Interesting thread about the production of Zero One:

https://twitter.com/TomConstantines/...320880640?s=19

It explains why and where the season was rushed. I think people forgot just how early a lot of planning goes into place and how much sudden events can throw a wrench into things.

Still, a show must adapt to viewers during the air date and we can see that with the handling of Gai.

At the end of the day, despite its issues, it's clear the people behind the show truly care about it and did a lot of research. I think Zero One will be remembered fondly in the future.

As I thought, turns out Izu’s death was rushed — it was a last minute decision to make things go where they wanted.

A lot of this sounds like the result of shoddy planning. Going from 8 episodes to 4 at the end sucks, sure, but did they seriously not have a plan for how it was generally supposed to go aside from the ending? Could they not have even tried to develop Aruto’s direction towards his fight with Horobi in the 41 episodes prior???

I mean given there was a fear of the show possibly only getting 41 episodes because of Corona and not 45 which was their new max, I'm sure they had stuff planned, but had to scrap a lot of things and switch things around last minute for stuff to get into how they wanted things to go currently due to prior plans not working out.

If they thought they were going to have 41 episodes how on earth did they just write 34-41 as if it was normal?

41 can be seen as an ending anyway, had they not gotten the extra 4 episodes. Horobi's story could've been wrapped up in the movie anyway.

I mean given just the framing of Episode's 40 and 41 (I pair them together since they jump perfectly off of each other), with Aruto delivering the final decisive blow to Ark alongside Ikazuchi destroying the satellite that housed it, it definitely feels like it could have ended there and had Horobi decided to act rational and not get scared of "emotions" then we would have had probably a more solid-ish ending.

I mean also to be fair, we don't know how far in advance they can do rewrites for things and how much they could have changed to try and fit their narrative in the short amount of time.

Personally, it won't change my opinion about Zero-One flaws.
I love zero-one but the flaws it has, to me, aren't the one due to Covid.

The overall plot is very weak from the beginning. The starting plot point of the show, the incident at daybreak town, and what happened there could have been more thick and revelations happen mid show. But it was evacuated in the first arc real quick like "oh yeah that was us back then. period." amidst many things like the development of humagears having a heart through Ansatsu-chan singularity plot, the why is yaiba doing shady stuff plot, and of course MJ want humagears independent/destroy the humans (all of this without even mentioning patients of the week stuff). They should have spread that out.

That's something a show like Build did right and that's why it's a very solid show IMO. The show was built (pun intended) on the Mars/Pandora Box/Sky wall thing as a basis and it was here in the background during all the length of the show, diluting revelations. It doesn't mean you can't reveal stuff early on. Build did it with BloodStark identity (edit : and even Katsuragi). But yeah.

Zero one launched everything in our face in 15 episodes, and the script for the rest of the show was Aruto vs Gai and Aruto vs MJ.

And that's absolutely not Covid's fault at all.

I bet that they never planned to give Yaiba more to do from the beginning though. :eyebrow No matter what else has or will happen, that will be my bitter point number (zero-)one about this show, for sure.

As usual no respect for female riders. Valkyrie better get an upgrade for a V-Cinema!!!!

Anyone here fighting for women's rights in KR?

It's less a fight and more like begging for the franchise to stop stepping on my skull. At least, that's how it feels to me sometimes! The saddest thing is that overall, even after everything, Valkyrie probably still got off better in how her show treats her than the likes of Poppy or Tsukiyomi etc.

I just want one of them to be like Mach or Snipe sometime. I don't need for like major upgrades in the latter half or to have entire plots centered on them, but just allowed to be cool and relevant during the whole show's run, maintaining their own internally generated motivations and whatnot. I guess Rider isn't quite ready for that though!!

Regardless of the show's flaws and which ones were caused by Covid and other complications vs which ones were just bad decisions by the creators, it is cool to hear that they consulted with experts for the technology, and that they talked to people who actually were in those professions for some of the job battles.

Agree with all of this. And it's not even like writing good female characters is any harder than writing males, there's different cliches to watch out for but that's about it. Heck, most of the secondary and even main Riders recently could've been women without changing the story! But for some reason the creators seem unable to have a female Rider without sidelining her :/

It’s because Kamen Rider’s main audience is young boys and boys generally don’t care for female characters. And with Pretty Cure going strong, Bandai/Toei isn’t keen to push for that to change anytime soon, since they’re not losing that audience anytime soon.

