Neat! Thanks!

Wait, it was? I distinctly recall paying more attention to that moment on a rewatch specifically because I remembered you speaking of it so fondly when going through this show. Either way, totally a point worth reiterating.

You know, I hadn't even considered the possibility this subject would come up during this thread? Like maybe you just dodged that whole aspect of this show's popularity, but then you mentioned the merchandise and it's like "oh yeah, I guess it's kinda hard to miss!"

While we're tackling this directly, though, as easy as it would be to kick in my own misgivings about the sort of fanservice that makes people mistakenly believe "anime" is a genre, I'll instead take the more interesting option of noting that I also, at the same time, have to wonder how much of the long-term success of this series genuinely wouldn't have happened without its two female leads becoming so popular in that way. Did all the statues and everything pay for Dynazenon? How much did the free publicity of all the fanart draw people to the actual show proper? It's easy to sit here all disapprovingly, but I have to imagine there are definitely people out there whose genuine interest in Gridman as a whole began merely as an interest in Rikka's thighs, and I honestly wouldn't want to disparage that? I could bemoan the expectations that seem to come with being a late-night animated series aimed at nerds in Japan all day long (though, similar to what DreamSword is saying, I don't actually find this show itself that egregious), but I guess I also can't help but see some nuance in there, too?

What you might be thinking of is when I called back to that moment during my watch of Dynazenon. I won't say exactly how I did because, well, spoilers for Die.

But yeah, when it came to the Gridman posts specifically, while I did mention the moment, it was very brief on the post for this episode.

Still, happy to know my fondness for it stuck in your mind! I'm honored, haha.

Yeah, I don't... like, it's not like this approach invalidated anything for me, and I hope I didn't make it sound that way. While I don't have a ton of interest in a show that wants to get horny about high school girls, it doesn't really bother me if that's what people want from their entertainment. And I get that merch is required for these shows to survive, and sometimes it can't just be robot action figures and replica transformation devices. (As someone who is expecting two different HG Girls Tsumuri figures in the mail soon, I am not morally opposed to buying tiny vinyl representations of toku girls!)

Plus, even within the specific discussion of lingering shots of certain cast members trying on their swimwear for their digital co-conspirators... like, it still served a narrative purpose here? I'm not gonna say I couldn't've used less of it -- pretty sure I said exactly the opposite -- but it is coming from two specific plotlines that the show has been working on since the beginning: Akane's duality and the fact that these are teens with (horny) attitude. It's not like this was a dour show of trauma and violence, and suddenly we've got teens trying to look cute for each other and/or manipulate one another into divulging secrets -- this is still the teen toku action/comedy! All of that stuff is here for very legible and defensible reasons!

...it's maybe just a little too much, too often, in this one episode for me.

I went back to check and you're completely right about that. Which I guess validates your decision to bring it back up in the first place, because apparently I was exactly the kind of person who only really got it the second time. :lol

SSSS.GRIDMAN EPISODE 6 - “CONTACT”

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/ssss/gridman06a.png

I really love how unhurried this show is. Not in a particularly laconic or lazy way, but in how it lets the rhythms of school life dominate its episodic structure. In much the same way Akane resets the world after every episode’s kaiju battle – well, almost every episode’s kaiju battle – these kids go to school, and then they kill time, and then they go home, and then they go to bed, and then the next day everything repeats. That’s the routine, and somehow Battling Kaiju became just another thing that happens daily, like going shopping or riding the train. It’s soothing in its regularity, even when what’s happening is insane and irregular.

Like, for example, a dreamlike visitation from a nameless, eternal (?) kaiju, that serves to fill in some of the many blanks that Yuta’s protagonist inertia was already sort of cluing him in on. While I’d normally roll my eyes at a brand-new character showing up to exposit to our powerfully uncomplicated amnesiac superhero pilot, I can’t say that Music Note (I love that they referenced my favorite Ghost character!) really bothered me too much. For one thing, like I said, this is stuff that Yuta was already starting to get curious about, so the info dump here mostly just sped things up, rather than completely upending our comprehension of the narrative or its possibility space. For another thing, it was just a super fun sequence? It paired nicely, almost musically, with the Anti/Rikka stuff. Every scene rhymed, with a kajiu helping a human better navigate the kaiju world, and a human helping a kaiju better navigate the human world. Everything compressed down into trying to align multiple perspectives into one truth, and so a character opting to guide that process for the viewer felt appropriate.

