Kamen Rider Die watches SSSS.Gridman and SSSS.Dynazenon
 

Hi there. I’m Kamen Rider Die, and this is “Kamen Rider Die watches SSSS.Gridman and SSSS.Dynazenon”.

I definitely don’t think of myself as an Anime Guy, despite being old enough to have devoured formative series as they were first making their ways to America’s various physical media storefronts (Suncoast Video!) and as bootlegs on the tables of comic conventions. (Imagine if the cat site was some random dude’s folding table, and you had to pay $20 for a batch of episodes.) I came up on the AD Vision and Pioneer and Manga Video releases of Evangelion, Escaflowne, Cowboy Bebop, Blue Sub No 6, Tenchi Muyo, and a dozen more. But I’m old, and that was a million years ago, and I don’t really have the chemicals in my brain that hunger for season-length animation; I’d say I grew out of it, but *gestures to seven years of immersion in a tokusatsu franchise designed to sell toys to Japanese children*. So, I don’t know. Fell off of it, I guess? Seems like that’s something I could maybe push myself back into.

Which brings us to this thread! A couple years ago, as I was planning out a road map to rewatch and write about the Phase 2 Heisei Rider shows I’d gotten into before joining the boards on TokuNation, I wanted to sprinkle in some non-Rider stuff, so it could be new to me. (I like discovering new things!) One of the projects was watching a toku anime, and the first thing that came to mind – despite honestly not knowing a ton about it, including if it was actually any good – was SSSS.Gridman. I’m originally a Transformers guy, and I recall the initial designs of the characters from Gridman trickling out into the TF fan community, because they’re references to the Shattered Glass TF designs, which is fascinating and bonkers. Just basing these kids on Transformers is weird, but basing their designs on fan club repaints is the sort of thing that sticks in the brain of even those indifferent to anime. So, yeah: Gridman! That’s the one I wanted to check out, and hopefully find some of that old anime excitement that used to chew up my paycheck as a younger cubist monstrosity.

While there are for sure more knowledgeable and dedicated fans of toku anime on the boards, that is probably not the manner in which I’ll be approaching Gridman and its follow-up (?) Dynazenon. I don’t inherently care about anime, or the intentions of its creators. I’m going to watch a show, and tell you how I felt about it, and the parts of it that said something to me as a piece of art. I don’t know if that’s going to work for folks! (I definitely didn’t feel like my engagement with Fuuto P.I. was fostering a healthy discourse?) But it’s what I’ve got, and it’s how I process these things, and I hope some of you feel like going along for the ride.

After briefly feeling like I 100% did not want to do these threads anymore, I am going to approach this (potential) return in a slightly different way than in the past. Namely, I don’t know what the schedule’s going to be. I am going to look at each day, and see if I’ve got the time and interest to do another episode. If I don’t, we’ll try again the next day. I promise you that this thread will finish, but I couldn’t tell you how long it’s going to take. That said… I really like a steady cadence to these things? So expect something along the lines of 4-5 episodes per week. Just, like, set a subscription to this thread, and you’ll get a post when I feel like I can engage with it.

Beyond that, we’ve got our boilerplate disclaimers:
-PLEASE DON’T POST ANY SPOILERS ABOUT UPCOMING EPISODES. This is my first time watching these shows, and I prefer to go in as cold as possible. If we can keep the discussion to just the episodes I’ve covered, I’d appreciate it.
-DISCUSSION IS WELCOME. I like getting to talk about these shows, but I love getting to talk about them with other people. You are not obligated to chime in if you’d rather lurk, but I definitely enjoy these threads more when people share their own experiences with the art. (Facts and trivia are fine, too, but I way more want to talk about what you took away from the show!)
-KEEP BEING GOOD PEOPLE. I like when everyone is respectful of each other’s views on art, so let’s keep that in the front of our minds as we talk about these shows, okay?

I think that’s it! (It’s probably not, but I can’t recall what else to mention.) Let’s watch a toku anime!

