Thank you, CybermanWorf!

I got a message to those who are not liking Gou. Get used to it!

Gou is like Deadpool of Kamen Rider.

Gou will be not pointless character unlike Nitou, his relationship with Kiriko help too.

I guess Gou is suppose to be Deadpool to Shinnosuke's Spider-Man

Ohhhh.....I almost forgot about that site.

Pfff... what? Why?!

Because of one joke he's Deadpool now? Why? Deadpool is a maniac who throws references and jokes directed at the reader faster than he can breathe. Not to mention that he kills everything he wants as violently as he wants.

How is that, in any shape of form, the case with Gou here? He's just a flashy showoff (for now).
He will add some spice next week at least, but I don't see why he's Deadpool.

Nitoh wasn’t pointless at all. He stopped the Sabbath. And he was actually funny.

Everything he's supposed to be is the secondary Rider. Everything else is your

http://apaeantochangeeverything.file...magination.jpg

Just to be clear I am sort of on the fence about Gou in being sort of annoyed by his antics but seeing his potential so you could say I am in the middle of opinions when it comes to Gou.

That wasn't a bad episode. Still a little iffy on Mach. Also it all comes full circle now (if you know what I mean) :lol :
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/...49/918/988.png

Gou, you motherfuckering daredevil you are the best rider ever. Absolutely ludicrous.

I love this show.

So yeah, this episode was pretty much total garbage from beginning to end.

Putting aside my problems with Gou - and believe me, I have problems with Gou (bitch, you do not steal Haruto's catchphrase) - there was a lot of terrible crammed into this 22 minutes. Most of it boils down to a complaint I've had about the show before: it isn't funny. It tries to be funny - oh lord, does it try - but it just isn't funny.

People making goofy expressions isn't innately funny. Awkward and obvious slapstick isn't innately funny. Guys wearing bad wigs or talking in silly voices isn't innately funny. These things can be funny, but they need to be set up with funny characters, funny situations, or even basic comedic cinematography. Nothing about the execution in Drive is funny. I don't care how many gurning faces you shove into a fish-eyed camera lens. I don't care how aggressively Gen flails around while falling. None of it is funny and it's really hard to watch the show keep throwing the same basic, tired, unfunny jokes out again and again and again. The minute Kiriko said Gou was here brother I knew what was going to happen: Shinnosuke was going to say "Oh yeah, cool," take a beat, and then have an over-the-top reaction. It's all repetitive, unoriginal, and honestly not even acted very well (a good actor can sell that gag - Renn Kiriyama did that shit all the time on W and it was usually gold - no one in Drive's cast can pull it off). Ordinarily I can just shrug off the one or two bad joke bits in an episode of Drive, but this week they just kept piling them on top of each other again and again and again. When the episode ended with a new Roidmude showing up with a squeaky voice I just wanted to tell the show to fuck off.

I really want to like Drive. I do. But man, it has been a long time since a Rider show has so utterly failed to entertain me. At this point I think even Kiva was more enjoyable than Drive currently is. Fucking Kiva. I really hope the show turns things around, but I'm watching this episode, seeing Gou prancing around like a total nutjob while Medic dances ballet and I'm kinda losing all hope. :(

I think this show might just not be your deal Switchblade. Nothing wrong with that. I find it funny and entertaining, and while I can understand the problems you have with it I don’t feel them.

A feeling I have about the humor in Drive is not as much that Sanjo actually wants to put that much humor in the show but Toei/Bandai telling him to put that much in there because of the situation we had with Gaim.

Normally Sanjo really knows the stregths and weaknesses of his actors and for the most part he writes comedy so the actors actually are funny. But alot of the jokes in Drive are the exact opposites of that. Mostly everything that has to do with the Special Crimes Unit.

With Gaim we had the situations that alot of kids stopped watching the show. Which probably resulted from the show being just too serious and complicated fro kids to enjoy. So Toei/bandai paniced and everytime Toei/Bandai panics stuff goes wrong for these shows. I wouldnt be surprised if they told Sanjo to put as much humor as humanly possible in each episodes because they think thats what kids wanna see even if it just doesnt work in the shows favor.