And while the Yuta/Music Note stuff was surprisingly good, the Anti/Rikka stuff was expectedly good. I would’ve honestly just been fine with an episode of Rikka’s ennui propelling her through a tour of the neighborhood’s least interesting shops – I’m just fascinated by the way this show lets scenes breathe, to build that connection – but running into Anti was definitely the right move for the show. Rikka is once again put into the role of trying to help a weird boy be slightly less of a danger to himself, and she does it without ever losing her agency. She’s not just a caregiver, she’s a girl that is trying to solve a puzzle in a way that satisfies her curiosity while also helping someone else understand themselves better. It’s sort of the exact opposite of the Yuta stuff in this episode, where instead of one person dictating to another, there’s a feeling of connection happening organically. Rikka exists and invites conversation, while Yuta needs to have things explained to him. The way those two options work in alternating scenes – inquisition versus reception – keeps this episode flowing so smoothly.

I don’t know if this is one that worked for other people as well as it did for me? The episode hangs a lantern on it, when Utsumi and Akane talk about how lame episodes without kaiju fights are. (Anti fights Calibur and Max, but that ain’t really a kaiju fight.) Beyond Music Note’s exposition, there isn’t really anything that “happens” in this episode. But for me, this one was perfect. It evokes the repetition of adolescence and then uses that routine to make the impossible and bizarre feel acceptable, which is as heady and exciting of a feeling for me as any giant monster battle. When the kaiju are this interesting, the fights are sort of superfluous.

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/ssss/gridman06b.png

https://i.imgur.com/FDA20zD.png

There's alot of meta context to this episode. Not just in terms of stuff from the Gridman franchise, but also TsuPro and its fans as a whole. One thing I've always dug, and even moreso now that I'm more familiar with Ultra, is how Akane is a stand-in for the Ultra fans who don't really care about anything a given Ultra show has to offer outside of the Kaiju blowing stuff up. It's one of those things that speaks volumes about her character in universe on face value, but adds another layer for those in the know.

Yeah, she definitely isn't the type of fan who's interested in the human cost of kaiju battles, or the more human scale of relationships. She also chews her straw, which is a nicely subtle visual cue of how little she likes having to dance around what she wants from a conversation, rather than just getting what she wants by demanding it.

Another fun episode in terms of easter eggs.

1. The Uchusen magazine cover in particular (the one that appears when Sho and Akane chat about toku in "Starbows Coffee") features three Ultramen in their armored forms; Tector Gear Zero, Hunter Knight Tsurugi, and Andro Melos.

2. The pink wallet thing that Rikka looks at has the Matrix of Leadership on it.

3. The customer who asks Vit about the synth is voiced in the Japanese dub by Masaya Obi, who played the original Gridman host Naoto Sho in the 1993 tokusatsu show. They made it even more obvious for those who knew what he looked like at the time by using his likeness for the character. When the anime first came out I was hoping they could get Matthew Lawrence to voice him since he was Sam Collins in Syber-Squad, but oh well. Would've been cool to see, but I understand if it never worked out or the thought never really crossed the English dub staff's mind because they weren't aware of this tidbit during production.

Honestly, my favorite thing about this episode is probably just how easily Akane immediately makes Utsumi seem like some filthy casual by comparison? I mean I'm sure him being all sweaty and nervous around a cute girl is 99% of the problem, but "d i d y o u e v e r n o t i c e R e d K i n g i s n ' t r e d ?" is such a lame icebreaker, it's downright patronizing. It's like "Yes, Utsumi, we *all* noticed! Everyone notices that!" :p

Well for once, a character not named in the episode is named in the credits, namely, she’s known as Anosillus II, with the original Anosillus being a monster from the OG Gridman who was associated with music (he lived with the “computer world” of a synthesiser) and had elasticity powers. He didn’t look human, but he did have a humanoid female (specified in the original episode to be a Compoid, an inhabitant of the Computer World) partner who seemingly had something of a romance with him. Make your own conclusions.

