheriff Gavan established. It's a very enjoyable show, although I do personally rank it last of these first four Metal Hero series.

How is this show different from its predecessors? It's a narrative reboot for one thing, not a continuation. There's no Galactic Union Police Force and Juspion is not a Space Sheriff. The opening scene of the first episode dives right into the wild premise. One day on a distant planet, a young man named Juspion (Hikaru Kurosaki) is summoned to a cave by his elder, the prophet Eijin (Noboru Nakaya), who shows him a stone fragment of the ancient Galactic Bible. "When the time comes that Satan Gorth reawakens, the cosmos shall be overrun with berserk Megabeasts that will lay waste to everything. To defeat Satan Gorth..." The text on the stone fragment is cut off there. Juspion dismisses Satan Gorth as an old demon legend, but then the cave shakes violently and Juspion runs outside with Eijin to see Satan Gorth walking by, a giant figure resembling Darth Vader. "Just as the Galactic Bible prophesied," Eijin says, "the Megabeasts will begin to run berserk. Go now, Juspion! Fight the Megabeasts, defeat Satan Gorth, and preserve peace in the cosmos!" With a flash of light, Juspion is adorned with a white/silver/red power suit and accompanying sword courtesy of Eijin. In the very next scene, Juspion is traveling aboard the Super Planetary Battleship Daileon along with Anri (Kiyomi Tsukada), a female android also built by Eijin.

So, even though it doesn't continue the Space Sheriff saga, Megabeast Investigator Juspion quickly presents a lot of the same elements: the young male hero who can instantly summon his mechanical power suit, traveling with his female sidekick on a spaceship that can transform into a giant robot for combat purposes. Unlike Gavan, Sharivan and Shaider's transformation scenes, Juspion doesn't shout a special command to summon his power suit but merely waves his hands next to his hair, and there are never any immediate flashbacks to Juspion elaborately posing while a narrator explains how the suit gets transmitted onto him. Anri being an android is notably different from Mimi, Lily and Annie of the prior shows and it's usually played for comedy, as Anri often short-circuits and freezes her body in place until Juspion reboots her while she makes cross-eyed expressions.

In the first episode, Juspion and Anri crash-land on Planet Beezee where they encounter a pair of bandits who attack them with arrows. When they flee into a forest and get trapped by oversized plants, they're saved by a pair of peaceful forest creatures, one of whom is identified onscreen as Rare-Beast Miya. After Miya chews through the vines entangling Juspion, the bandits kill Miya's mother as he and Anri flee. The bandits chase them out of the forest to a cliff's edge but are driven away by the sudden appearance of two Megabeasts, the turtle-like Marigos and the flying Hanedar. As the two Megabeasts battle, Juspion and Anri escape and come upon a city. After riding up an escalator in a domed facility (I swear this is the same mall location that was later used in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah for the interior of the Futurians' mothership), Juspion and Anri enter a bizarre nightclub bar filled with strange characters, including a fat crime lord. As Juspion and Anri mingle, the lights lower and everyone applauds as the evening's entertainment begins. The two bandits from earlier walk a hapless individual to the middle of the room, and it's Miya, bound and blindfolded. The crime lord gives the signal and one of the bandits uses an arrow to hit an apple right off the top of Miya's head, much to the room's amusement. As the bandit aims the next arrow lower, Juspion intervenes and whips the arrow away, saving Miya's life and blowing a kiss to the crime lord, then proceeding to kick ass as everyone in the room attacks him. Later in the episode, Miya follows Juspion and Anri into a cave which is filled with the eggs of Marigos. Satan Gorth appears and blasts Marigos and Hanedar with energy rays from his eyes, demonstrating his dark power to make Megabeasts go berserk. Juspion dons his power suit and takes on the two Megabeasts, utilizing his Super Planetary Combat Tank Garbin, the detachable Garbin Jet, and the transforming Combat Giant Daileon. At the end of the episode, when Juspion and Anri are about to leave the planet, Miya turns up again and expresses her desire to join them, to which Juspion happily agrees over Anri's protests.