Maybe Gou was supposed to be kid-appeal character to contrast Shinnosuke's not kid appeal guy. I hope Gou wouldn't become Shunpei of Kamen Rider!

Funny because Gou steal Haruto's catchphrase!

Gou: It's showtime!
Haruto: Hey! That my catchphrase you fool!
Gou: Sorry Haruto. You're not flashy enough to use that catchphrase!
Haruto: Not flashy enough? I show you that I am flashy enough!

Haruto get his infinity ring.

Wizard Driver: Infinity!

Haruto's infinity form: Flashy enough?
Gou: OW! That's too flashy!!!!! You burn my eye out!

Honestly, it feels to me, especially after this episode, like somebody watched Wizard, saw Shunpei, and decided that he was the highest form of humor ever developed in the history of mankind and that Drive must be full of his kinds of jokes.

That person should never be allowed to reproduce.

I can see what you're saying, though. Drive does seem to be trying to go for a lot of big laughs after how dark Gaim got by the end. It's just that nobody seems to be putting any effort in trying to actually be funny.

Thats the point though since I dont think Sanjo normally writes this way. And I admit up front that I´m a giant Sanjo fanboy so take it for what its worth :lol

To me it just feels like alot of the humor stems from some of the executives wanting to put silly humor in it as opposed to the writers. Like with Shunpei in Wizard who was unbereable and then they put Beast in and he was just Shunpei 2.0 and the show got even less funny. With that show we kinda know that the writer did not care for Beast so thats why he wasnt the greatest character and Shunpei is probably a result of Tsuyoshi Kida mostly having written Den-O stage shows.

With Riku Sanjo though I dont think he would go for so many cheap laughs unless something is up behind the scenes that forces him ( and hasegawa for that matter) to include them in the show.

I must say a lot of the jokes do feel forced and tacked on. Didn't Gaim have good ratings compared to other Kamen riders or did the viewership take a dive as the series progressed? Things like Gao's acrobatics seem unnecessary to the character. Okay venting done... I like Mach as a rider even if the character isn't the best. The fact that he seems to have a implied time limit on his transformation is interesting and makes his highspeed nature more understandable (he can't wait for Drive to get into gear) and him opening the visor does seem to be a cooling system of some sort. I like the idea that while Drive has the power to cause slow down he's never used it (or at leat hasn't been told how) where as Mach (if the perview is to be believed) uses it openly. Medic is interesting for what we've seen of her. There's a very obvious connection between her and Heart that the others don't share and makes me think that Proto-Drive damaged her during the global freeze which put Heart over the edge causing him to evolve allowing him to beat Proto-Drive.

Likes:
The idea of a Kamen Rider Japan and a Kamen Rider America. Let's expand on this concept, G-Gundam style.

KR Mach has a distinct style, wierd weapons (bending lasers)

Kiriko in her civilian outfits and hair down

Gou has a personality, even if it's over the top

seeing the fit of the special investigations division (and how its in a driving school) within the police

The idea of a enemy Medic

Dislikes:
Mach ripping off Wizard, a mediocre show

Mach's overuse of acrobatics and overall movements. Excessive

Humor. Overdone and poorly done at that

As other have said there's a real case that there's executive pressure on the writers and director... just thought of something what if the police upper brass is a reflection of how the creative staff feels about their bosses at Toei?

Definitely feeling like Drive is trying to compensate for Gaim's bleakness tbh. Just wish they would tone it down. I loved W because despite being genuinely funny at moments, it still knew when to dial it back.

I think many people have suppressed the memory on who provided the "jokes" in W. And I don't really blame you:

http://fs1.directupload.net/images/141230/yj3q4cm4.jpg

I'll take the entire Special Crimes Unit + Shunpei over that girl.

Sure, W had some really funny moments, but I don't see how the comedy itself was any better. It still came from characters who obviously only where in it to provide cheap jokes.