I’ll also add that originally, the character would've been Anosillus III (since an evil knockoff of Anosillus had appeared in a later episode), before it was changed to Anosillus Jr. to make the relationship more explicit and then finally to the current name because “Jr” is more associated with male children.

And talking of music, two recognisable theme songs can be heard. The first being that Rikka listens to Die Hollen Polizei, the theme song to the director’s (and indeed, the studio’s) first anime series, Inferno Cop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzJ0dcj3W-8

And later, the sad piano music Anosillus II plays to wake up Yuta is the theme song to the original Gridman the Hyper Agent, known as Yume no Hero (or as it became known batter as thanks to memes, Baby Dan Dan). The group that performed this show’s theme song Union did their own cover.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmh1P74y9So

Inferno Cop, the show where Trigger said, "Let's make our own Adult Swim show!". :lolol

I was aware of the second one, but the other two are neat! Thanks!

The show does such a great job of balancing Akane's gleeful sociopathy with moments of visceral justification for her desire for violent retribution against society -- Utsumi is such a patronizing fandom gatekeeping dude here! He even does the Well You're A Cute Girl So I Assumed You Didn't Know Anything bit!!! Show Anti a picture of Utsumi next!!!

(I actually really loved how Akane was with him, how quickly she's like It's Not Like Every Dude Is Into Kaiju, So Why Is It Weird That A Girl Is. She's so comfortable in her fandom, and instantly disarming around Utsumi's reflexive buffoonery and regrettable peacocking. She's really connecting with him, only partially to then leverage that connection to get what she wants.)

Neat! Thanks!

SSSS.GRIDMAN EPISODE 7 - “SCHEME”

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/ssss/gridman07a.png

You know it’s gonna be a fun date episode when the girl’s dad shows up.

Very much a Setting The Table episode, both literally with the aforementioned date, and figuratively with the continued unfurling of Music Note’s warnings and exposition from last episode – which takes a weirdly long time to get everyone onboard, considering all of the insanity they’ve already experienced – leaving this one feeling delightfully chaotic but sort of narratively a little too open-ended.

I did enjoy all of the Akane/Yuta stuff, and it’s genuinely nice to have an episode that foregrounds their relationship/acquaintanceship/rivalry/dyad. They’re both dealing with otherdimensional robot mans (?) who are empowering them to follow their hearts and do the things that only they can do, whether that’s destroying kaiju or creating kaiju, and that gives them common ground despite their hilariously diametrically opposed views of the sanctity of human life. They’re in this battle, even though Yuta can’t remember why, and Akane can’t explain why. Letting them feel their way around that vaguery through something as simple as two teens going on a date (which her dad shows up to!) is exactly the right energy for this show, and it’s probably going to be in the Top 3 things I remember after the series is over.

The Anti fight, also very strong, even if I find his dedication to a third Something Only I Can Do story to be more comedic and extravagant than I find it particularly moving or insightful. He’s cute and funny as a guy who just wants to kill Gridman, and while that has thematic value – his commitment to a cause at the expense of connections, versus forming connections that could impact his cause – it really just comes off increasingly goofy and more of a release valve for other stories’ tension than anything too compelling in its own right. He had an exceptional time out last episode (proximity with Rikka will do that for you), but this time out felt like a little more of a step back.

There are of course a bunch of little things that further flesh out Music Note’s exposition from last time, and I sort of don’t want to talk about them. That sort of puzzle box stuff, the city in the clouds or Alexis Kerib’s plans or whatever… I don’t want to theorize? I’ll find out in a couple episodes, maybe; if I don’t, I honestly don’t care. I am not here for that stuff, even if I’m sure I’ll love it when it all comes together. (I really like how Akane’s “perfect world” is all of them in high school, because it speaks to both a sense of ennui and a need for safety and routine that matches her dislike of disruptions and inconvenience. She very much wants things to be a certain way, and always go a certain way, and that really matches the template of most toku shows.) (Also, boy, I feel like Yuta not being able to say that Akane’s his friend, and Rikka not yet giving Akane the folio she bought her… those feel like real big things for this show and its eventual conclusion! I am not immune to hypothesizing after all!) I just like watching these characters bounce off of each other, and explore their concepts of self, like the teacher none-too-subtly talked about. I like them figuring out who they are so they can figure out what they stand for, even if those things are terrible.