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/ssss/gridman00.png

SSSS.GRIDMAN EPISODE 1 - “AWAKENING”

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/ssss/gridman01a.png

Toku should be for the young.

I’m old, obviously, and I like toku, but it shouldn’t be for me. It needs to speak to children – it needs to address their concerns, argue for their futures, and provide them the road map to survive their adolescence. If there’s a universality to that experience that echoes into adulthood, or a secondary payload for adults, all the better. But the use for toku is for the young.

So I loved this first episode of Gridman, and how it takes the signifiers of nostalgia and history – the Junk Shop, the retro computer, Gridman’s corny statements about callings that don’t impart any useful or tangible information – and hands them over to a new generation, and allows them to do whatever they want with them. It’s a rejection of nostalgia as something that targets a pointless audience, and instead takes the value of the past as only something that the future can give it. These kids don’t know what Gridman is, or why it should matter, so they get to decide in what ways it might matter. It’s a show from their point of view, with the entirety of their world being the scope of the story.

That was great, how hyper (agent) focused it was on these kids, their connections. The best sequence in the episode for me was the jittery editing of the Rikka/Yuta amnesia chat in the Junk Shop. (A protagonist with narratively convenient amnesia? It’s like I never left!) It leverages the flexibility of anime pacing – this episode’s lousy with languid establishing shots, frozen reaction shots, jump cuts – to bind Rikka and Yuta together into this one brain that is as equally annoyed by his amnesia as it is committed to keeping him tethered to the world. There’s no help coming from adults (Rikka’s mom’s two moves are leaving a scene, and asking the kids to leave a scene), so we’re left with kids sort of wandering around, navigating a world that’s shrouded in mist and unanswered questions. Again, the meanings are up to them.

It’s a really good vibe. I like these kids. I like how they’re amiable, and the right amount of idiosyncratic. There’s for sure more to come in each of their backstories (Akane feels slightly too weird to just be a weird kid in school) and tons of mystery to be explored (the school’s just back at the end?!), but this episode really only works if you want to hang out with Yuta, Utsumi, and Rikka, and I totally did. Yuta’s amnesia acts as a fun way to introduce the cast, and his chemistry with Rikka (charmingly inept) and Utsumi (co-conspirator) creates a really strong base to push the main story forward – the climax of this one needs you to buy not only that Yuta would get in the Hyper Agent, but that Rikka and Utsumi would try to help him defeat the kaiju, and I completely bought it. I bought that these three kids would puzzle their way through to saving their town, and that they could do it without subsuming themselves into toku mythology and signifiers. They did it as/for a bunch of kids.

I like that this show took an old thing, and handed it over to a bunch of kids to figure out what it was, and what they should do with it. Perfect choice, and a great start.

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/ssss/gridman01b.png

>watching the sub and not the dub

Wow, you really are a hardcore anime fan!

I dunno how often I'll post in this thread, given I feel that I've kinda already said everything I possibly could about these two anime and their finale movie, but I'll for sure be reading along.

Glad you liked the first episode! Personally I felt it did a great job at both being an introduction to its own original tale as well as having enough to try and hook fans of the original Gridman and/or Syber-Squad. The way the show handles its references is especially nice, as the way they're presented, you're not really missing out on anything super major if you're a newcomer, but you do get a nice little bonus if you've been around. It's the sort of thing alot of reboots fail at, in my experience.

Case in point, the special dog:

https://i.imgur.com/0hzKPOz.png

A nice little nod to the older shows if you're oldschool. A fun little oddity that just sorta exists in this world if you're someone new.

Anyways, hope you enjoy your time with this little section of the franchise!

It's the best decision this show could make, just letting the world happen to the cast, rather than continuously highlighting callbacks or whatever. I don't want a show that wants me to care about some other show!

Fun fact, the color scheme for certain characters are taken from Transformers: Shattered Glass.

I think I mentioned this? It's for sure what first made me aware of this show, as a Transformers fan. Really neat to see that SG Optimus color scheme, and the mask for SG Soundwave... just fun touches, even if it doesn't feel very narratively motivated. (The SG stuff is all flipped morality, so maybe that'll come into play?)