Akiko had some place in the story, but they simply forgot about it or outsourced it into the movies. I mean in the first ten episodes we had the suspense that Shotaro knew about the fate of her father and struggled to tell her, then no one talks about it again until the one dude from prison comes to the agency much later and somehow Akiko already knows her dad is “dead” and that's it.

And we had the same silly moments in Gaim, facial expressions and stuff, difference was they where provided by characters people actually like and they toned down drastically in the later parts of the show.

I can see how people don't like the comedy parts at all, but I can't understand how they cherry pick the stuff over other shows who had the exact same thing, only that people don't remember it as clearly anymore. I don't blame anyone, I for example completely forgot many things about shows I watched some time ago.

For my reasons of why I think people don't seem to be bring older hyper comedy characters in prior series is that most people have gotten somewhat used to them by this point while Gou is a new character that people have only seen one episode of so the thoughts of him are still fresh in their mind while some of the antics of prior characters are toned down.

I actually think Gou is a step up for the humor in this show.


My main problem with Drive's humor, unlike W's, is that the characters rely too heavily on visuals, editing and sound effects to push the humor, while what made W funny, or at least tolerable, was that the comedy came entirely from the characters themselves. Even for as annoying as Akiko was, I could find situations involving her funny because of how she made the others react. Where you would normally have brooding Terui, whenever he interacted with Akiko, his seriousness as a character was completely undermined. Same thing with Shotaro, who normally tried to put up a cool and collected front, but was taken completely out of his element whenever Akiko pestered him. Akiko herself wasn't funny; the characters' reactions were what was funny. This is partially why I think OOO has the best humor in the franchise; Ankh is like Terui's seriousness and no-nonsense amped up to the eleventh power and his reactions to all of the B.S. going on around him were genuinely great moments.

The same thing isn't happening with Drive for me. The more serious, or at the very least "not-comedy-relief" characters don't really give much of a reaction, so the humor is relying entirely on the visuals, the sound and the editing. The reason I say Gou is a step up is because he's just way too wacky for the other characters to NOT react, as seen in this episode. And I like that. I really hope we get more of that type of humor, as opposed to the barrage of funny faces and weird edits.

And that isnt a coincidence. Setting aside if someone actually enjoy Akikos comedy or not her bits are an actual form of japanese comedy opposed to what we mostly get in Wizard or Drive.

In Double alot of the comedy stems from a certain type of japanese stand-up called "Manzai". This particular type of comedy revolves around a duo of which one is the straight man and the other one is the funny one. This form of stand-up is associated heavily with the japanese city of Osaka and thats where Akiko comes from. All of her jokes are in some form of another just Manzai comedy with her acting like a typical Osaka person (being loud,kinda annoying and overall not that smart) and the Straight Man (Terui/Shotaro) reacting to this.

In Wizard/Drive we have this annoying habit of modern toku shows just having their character be loud and obnoxious for the sake of being loud and pbnoxious thinking this alone is enough to make the audience laugh.

I've actually been rewatching W recently and it's really changed my opinion on Akiko. I absolutely hated her the first time through, but the second time around I'm finding her far more entertaining (and not just because Shunpei has set a permanent low bar for comedic relief in Kamen Rider). There are two things that make Akiko work for me that separates her from the comic relief in Drive:

First of all, Akiko is a comic relief character, yes, but she's a comic relief character. She actually has a personality, she contributes to the plot in meaningful ways, and the way she acts actually changes based around the situation she's in. Her default mode is "goofball," but that doesn't mean that she's incapable of being serious when she has to be. The comic relief on Drive doesn't have that - there's a reason why we're twelve episodes in and I still don't know the captain or doll guy's names: they aren't characters. All they are is joke fodder: guy who makes funny faces and guy who plays with dolls. Compare them to Watcherman or Santa-chan, two of the minor comic characters from W; they didn't do a ton either, but they were far more memorable and better realized.

Second: Hikaru Yamamoto had really good comedic chops. Everything she did felt really natural where Drive's humor is incredibly forced. There are some really funny scenes in W where Akiko is still acting silly, even though she's in the background. It's just an aspect of the character and Yamamoto pulled it off really well.