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/ssss/gridman07b.png

https://i.imgur.com/7CR6QW6.png

The symbolism is strong with this one.

It is sadly lost on me!

Zeong?

(The extract here has been redacted after re-reading the post now that I haven’t just woken up and got to work on editing the TV Tropes Recap page for Bakugan)

And we get our final Gridman combination, in the form of Sky Gridman. His attacks, the Amp Laser Circus and Lucky Smoke Screen homage the original Vitor’s two pilots, Amp Pierre and his replacement when the show got unexpectedly renewed and the actor couldn’t commit to the new episodes, Lucky London. To sum up the differences, both in the words of TV Tropes and my own.

As for my words, Amp got the funniest lines (Holy Mel Gibson! That’ll make him one lethal weapon), while Lucky was on the receiving end (You couldn’t perform magic if Merlin himself was helping you).

And a last bit of trivia, this week’s monster, being made by Anti instead of Akane, not only has a totally different aesthetic, but has his voice distorted for the cry (though he doesn’t seem to be saying anything legible)

This episode's monster fight was always a favorite of mine? Between the slick nighttime atmosphere, the way Sky Gridman's basic ability to fly ends up being a natural way to drop a notably big hint about the larger Plot, and the especially clever concept for a monster, there are a lot of layers all going on at once that make it particularly interesting and fun.

If I may add to this, it also, aside from Amp from Syber-Squad like you shared, appears to be a reference to the "Itano Circus" technique originated and perfected by animator Ichiro Itano and emulated by his successors since. Here's more info on that:

https://macross.fandom.com/wiki/Itano_Circus

And here's an example of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2eGmaM1su0

Neat! Thanks!

Ha ha, this is what I was coming here to talk about! I am not a well-versed anime viewer, but I love a high-altitude dogfight where a target has to barrel roll endlessly to avoid infinite streaking missiles/lasers. That sequence was breath-taking. A very fun fight scene!

Nah, see:

All I'll say is that all of the previous Kaiju were peaks into Akane's' heart.

I'll be sure to keep that in mind!

The crazy part of it looking at the wiki article? A moment of his childhood where he tried to imitate Kikaider, a toku hero show, was what inspired it.

Wow, I'd've never thought he was young enough to have grown up watching Gaim!

SSSS.GRIDMAN EPISODE 8 - “CONFRONTATION”

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/ssss/gridman08a.png

I think Rikka and I would watch toku the same way.

(Rikka, of course, very much does not watch toku, as established in Episode 7 as a hilarious rebuttal to the gender equality shown in the Akane/Utsumi scene of Episode 6. Rikka is not looking to understand the intricacies and tropes of tokusatsu!)

In an episode that foregrounds a ticking clock threat from Akane – a powered-up version of an old foe, just get things kicking off in the correct motif – Rikka is the one who doesn’t want to treat the situation by boring, staid genre convention. Where Akane says We’re Gonna Fight, and Utsumi immediately comes back with We’re Gonna Fight, Rikka instead looks outside that incurious adherence to conflict and both opts out of it and interrogates it. It’s a clever subversion of the story’s inherent tension, pushing off the clear threat in favor of something that treats things as – appropriately – smaller, and more in need of connection.

The reveal that Rikka is as much a construct as everyone and everything in the city is a good one, mostly for how it instantly unmoors Rikka’s belief in conflict as an avoidable consequence of overexcited toku fans, Utsumi and Akane both. Akane flat out tells Rikka that her own sense of hope in Akane is a byproduct of Akane’s need for the world to love her. (Super telling that Akane created a friend who completely ignores her; Akane wants to be loved, but not be noticed or bothered by that love.) Where Rika once had a certainty that the Gridman Alliance wasn’t something she was a part of, and therefore wasn’t bound to their particular sense of Giant Robot Justice, an inability to trust her own feelings towards Akane means that she can’t go it alone when it comes to solving this problem. She’s going to have to work with the group.