Dang it, I missed it. :lolol
But yeah loved seeing SG Soundwave.

It's hard to even know where to start with this one, for me?

I mean, first of all, happy to have you back, is probably the most important thing to say. I'm definitely looking forward to getting your perspective on these shows as someone coming in from the outside in so many ways. Even as a toku fan, your interest has always been pretty specifically with Rider, so you're sort of *double* lost going into this one? Which is maybe kind of perfect, actually? It's not really a surprise this first episode clicked with you, in that context. If you're exploring this weird new world, struggling to find your own meaning in it while dealing with some sense there's a drive or purpose you once had that you're only beginning to rediscover... hopefully that helps you connect with this story in a way that's entirely unique to you. (Or, failing that, hopefully a total episode count around half the length of one of your usual threads at least makes this a more manageable experience.):p

I'd like to talk about the unique way *I* feel connected with this whole Universe of Gridman media -- and I may have chewed someone's ear off about it in some other thread a few times -- but it's sort of hard to break it into digestible chunks? Trying to keep it relevant specifically to this premiere, I was going in as a fan of the original Gridman series, and it ended up leaving me feeling cold for reasons I had to spend a lot of time (i.e. the entire rest of the broadcast run) untangling before beginning to understand how lucky I actually was to have this show in my life.

So that's the oversimplified version, anyway! Skipping way ahead to entirely present tense feelings, though, I do think this series made a lot of really smart decisions in how it chose to present itself to new audiences first, and as is often the case with you, Die, despite only being one episode in, you're actually already a lot closer to grasping some of those big picture ideas than you probably realize right now.

Well I would make my regular feature explaining all the references (Inoue Hospital is not a reference to Toshiki and Akiko, for one). But I already did that for the other guy. So my snap new feature here, which will require me to make a major effort, is to point out what major Toku roles the Japanese voice cast have had (be they regular roles, or guest characters for a movie/V-Cinema.

Yuya Hirose (Yuta Hibiki) was also You and Pi (collectively known as YouPi) in Ultraman Arc. (Hilariously, the same is also true of the dub VA, Brandon MacInnis)

Hikaru Midorikawa (Gridman), in addition to playing the same role in the original series 25 years earlier, was also Dark Dragon King Salamandes in Kyukyu Sentai GoGoFive, Bakuryuu Topgaler in Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger, Negataros/Kamen Rider Nega Den-O in Den-O x Kiva: Climax Deka, Mirror Knight in the Ultraman Zero saga and Wiserue in Kishiryu Sentai Ryusoulger.

Yume Miyamoto (Rikka) was later Magine/ZenkaiMagine in Kikai Sentai Zenkaiger.

Reina Ueda (Akane) was later Mrs. Sweet Cake in No. 1 Sentai Gozyuger.

Tetsu Inada (Alexis Kerib) was also a wealth of roles, mostly in Sentai since 1999. Most notably, he was Juma King Golmois in GoGoV’s V-Cinema, Highness Duke Org Shuten in Hyakujuu Sentai Gaoranger, Ultraman Cosmos and Ultraman Legend in the former’s movies, Doggie Kruger/DekaMaster in Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger, Dark Faust in Ultraman Nexus, Kamen Rider Ichigou since Decade’s movie whenever Fujioka isn’t available, Homuras in Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger Brave, Gachileus in Ryusoulger, Mashin Hakobu in Mashin Sentai Kiramager, Manhole Grumer in Bakuage Sentai Boonboomger vs King-Ohger and the live action role of Suji in the latter series. (Though his casting here is because he was the voice of Over Justice in Space Patrol Luluco, who Kerib is designed as a homage to)

And last but not least for this episode…

Suzuko Mimori (Namiko) was also RE.M in Ultraman Geed (also physically portraying her human form in one episode) and the Mother of Ultra in all Ultraman media the character’s appeared in since 2020.

As for what I thought… well I’ll either have to rewatch the shows, or go back and find what I said in said other guy’s threads.

That has to be intentional. :lolol