That's a lot that happens in just the first episode and it ends with Miya becoming a permanent addition to Juspion's crew, which is another notable difference between this show and its predecessors. The second episode involves them finding a desolate space bus filled with dead passengers and then traveling to the frozen Planet Peace, where they encounter flying stingray-like creatures and a deadly conspiracy involving Satan Gorth, the Megabeast Tetsugos and an artificial intelligence called Sakura (Cherry Blossoms). The third episode sees Juspion, Anri and Miya landing on Planet Dodo where they meet a boy and his Megabeast friend, Namagerath, who is suffering from a poisoned arrow attack by the townspeople and needs Juspion to retrieve the Fruit of Life in order to survive. The townspeople see Namagerath as a threat, and Satan Gorth sees the opportunity to sow chaos. This episode also includes a still-illustration flashback in which the narrator explains that Juspion was a baby traveling through space with his parents when their ship crashed on a planet. Juspion survived the crash and was rescued from the wreckage by Eijin, who raised Juspion alongside Megabeasts.

Three episodes in, I was impressed by the ambitious scope of this series, which made for a variety of exotic locations and diverse characters. Then comes the fourth episode, titled "Set Course for the Third Planet" which, sure enough, involves Juspion traveling to Earth. Eijin tells Juspion to search for more fragments of the Galactic Bible on the third planet from the sun, the legendary "Planet of the Megabeasts" which will soon be targeted by Satan Gorth. Of course the contemporary mid-'80s Earth that they reach is dominated not by dinosaurs but by humans, and by the end of the episode, Juspion and Anri decide to remain on Earth to protect it from Satan Gorth's future efforts to awaken dormant Megabeasts. And with that, this show abandons its initial planet-hopping premise and becomes a lot more like its Japan-based predecessors.

The fourth episode also introduces Satan Gorth's son, the human-sized Mad Gallant who can disguise himself in a human form (played by Jyunichi Haruta). That also makes this show's recurring villains more like the evil organizations of the Space Sheriff shows, with a ruling overlord portrayed through special effects and his loyal commandant played by an actor who gets involved in the action. The differences here are once again in the details, as Mad Gallant's natural form makes him look like a black-suited version of a Metal Hero, and Satan Gorth is a walking giant brought to life through suitmation unlike the "built into the wall" leaders Don Horror, Demon King Psycho and Great Emperor Kubilai of the prior shows.

As the series progresses, it continues to introduce elements which initially bring something unique to the table but eventually give way to a more formulaic approach. In episode 13, Mad Gallant summons four different galactic warlords from across the cosmos, two male and two female, bringing them together on Earth to help him defeat Juspion. I thought that was going to be the start of a compelling mini-saga, but after Juspion manages to defeat the two male warlords within a few episodes, the two female warlords stick around and just act as Mad Gallant's top two henchwomen for the remainder of the series.

