The entire thing that defines melodrama is a reliance on exaggerated, sensationalized stortytelling, so I'd say that falls under what I'm talking about. For me, though, I guess I just don't think he's necessarily that bad at it? Those absurdly overdone bits of drama and comedy definitely don't always land, but when they do, they can be genuinely impactful.

I will say he's at his best when he decides to balance all that out with a lighter touch here and there though.

Good to see you getting an early start on not being let down by Ex-Aid on a rewatch!

It's a strong premiere, to be sure. I wouldn't call it the best, thanks to stiff competition from, like, Fourze and Build and maybe Drive or Wizard or Black or-

Well, there are plenty of good first episodes of Kamen Rider is the point. But Ex-Aid, I maintain, has ridiculously great structure, and its premiere benefits from the show's usual lack of wasted space. Like you said, it fits pretty much everything you need, and little you don't.

A gigantic, roaring Mighty, a Level 1 suit as big as a building. A Sword Vent that's just, like, a ten-foot long Gashacon Breaker. A Final Vent where building-sized Mighty bounces on the monster's head, Mario-style.

Look, I am into this idea.

Wow, Kabuto! I don't usually hear folks bring that one up as a gateway drug. I'm looking forward to seeing what got you hooked!

Oh, man, that brings up something else that I thought worked great about the end of the first episode of Ex-Aid. I thought the roll out of the other Riders was awesome and immediately in character: Snipe mimes killing Emu, Brave dismisses Emu's existence, and Lazer is just completely doing his own hero detective thing. Like, that's the dynamic for pretty much the rest of the show! And they nailed it in episode one!

I can totally see Ex-Aid being, like, a port in the storm. There's something... soothing, maybe, about how Extra everything is. It's impossible not to smile watching the back half of that episode, anyway. I think my facial expression the first time I watched it was a stupid wide grin, and I couldn't stop shouting WHAAAAAAAT IS HAPPENING for ten straight minutes.

I'm being incredibly subjective about Rider premieres, I'll admit. Picking Ex-Aid as the best, you could for sure make a compelling counter-argument for another series. (I definitely remember OOO having a terrific debut.) But, and maybe it's from watching a few series where the fights are fewer and the drama is prioritized, I felt like this one balanced the exposition with a gigantic helping of action at the end. It's half the episode! That's... that is not how shows like Kuuga, Agito, or Ryuki pace things. Ex-Aid, in my mind, feels like a very full series. There're four hero Riders that all get complete stories, two villains that get the same, and a number of minor villains and sidekicks who get tons to do. It'd be easy for things to feel rushed, or overstuffed. Looking at this episode, nothing feels irrelevant or unnecessary, no one feels overshadowed or underutilized. It's a great unit of entertainment, and one that definitely gets you excited for more.

Episode 25 of Kabuto was the first episode of Kamen Rider I watched (as long as you don't count the Black RX footage from Saban's Masked Rider, or that clip I saw of X fighting Hitler Starfish). I didn't know what the hell was going on, but I knew I'd found something that was special. I'd been obsessed with Guyver from the age of 10 all the way into my late teens (which was tough, because very little in the way of merch for Guyver, which is a big way I enjoy a show/movie/comic, buying figures and playing video games related to said IP). After all the years of wishing there was more Guyver, it's like I'd found it's dad or something. Rider wasn't quite as brutal or violent, but it made up for it by being flashy and sometimes very funny. I was instantly hooked.

And, I assume, with having an endless amount of supporting merch. Do you ever wish you'd stuck to the largely-ignored Guyver? Probably would've been better financially!

Definitely would have been better for my wallet, there's no doubt about that. However, I wouldn't miss all the fun I've had with this series for anything. Between all the sweet figures, video games, wearing Rider belts to anime conventions and bumping into other fans, having seasons and seasons of shows to share with my friends, Kamen Rider is something I'm extremely glad I got into.

With Guyver, there were only unarticulated, glue-together vinyl models as far as merch, and once I was in my 20's and Max Factory finally made figures, they were super expensive and hard to get (P-Bandai stuff is more affordable and easier to get a hold of). I still love Guyver, but I find it very limited compared to Kamen Rider which has told so many different stories from 1971 to now.

Plus Rider is always on. Even if there's a season I'm not crazy about, there's always SOMETHING interesting about it, and it's a year tops before a whole new cast of characters gets introduced. There are few IP that can boast the same, and none that I can think of that brings such a consistent level of quality.

But do I wish I knew that Figuarts was going to be a thing when I was still busy hunting down all those Souchaku Henshin figures? Yes! Sooo many figures in storage due to updates. I've got Souchku Henshin Agito and Kabuto, as well as the first version of of their Figuarts in storage because....Shinkocchou Seihou. I'm not getting a 4th version in that scale unless the little fuckers actually henshin.

I think that's the best thing going for the Rider (and I guess, Sentai) franchise: one year and they move on. As someone who's been a fan of American superhero stories for decades, the fact that these Japanese ones end and move on... like, that is why I spend my work hours reading American superhero comics, and my free time watching Japanese superhero shows. They get to tell a whole story in one year. I love so many of the Rider shows, but I'd definitely be a little skeptical of, like, Build season 2. (Honestly, even when the series get a raft of follow-up films that are really fun, like Ex-Aid and Build, part of me whispers "Just leave it alone.")