I think in a franchise that decided to let Gen Urobuchi take the wheel and thus alienating every single kid before the halfway point it wouldn’t be unheard of to include more female Riders.

And at the end of the day all that matters is toy-sales. And if you include like 4 items tailor made for female characters that don’t sell as well as the gazillion of other things you make then that isn’t a huge deal.

Especially in stuff like Kamen Rider were items are interchangeable throughout the line, I wouldn’t believe a young boy would turn down a Progrise key just because it has Valkyrie's helmet on its packaging. Since you know, it makes new unique sounds in the main belt anyways and the children are taught that it would become a new form they could wear.

Bottom-line: Including more female Riders is super easy, and I don’t think it would impact their sales negatively at all.

Valkyrie’s items instantly sold out on pre-orders like all other DX items, so...

Agreed. As much as I am a fan of Rider, the inclusion and portrayal of women is severely lacking.

If we can even presuppose that Japanese boys don't care for female characters, it's another thing to assume that their inclusion would somehow hurt the show or other male characters.

At some point, your work of fiction stops being influenced by fans and starts influencing fans themselves. You can't pretend that Kamen Rider can teach us the nuanced intricacies of robotic-humanoid-cyborgs and their adaption into modern society, before it can recognize that women can be compelling characters?

I really think this tops McKuuga as the weirdest cross promotion Rider has ever done

I mean ultimately it isn't up to poppa Toei or the writers to decide who gets toys and who doesn't.

Geiz wasn't allowed to have an in-show power up to put him on par with GrandZi-O, blame Bandai going "Yeah but, girls don't like Rider".

Yaiba from the opening and vitamin c commercials is promote to be the third rider like woz and greases, but treated worst than poppy and marika.

It really just comes down Bandai/Plex not wanting to do it for whatever reason. Who knows maybe it's only the Western fanbase that really clamors for more good female representation in Kamen Rider maybe the Japanese doesn't care about it as much? I don't know and love to get more insight on this topic from the Japanese fanbase but alas I don't speak Japanese so that's gonna be kinda of hard.

I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't! I kind of assume every Rider show at this point secretly has the same kind of wild production history OOO did, with Medal Zombie Date and all those other abandoned story concepts. Zi-O even made the entire plot of its summer movie about admitting there's never much of a grand plan for Kamen Rider, as far as plots are concerned. This is entirely assumptions on my part, but I'd imagine they actively try to keep things as flexible as possible most of the time specifically in case unexpected issues come up that prevent them from doing something they planned on... like having another month's worth of episodes. It's exactly why even though I appreciate the generosity of people letting Zero-One off the hook for some of its problems later on (and this was an unusually huge blow, no doubt), I also think it's maybe a bit overly optimistic to use that as an excuse? Mind you, as I say this, I'm also one of the people who thinks they did a solid job pulling things together at the end.

Real shame about Valkyrie though! Can't say I mind seeing all this mourning for Valkyrie's lost potential!

Oh yeah no, see I'm only excusing the rough but solid enough ending they managed to pull thanks to the issues that presented themselves.

The stuff in this thread, especially some of the decisions made in regards to Gai, and the Workplace Competition before the Covid stuff are actually baffling to me. Like good for you views went up, but also man you kinda screwed the pooch and had to course correct because yeah, as we all figured, the Gai bashing was a response to the reception to Gai's introduction arc. Like I don't know, I love a good drama piece, but I feel like making that the center focus and feeling that Kamen Rider's shouldn't have a place in their own show during that arc, really hurt it a lot.

Also just the lost idea of having Gai early into the new year taking over Hiden Intelligence, is like, possibly the best swerve ball that could have happened because you have Aruto fighting this tough battle against this terrorist group only for this capitalist to pull the rug from underneath. And I would have totally been invested in where they could go with that.

And people would be like, "Oh, but how would Aruto transform, he needs to be Prez." and it's like, having the Ark Connections from Shining Assault and Metal Cluster bypass the restrictions of the 01 Driver, easy as that.

Oh, the part about how the action not gelling with the drama was particularly, uh, let's go with "fun" for me to see, too, because that was consistently something I (and I'm sure plenty of others) criticized both the competition arc for, and even some of the episodes after it. I'd be really curious to see that whole discussion and not just secondhand highlights, because it sounds like the producers were simultaneously very sure in the stories they were telling, and also very conscious of a lot of the problems they were running into doing it, and that's super interesting to me.

I just think you're making a lot of excuses for how it was handled. Anyway, when the producer said that a lot of fans didn't like the workplace arc but how it had the most ratings, is it mostly the western fans not liking it, but the Japan fans liked it due to culture, since in Japan, things tend to be more job focused.