The flimsiest aspect of this show, by far, is its running story arc. Mild spoilers ahead for this paragraph. In episode 12, Eijin finds another fragment of the Galactic Bible which reads "That which will defeat Satan Gorth will be born from the Golden Egg." Juspion soon learns from a divine messenger of the universe that the Golden Bird is what will hatch from the Golden Egg, and this sets in motion his quest to find the Golden Bird that is prophesied to defeat Satan Gorth. This leads to the introduction of a recurring character named Kenichiro Nanbara, a photographer who took a picture of what may or may not have been the Golden Bird. Nanbara's teenage daughter Kanoko and his young son Kenta are soon kidnapped and must be rescued by Juspion, not once but MULTIPLE times. I know that rescuing kidnapped children is a common trope in these Toei hero shows but the whole Golden Bird plot in this series really does lead to Juspion just rescuing the same two kids several times over, with more than one episode in which those kids run away from the safe location where Juspion left them so they can try to find their father again. Eventually, in episode 35, seven beams of divine light shine down from above Earth, striking Juspion, five children (including Kanoko) and a baby. Eijin meets up with Juspion, Anri and Miya on Earth and they find the remainder of the Galactic Bible, which reads "A lone hero shall descend from the heavens, obtain the Golden Bird, and destroy Satan Gorth. The hero shall be a young man, struck by the light. The Golden Bird resides in the hands of the five chosen children struck by the light." Eijin can't read the burned-away characters that begin the last sentence but it ends with "...the baby within the light will return." At this point, the notion of the Golden Bird hatching from a Golden Egg is forgotten as Juspion sets out to find the four other unidentified children who were struck by the light so they can bring forth the Golden Bird. I won't spoil why the Golden Bird is ultimately the key to defeating Satan Gorth but I will say that it has nothing to do with the fact that it's a bird or the fact that children make it appear. And as for the mysterious baby and why it has any effect at all on what happens, it really comes down to nothing more than "for the Galactic Bible tells me so."

All of that nonsense is supposed to be the narrative glue that connects the whole series but it's really the most contrived and least interesting part of the show, and it's why I personally rank this series below each of its Space Sheriff predecessors. That's not to say that's it's a bad series overall, though, because Megabeast Investigator Juspion really is a lot of fun to watch. Getting giant robot vs. Megabeast action in every episode is a welcome replacement for having the villains open some sort of space-time rift in every episode to plunge the hero into scenes of trippy imagery, which was a formula that felt fresh with Gavan but was uncreatively recycled with different descriptors for Sharivan and Shaider. The inclusion of so much Megabeast action does set this show apart, and even with its earthbound setting, it does a good job of presenting different standalone episodes with various kinds of giant monsters. The heroes are likeable and Miya has a central role in episode 37, which I think is one of the show's best stories. There are also a lot of fun recurring characters, including Boomerang (Hiroshi Watari, Sharivan himself) and Galactic Witch Gilza (Atsuko Takahata, who later played Maribaron in Kamen Rider Black RX).

[lhb412]

Finished Ryuki. Happy with the ending, but (major spoilers for a bunch of stuff) it comes at the disadvantage of being watched 20 years after it aired, and it feels like "darkest ending followed by timeline reset where most of the story is undone and everyone is alive but everything's different" has been used by everyone from Stephen King to Scooby-Doo, and it feels like I've seen it in a dozen anime! Again, not Ryuki's fault, as this show came about way before most of that and it's not their fault that it went on to be an overused trope! I do appreciate just how grim yet totally appropriate everyone's fate was before the reset.

Think I'll save the tie-in movie for a little later. I'm throughly in a Rider state of mind for Shin Kamen Rider tomorrow!

[Benjamin Haines]

^ I'm trying to think of other examples of "darkest ending followed by timeline reset" but the only ones that come to mind are the movie X-Men: Days of Future Past and the fourth episode of Family Guy. I haven't seen very much anime in my life.

Was the ending of Kamen Rider Ryuki really a timeline reset, though? I mean, sure it is, but it's not like in Back to the Future or X-Men:DoFP where the lead characters find themselves in a changed reality at the end but they still remember the old reality. All of the Riders and other key characters in Ryuki have already met their fates by the point when the timeline resets at the end of the last episode, so it doesn't change the events of the Rider War as any of them experienced it during the series. For all intents and purposes, the final scene of the series is like a "what if?" alternate universe showing how all of those characters could have met each other if none of them ever became Riders. It lets everybody show up onscreen one last time as a sendoff to the viewers but it doesn't really change or erase the events of the Rider War which the show depicts from beginning to conclusion. In any case, I thought everything about the series ending was wonderfully done and Ryuki is one of my favorite toku shows that I've seen.

It took me a little over two months to finish Ryuki when I watched it last year. You watched it all in under two months!