I was literally just about to say that!! I love that a long-running franchise can just let stories happen and end. There's not even any worries about getting cancelled or cut short because they constantly have a tight schedule of "on for between 45-50 episodes" so it's fairly easy to plan around it.

There's always sequels and teamups and returns movies and such, but even those I feel don't take away from it -- when the series ends, that's the main story over. Anything after is just a look at what the characters are doing now or just a cool "I'm your senior rider, let's team up and beat the heck out of this god or whatever" moment. These stories are allowed to just end and that's so, so, so important to me.

So, I feel like I’ve talked about this ad nauseum, but I think there’s a difference between the classic Legend Rider stuff, like Shotaro and Kaito looking for a lost dog, or the bit where Gentaro calls Shotaro “sempai” and you can see Shotaro puff out his chest, or just anything ever with Shotaro he’s the best, and the newer follow-up films. For the former, it’s a fun cameo. For the latter, it’s like, I Guess Kuroto Has Another Scheme We Never Heard About?

I think a lot of it comes down to the negative side of the philosophy where these stories are allowed to end: they have to end. They’re, mostly, designed to tell one story, to defeat one enemy. They pretty much all do that at the end of the season. After that, we want to see them ride off into the sunset, right? They've won their fight. And the show’s built for them to do that. It’s built for there to be nothing left for them to do, no big villains left to fight. Continuations for Kamen Rider always feel like a retcon to me, something that wasn’t in the original story that now is, that we have to pretend isn’t some forced way to continue the adventures of characters we all love.

It’s, weirdly, like the opposite of a problem Doctor Who has, where the character/iteration seems built to run indefinitely, and anytime they try to treat an actor moving on as the end of a story, like it was always about one thing instead of a series of adventures, I don’t really buy it. That’s why I love that there are any number of audio adventures for older (or just old, I guess) Doctors, where they can have another go around with their companions.

I don’t know, maybe that seems hypocritical, getting angry at one franchise for adding on to their narrative when I praise another franchise for the same thing. It feels different to me, though. Kamen Rider series feel finite, and I like that. Doctor Who feels infinite, and I like that. When either of them tries it the other way, sequelizing Kamen Rider or finalizing a Doctor Who story, it feels wrong to me.

This is all probably very splitting hairs, but I do get these weird emotions about Kamen Rider. Surprise!

With all respect to Die, he's still a series away from meeting Kusaka.

I can see why you'd think of it that way, but for me it never really feels that way for one particular reason: like I said, the main story is over. But in-universe, that story is not all there is to the lives of our heroes and the machinations of our villains; and many Rider series leave it open that way.

W sees the main criminal organisation behind the Dopants brought down, but Gaia Memory salesmen and hence Dopant crimes are still out there. Ex-Aid may have brought down Masamune's schemes and redeemed Para-DX, but as Emu lays out in the ending they still have a lot of work to do in regards to restoring people within the game data; and who knows if Kuroto's really turned over a new leaf or if any more bugsters could end up happening. Agito's mostly tied up neatly, but there's so many people out there who could still become Agitos and would need help; and for all we know even though Spooky Man has been destroyed, other Unknown could have remained.

Nothing's ever completely resolved and there's always remnants hiding in the shadows. I can totally believe that there would be some threat out there after the end of any given Rider series that our heroes would have to fight against, and that doesn't invalidate their stories or the value of an ending; it's something we could easily have assumed without the need of a Returns movie fleshing out the idea or a teamup movie giving us new antagonists. Our heroes still saved lives, still developed as people, still formed bonds and had their journey together -- it's just that there's other things remaining.



There's a couple other things aside from that, too:-

- Many Kamen Rider series play with the idea of the heroes taking up the Rider mantle being a burden that they'll have to live with, and part of their development is realising the real stakes of that and deciding to live with it. That doesn't mean "oh I'll fight for a year and then chuck my belt away", that's about a life-long commitment to fighting evil. For some this is in much more direct Rider related ways -- W is still fighting off Dopants, Wizard it seems is still tracking down phantoms, and... well, I don't want to spoil other series for you. But even then despite my quip of 'chucking away the belt', there's still many Riders that continue their fight without their rider powers; like Drive still being a policeman or Kuuga travelling the world spreading good will. They get happy endings, sure, but they are no less the heroes they were in their respective series and will throw on a belt to save a kid from a kaijin at a moment's notice -- or, if none are around; will still put their all into giving a big hug and advice to those in need. So from a metatextual point of view, Returns movies in this sense are fine to me in continuing aspects of the story because it is just what these Riders would do - continue to help people and save lives.

- For returns movies specifically, they've got an interesting framing device to most of them: they always put a secondary rider in the spotlight. Now, I'm not saying that Chase or Hiiro weren't fully fleshed out riders who needed a movie to make them good characters; what I'm saying is that they were still secondary characters and hence while they had their own journeys, it was still Shinnosuke and Emu whose stories their series were about. So Returns movies can feel less like retreads in this sense because it's now positioning different people as the main characters.


... this is all in principle and theory, anyway. Another Ending: Brave & Snipe was a very dire movie that at best just retold the development of Hiiro and Taiga by regressing them and making pretty rubbish and dissatisfying choices, to the extent that I could barely tell you a thing about the movie other than remembering that one scene where Taiga became Chronus again. i don't even remember why he did.
But you know! It could have been good! It could have been a new story about these characters that put them in the spotlight and hence wouldn't feel like they were retconning or retelling their journeys! It could have been...