(I actually like how Rikka doesn’t, like, do anything in the days leading up to the school festival. While Utsumi is like WE GOTTA FIGHT, even Yuta tries to appeal to Akane’s purely theoretical humanity first, and then eventually devise a strategy to prevent Akane’s attack from harming any of their friends. Rikka just sort of… hopes Akane won’t do it? I guess? For some reason? She briefly tries to talk to Akane on the bus, but it's not like she goes out of her way to do it. Rikka’s strategy is sort of nowhere this episode, but in a way that speaks to her innate belief in all of her friends, even the ones that just said they wanted to destroy the school and everyone in it. It’s an abdication of defense because of a rejection of the necessity of conflict. Still, I think her even bringing up the possibility of deescalation gets Yuta and Utsumi to talk to Akane, which I will count as Rikka’s positive influence on the story!)

Teamwork! It’s very much what this episode is about, and a good team allows for everyone’s viewpoint to have equal validity. Utsumi’s embrace of action needs to be tempered by Rikka’s reluctance to fight; Calibur needs to consider how Yuta would treat Anti; Yuta needs to think smaller, while addressing Utsumi’s plan to think bigger – the whole episode is a collaboration between what everyone thinks is right, and that’s as good a way as any to introduce Full Powered Gridman.

Hey, it’s Episode Goddamn Eight, lemme take a minute to talk about some of the hero forms. I love how toyetic they are? Everything that attaches to Gridman is in the style of an action figure accessory, for better or worse. (I think I remember hearing that some of the Gridman toys were janky garbage, due to their gimmicks?) Beyond the usual toku delights of something becoming more powered – full powered, even! – I like how a giant robot combination gets more elaborate and consequential as the power levels rise. We have to get three different transformations (Calibur’s just, like, a sword) and then the combination sequence, with all of its bells and whistles. The length of that sequence is like the roller coaster going up the hill at the beginning of the ride, and then it takes off like a rocket as the full (powered) form kicks tons of ass and then even turns gold for its finisher. It’s gaudy, in the best way, and it speaks to how well this show has integrated its teen drama with its giant robot action that I wanted this thing to happen as a reward for Rikka fighting for her independent view while still hearing other people out. It’s teamwork as a way of bringing out the best in everyone, rather than subsuming everything into one set of default actions. And, yeah, that’s golden.

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/ssss/gridman08b.png

https://i.imgur.com/MVampAS.png

This moment set the anime sphere on fire for awhile.

In particular, the original DX Full Power Gridman from back when the show was new was, as I understand from secondhand accounts, a pretty unpolished release, owing largely to being made by a company who I don't think had much experience making that sort of toy to begin with, and to the design itself not actually being created with the intent of easily translating to toy form. (The crux of the challenge being that you have to make a very tiny Gridman support a *lot* of weight somehow.) That second thing being despite the design *also* being one deliberately and consciously designed to look like a DX toy, to the extent that things like clips that would hold the various bits together in different configurations are explicitly baked right into the design.

Really, just this one topic is kind of a lot to get into? Full Power Gridman is really emblematic of the whole show's ethos in a lot of ways, and a big part of that is how director Akira Amemiya went out of his way to get Tsuyoshi Nonaka to do the designs for the Assist Weapons. Nonaka being a designer and artist who -- aside from doing some Transformers artwork back in the day as part of Studio OX, which maybe means something to Die -- was *also* someone with a long career at Bandai, where his credits include, among other things, designing DaiZyuJin for Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger, which kind of became one of the most widely identifiable and well-loved combining robot designs ever. You could say it was thanks to Power Rangers, but I would personally argue Power Rangers should be thanking DaiZyuJin at least as much in return. Anyways, I also vaguely understand Nonaka himself grew up during the original Chogokin boom of the 70's too, and is thus kind of part of the first generation of guys making cool robot toys who also grew up with cool robot toys, and that probably gels pretty well with what SSSS Gridman is about too. At any rate, the dude is a true legend, for sure.

I'm kind of rambling most of this off the top of my head, so apologies if it's all a little hard to parse, but the whole like, ecosystem of Full Power Gridman and all its various components and forms is one of my favorite things to come out of this series, and I find the history behind it pretty exciting too. So exciting I'm not even talking about the episode it debuts in! :p

I definitely don't get the context, if they're supposed to be dressed as specific characters, but this seems pretty innocuous to me? Unless it's how smart Rikka looks in that uniform!

It's a very cool design! That I absolutely will not be buying as a toy!