What gives you the idea they were talking about western fans at all?

Well there is this.

https://youtu.be/EQ2q4AB0W6w

Hey so Zea got shot to bits, right? Does that mean they literally destroyed the Rise Hopper?

As if the concept of bikes in this franchise aren't already undead!

That’s one thing I’ll give the end of Zero-One — they knew the bike had such a little part to play due to road laws, so they gave it one last spotlight against Ark-Zero then blew it to bits :lol

Ikazuchi betrayed the Ark just so he'd have the slightest chance of blowing up that damn bike that caused him so much hassle.

While we're here, let's not forget about Zero One's overpowered giant mecha/personal jet, Breaking Mammoth.

RIP to Rider vehicles.

IIRC, the Giger drones that were recolored from its CGI model got more screen time than the mecha itself!

Although that was its jet mode that Raiden piloted to blow up the satellite, so at least it played some role in the plot, however small.

I hope for V-Cinemas in Zero-One

- Cerberus Vulcan (Vulcan+Naki) & Valkyrie Assault Cheetah/Jackal vs evil rider/Raider (new Progrisekey)

ThousanDriver based with Zero-Two-type key.

- Horobi, Jin & Ikazuchi vs evil Rider/Magia with ForceRiser

Zero-One soundtrack albums don't come out until Sep 30. I am gonna go insane during the wait. I want to listen to Now Is The Right Time right now!! (The Humagear rap from episode 28 is also in there, which is cute.)

Also apparently there was one more insert song associated with Shining Assault Hopper that just never made an appearance. I'm gonna assume based on nothing right now that it's because the lyrics were probably all about the two satellites and two different worlds coming together much like Zero-One and Vulcan working together, but that wasn't how the context of the form came about at all so they were just like 'eeeeh lets not bother'.

Honestly, I can't decide if a song not appearing at all is better or worse than being used super poorly like Future Guardian or Black & White!

If it helps, Avex released a teaser for the CD Box:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NttKi3IkApU

Based on how the songs are arranged, I assume the missing track meant for Shining Hopper was "Rising Sun" which I can't remember hearing in the show, yet is placed in between "Find A New Life" and "Now Is The Right Time", not only that but all three tracks have instrumentals placed together as well.

Yeah, the title has ハイブリッドライズ！(HybridRise!) in it which absolutely means it's associated with Shining Assault Hopper, and I certainly would have recalled if a brand new melody had played for it at any point (it didn't!). The debut of the form even had a really nice imagery of the sun 'rising' behind it, it would have been perfect...!

The show as a whole made (good) use of the same few recurring themes, so any new piece of music (like Zero-Two's insert song, or that BGM during Metal Cluster Hopper's fight with the Ark in episode 37) would really stick out.

Uaaagh, what the heck! Horobi and Jin have battle themes that play off that one track with the ominous chanting. Rampage Vulcan has a battle theme that sounds like a different rendition of the usual AIMs theme. Oh and Zero-Two has cool instrumental mixes of it's theme song but those have an obvious and understandable reason for not seeing any use.

I know every year, there's always gonna be some things from the soundtrack that just get left in the album, but something about this year, with how nice all of it is and how heavily associated it is with specific characters and moments... It feels like that much more of a waste that they didn't actually get implemented, at least to me.

I have been waiting literally since the press conference where they announced the show to hear a full, clean version of Find a New Life. I knew we'd get there eventually, but man, I'm so happy the day is finally so close. Not to mention that the OST in general is ~maybe~ my favorite Rider soundtrack ever? It's definitely way up there!

Lots of fun tidbits from those track titles too, like the fact that the music from Aruto's near-victory against Ark-Zero with Metal Cluster Hopper is indeed meant to be Zero-Two's theme, or that somebody clearly messed up, because Vulcan's theme music is labeled as "Kamen Rider Vulcan & Valkyrie". :p

I also half-remember actually hearing that Rampage Vulcan theme at one point in the show, but I can't recall where, so I'll take FreshToku's word it wasn't in there.

:( :cry

The only time I ever remember a guitar blaring that triumphantly was Ichi-gata's theme during The First Generation. Though, it is possible that Rampage Vulcan theme played briefly during his and Naki's big bonding moment before fading in favour of the runway music, and I just don't quite recall.

If Ex-aid soundtrack didn't exist I think I would feel the same. this one comes close in 2nd place in my ranking.