Huh, I never knew that. That makes her character work even better, I think.

i liked how he was using the mach driver accurately to the toy like taking out the signal car and putting a new one in comparing to the drive driver.

Dont really understand what you mean.

ok, like when in drive's debut, everytime he changes forms, he doesnt take out car from the brace, it's already out but from the toy you have to take out the car to change tires, it's not done in the show.

unlike the mach driver, you see mach taking the bike out of the driver to change forms/signals and putting a new bike in and it's done accurately to the toy.

Do you guys think that the new theme that debuted along with Gou will be a new theme in general or that it is just a theme for Gou becuase I hope we get more insert themes outside of just playing surprise drive?

Among tumblr, I heard many people kept saying it's Mach's own theme, but hey who knows.

Just something that bugs me: When Gunman Roidmude causes Density Shift, both Shinnosuke & Gou can freely moving. It's okay with Shinnosuke since he's got Shift Cars. But how about Gou? It clearly show that the Signal Bikes didn't come to him until he transforms.
Maybe that thing will be explained next episode where he can cause Density Shift too, but let's give it some theories!

You can expect that to change in future episodes. They usually show it once or twice, after that they skip it to save time/shots. Remember Gaim? After the first bunch of episodes nobody "Locked Off" anymore, the lockseed was just gone when they inserted the new one.

And Drive did take out Shift Cars, remember the scene where he first switched from Max Flare to Funky Spike?

Well seeing 7 pages of discussion for a Drive episode kinda shocked me - the average was like 3 pages? But upon clicking the thread, I didn't really expect these reactions, especially the poll.

So I finally watched the episode today and I find Gou's voice to be pretty cool and that debut henshin was so over-the-top that I liked it. And Gou really embodies the "feeling high" part of the opening lyrics.

Oh and the Gunman Roidmude design is really nice too!

I like Gunman too glade he gets one more episode. It's kind of a cheat when you think about it as even Drive's finishers don't have a 100% success record and while the story for that episode concludes the enemy can still come back the following week.

Gunman is one of my favorite monster themes. I remember there was one in Faiz that also was pretty badass. I know the chances is slim to none, but would still like a figure of this design.

So things I really liked about Gou...He totally is a play on the Showa Kamen Riders! The extra flips, the scarf, the over the top bike...reminded me a lot of Kamen Rider X. He is a caricature of that style, almost like "Well you complained that a Kamen Rider with a car isn't like the old ones, so HERE!" All the extreme moves and even the explosions...he's showy. I will bet dollars to donuts he is overcompensating for something bad going to happen. Maybe he was infected or injured...and this is all to distract from that. Hell, he may be evolving to a Roidmude...perhaps an after effect from the rider system?

I think the show may hit a serious turn in the latter act.

Him being a photographer alone is a pretty big nod to Hayato Ichimonji (Kamen Rider Nigo).

I could see that working as a reference especially given that in Riku Sanjo works there is some part of a rider which references something about the Showa era riders.

I know :) Its not a coincidence that V3 and Accel share pretty much the exact same origin :lol

V3 and Accel..... Holy crap I never thought about that but that makes a crap ton of sense, that is some fridge brilliance there.

I wonder how much references to showa era riders there were in Double i missed, although that would take a while to go through.

This one and Black are the only big ones that come to mind right now since I havent seen W in a long time. Black in particular stand out so much since that was added to Kamen Rider Joker because of Shotaros actor being a huge fan of the character.

Which is probably also the reason why Joker got to fight Black and Black RX in Heisei vs Showa :lol

Thanks for reminding me about that one, I really do like that one probably because I really like Double.

Just a thing I thought of as well related to Gou.

I guess another problem people could have with him is that Gou just adds another obstacle to Shinnosuke defeating the roidmude which Mach could help with if he wasn't as competitive and as much of a show off as he was.

Mach has a lot of style.

I think the story arc of Gou would include something like a growth of maturity and cautiousness, maybe in the future of the show he might the cockiness beaten out of him lol