All I'll say is that crossdressing is a very popular thing in anime circles and leave it at that.

And both should be thanking GoLion/Voltron, as that robot design ended up being iconic enough to inspire the Daizyujin/Megazord in the first place.

Absolutely true! They're both total all-timer robots.

So now we come to two Toku traditions being incorporated that OG Gridman was guilty of.

First is the reused monster, which is something Tsuburaya is more prone to than Toei (they even reuse monsters across series), and something the OG Gridman did out of necessity, since their budget only stretched to 19 suits, 5 of which were given over to hero suits and 1 to the main villain. So after 13 episodes, there’s quite a lot of slapped on armour parts to make “Mecha” variants, before moving on to cannibalising the suits for the final third.

And then there’s the big mecha combination. OG Gridman had two, and given the specific homages at play here, this is a homage to the first of those two, Combined Superman Thunder Gridman. No I have no idea where they got “Full Power” for the name of this one (it’s not a Syber Squad reference, since the combination there was called “Phorno”, for reasons I am equally unclear of).

Also, Borr’s drills finally do something.

I mean, I didn't watch that show, but I can see some American writer trying to come up with a sci-fi term for what happens when you add four components to the main suit and feeling reasonably proud of themselves.

SSSS.GRIDMAN EPISODE 9 - “REVERIE”

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/ssss/gridman09a.png

I pretty much only ever want to watch toku shows about how to be a toku fan.

This whole episode was, suitably, a dream for me. It’s an episode that elides the specificity of something like Episode 6’s exposition (for a very Episode 6 value of “specificity”) in favor of something more haunting yet illuminative, and that’s an episode-length exploration of how Akane’s toku fandom has curdled from supportive into suffocating.

It’s that duality that powers this episode – how toku is something that should be additive to your ability to engage with the world, not a substitute for it, but how easily those two things can change places when we’d rather escape into fiction than deal with the messiness of the world. Akane’s interactions with Yuta, Utsumi, and Rikka are all bright and upbeat, but they aren’t real, and they aren’t about the person she’s with. They have the shape of connection – replacing Rikka’s meet-cute with Yuta; geeking out over kaiju with Utsumi; spending time with Rikka – but they’re all just things to flatter Akane. They’re a story she gets to tell herself using them, a story where she’s the girlfriend, the crush, the bestie. It’s a world that exists for her benefit, following the rhythm of a story she knows by heart.

But that’s horrifying, you know? A world flattened of individuality, left to tropes and contrivance. (Akane’s face when Rikka accidentally calls out how coincidental it is that they live next door to each other! Shots fired at Akane’s friend-fiction!) Escaping into stories to a degree that you resent the world for refusing to follow the rules of fiction is the worst-case scenario for fans of anything, and it’s even more terrifying if that person is capable of punishing a world with kaiju.

But it’s reductive to say that toku fandom, or any fandom, is mere escapism. If Akane’s story is here to introduce the depths of loneliness that can come with loving a fictional world too much, the Gridman Alliance’s stories are here to offer an alternative to that reading by letting toku be a way of coping with the world, and using its lessons to more humanely approach our shared existence. Gridman isn’t there to save them, or punish their enemies, he’s there to be a part of their lives when they need to better understand themselves, and the world around them. None of the kids turn on Akane, or berate her for trapping them in her dreams while telling them it’s what they want. Yuta’s dedication to protecting people is something he’s doing for people like Akane, and you can tell how sad he is that she feels like this escapism is what’s best. Utsumi admits that he really does have feelings for Akane, but they can’t be the only thing in his life, even if she’s okay letting them be the only thing in hers. Rikka reaches the end of her patience with Akane, clearly frustrated by Akane’s treatment of friendship as nothing more than a fan club she can express false humility around. All three of these kids know that Akane has tried to dupe and divide them, but that plan says more about how isolated and afraid Akane is, than any vulnerability within them. It’s a plan about how alone Akane is, and that’s the saddest thing.

Any episode that wants to spend this much time not only humanizing its central sociopath, but using her psychology as a way to talk about how easily hardcore fandom (she knows every kaiju name!) can shift from being a bridge to connect with other people, to becoming a barrier to dealing with other people – that is going to be my favorite episode of a series.

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/ssss/gridman09b.png

This is the only episode of S4 Gridman that I out and out dislike.

https://i.imgur.com/C9d31pb.png

So rather than go on and on about that, I'll instead note that, adding onto the various Robots being designed after DX Toys, Powered Zenon here doesn't have elbow joints. It's a neat little detail I suppose.

I am not at all surprised. Sorry it didn't work for you!

Honestly, Powered Zenon is so funny, given it has a pair of obvious arms forming legs and vice versa. Not to mention the sword becoming an axe.

Also, we’ve debuted every aspect of the toyline, so here’s the entire set.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=5ck-X1SH...WIXOkSySI873at

Also our kaiju’s vocabulary this week is “Don’t leave me!”, which says a lot about Akane’s current psyche.

Side note: Zenon is probably the only thing to have the same name across all three versions (the only major difference is that both Gridman’s added a suffix, with the LA version having “God” as said suffix)

Neat! Thanks!

One of the things that makes the anime Gridman stuff so fascinating is all the ways it finds to do new riffs on familiar concepts. The direct references to its source material are a given, and before he even started the thread, Die was already familiar with the homages to other things the creators happened to be inspired by, but it's also notable how often SSSS Gridman and its followups quote themselves. Specific lines of dialogue and and visuals sometimes as specific as entire shots are frequently repeated and recreated, given new meaning through new context, even in situations where not much else is altered. The purpose of it all, of course, being how drawing those explicit connections between moments can help get the viewer thinking about the story in a certain way, and hopefully making the experience that much richer.

I bring this up now because episode 9 as a whole is one big example of this going on that's just about impossible to miss. I'm kind of a sucker for when shows are able create warped and twisted versions of their own premieres for whatever purpose, and I think here, the way the entire show is unnaturally looping back on itself adds to that sense that the world Akane is choosing is inherently a world of stagnation, where she can't move forward, and thus nothing else really can either. The sense of atmosphere throughout this one is a standout of the whole show, but that particular element of it, I think is kind of at the core of why.

Oh, and speaking of poetic repetition!

If I'm remembering right, I think sharing this anecdote in DreamSword's own thread when he got to this episode was actually the thing that motivated me to finally speak up in there for the first time, after merely lurking for the previous 8 episodes? I forget exactly why I felt fired up enough to mention it, but the factoid itself is sort of particularly precious to me, because learning it for myself back when I still had mixed feelings on this series played a huge part in pushing my overall outlook more towards genuine appreciation and respect.

It's such an insanely specific choice for the series to make, that you can't possibly be doing the job half-heartedly and even conceive of it. To even notice it, you'd have to be a greater robot nerd than I. Which means I had to learn it from someone first too. So while we're on the subject of how people and the things they create are a reflection of their influences, I'm going to go ahead and give a ultra niche shout-out to Channel CUBE, who mentioned it when doing a 2+ hour long multi-part review of the Actibuilder Full Power Gridman. As you can maybe infer from the previous sentence, Cube-san's toy reviews are kind of a whole dimension apart from the typical standard of "describing plainly what the viewer can see themselves." His videos are actually heavily edited to avoid any dead air, but they tend to run long anyway because he likes to enrich the experience by bringing up relevant anecdotes about related media (like the elbow thing!), as well as just offering observations about the design and engineering of a transforming figure that are often staggeringly thoughtful and intelligent. Dude respects the art of transforming toys like nobody else I've ever seen, and while he sadly hasn't uploaded anything new in years at this point, during the period he was active, he was a constant inspiration to me. Part of that is just that he talks so fast it hugely motivated me to improve my Japanese listening skills (!), but I'm pretty sure all the weird long-winded galaxy-brain retrospective stuff I occasionally do on this site is carrying that whole spirit more than I even consciously realize. If nothing else, his enjoyment of this show absolutely started to rub off on me at a time when I wasn't yet convinced of its quality.

Oh, and I almost forgot one other thing, while we're talking about transforming robot toys and references! The references to Transformers in this series may be a particular obsession of the director and character designer, but the original Gridman actually *did* set something of a precedent for that with Powered Zenon's inspiration, God Zenon, who looked suspiciously like some kind of bootleg Optimus Prime. (Worth noting the original toyline for Gridman was made by Takara?)