That was episode 23, the episode where the introduced MOTW was this chick who was walking around with swords, slashing people and telling them "don't turn around", and they died when they did.

It isn't shown on camera, but the impression they give is that when the victim turns their head it falls off. The decapitation was just so swift and precise that it didn't dislodge the head.

Kuuga gets pretty brutal, yo.

Then I remember it wrong, I DEFINITELY got at LEAST 35 episodes down, had all Rising forms too

Never thought about it this way but that's totally what happened.

He got another powered up form later, maybe you remember that? The silly hair they gave him in his bat monster form turned white.

Has to be it, yeah
EDIT: Looked up episode summaries, I think I was at Episode 36

I mean yeah, but the Grongi had a purpose in all their murder games. The purpose was that they were bored, mind you, but the killing had a point.

For this X plot it's like...this scientist had been experimenting to make smart children smarter, so GOD decides to hypnotize them to kill themselves to...convince him that his experimentation causes death? And that's supposed to get him to join GOD, somehow? It's a totally nonsensical, pointless plan. And they're all like explicitly stated to be elementary and middle school students. And the episode opens with a montage of them jumping to their deaths! But it's still not really a particularly dark episode overall. It's just bonkers is all it is.

I thought the reason for the gameatic killings was in order to obtain the power of N-Daguva-Zeba. Cause O remember later on one of the guys getting a key or something put into his belt that changed his form. That the bat guy from early on came back with silly white hair on his bat form claimimg to have gained the power.

All this Kuuga talk - congratulations, I'm switching to Kuuga!

Watching Kuuga = never a bad idea = do iiiiittt!

It's appropriate seeing as I just finished Agito. I watched the first few Kuuga episodes a few months ago and liked it, I just needed to gather the series.

I'll return to Kiva but, clearly Kuuga is a good series and I want to watch something that will have me gripped.

BTW, I really like Kiva's weird as industrial rock and drone loops!

Kuuga was very mediocre to me after I watched it. I appreciate what it did for Heisei Rider and the Rider overall, but the show is just uninteresting in a lot of spots.

Haven't seen Agito yet. Someone from Tv-nihon is going over the blu-rays right now, so I'm gonna wait until the entire series comes out in HD.

Kuuga for me was a show that I found more interesting in retrospect than when I was actually watching it. Gotta admire the art house director they had though! I love the concept of a killing game though, but then again I'm a sucker for mystery stuff.

If you like mystery, you'll like Agito. It definitely drags at points but, overall, it's pretty good. There's a big production upgrade near the latter part of the show which was pretty surprising; like, all of a sudden they got an infusion of cash to do everything better. It's the opposite of what you usually get - kind of (it still goes cheap in the final stretch). I also love the cooking sub-sub-plot, you'd think they'd go light with the kitchen culture stuff but - hell no - it's the most realistic portrayal I've seen in a TV, all that was missing was a drunk guy coming in late.

I didn't like the mystery element as much in Agito since it was basically all one drawn out case. Instead of trying to figure out the pattern of each individual case it's more focused on the ongoing debate about if people getting killed are espers and whatnot, which just wasn't as interesting to me. The cooking sub-plot was pretty cool though, I forgot about that. It would have been cool to see more of it.

Wait - Kuuga has a Mystery of the Week structure?

Pretty much, since the general concept with the Gurongi is there is a pattern to each killing game. It's a really cool concept, although its not always approached in a mystery way, I loved it when it was.

That's crazy cool.

And this is why you watch the show without Grongi subtitles - it leaves you trying to figure out what's going on at the same time as the characters.

It does one better and has a Mystery of the Fortnight structure. Despite being such a unique show, it's sort of the predecessor to the Neo-Heisei formula in a way. Although instead of a mandatory mid-episode fight scene you get more *people talking*.

Also that's how they want you to watch it. It's not an error that there are long scenes of monsters talking gibberish to each other that you can only get the gist of through body language and helpful props, it's like, a critical part of the experience. Very deliberate stuff. Please tell me people don't actually watch Kuuga the first time through that way? That just sounds horrible.

X episode 9.

This is literally the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Holy shit. No words.

That's right, children - when Mom says jump you -WAIT!! I DIDN'T MEAN LITERALLY!

Oh man, I forgot about that scene. :lol

I think it was also featured in one of Fourze's Rider Trivia webisodes.

Black episode 26.

This episode felt like a breath of fresh air.

I'm not gonna mince words, I've honestly grown to find Black kinda boring. I don't find Kotaro to be a very compelling protagonist, and while it is the most modern feeling of the Showa shows I've seen, in practice that mostly means its plots of the week are more...grounded, I guess? It's not quite at the serialized level of the Heisei series, but (and I've started to notice this especially watching more X) they feel like they lack a lot of the insanity that makes the Showa series as endearing and fun as it can be. Not all of them, not all of the time (stuff like the mom-kidnapping episodes, among others, are bizarre enough) but it just doesn't feel as entertaining to me.

This though? Man. "Buffalo monster possesses girl to wreck stuff" is at just the right level of batshit. Pretty great episode.

Slightly off topic, but...I gotta say, I am pretty surprised that, in addition to more grounded, Black feels so...sanitized. There is so little death in this show, it's pretty shocking. Some people do die, don't get me wrong, but the numbers are staggeringly low. In every other Showa series (maybe, least the ones I've seen a significant amount of) they have basically no reservations about killing off any random people who happen to be around during cold opens, or kaijin introductory scenes and things like that. Quite the opposite, wanton murder is how those things tended to go. A lot of times in Black, however, people who would have been dead ten times over in any other show get off with mere injuries. In particular, I can't get over this one guy that I think one of the mutants threw off a mountain or something, and he still survived. Or that one about Omanyte the Mutant and his psychic powers. "Drunken guy stumbles into the monster and gets killed to death" is a classic way to start an episode in the Showa era. Dating back to the very first series. But in that episode, the drunken guy gets away! It's crazy.

The low mortality rate is probably the most surprising thing about Black so far, and the thing that stands out as the most different from other Showa shows I've seen.

I can't tell if my opinion on this is positive or negative though. On the one hand, it makes Gorgom appear less threatening and more ineffective than its predecessors, and often the crazy deaths contributed to the entertainingly weird feeling of many Showa shows. On the other, it always was hard to take the happy endings at face value when basically every monster still got away with a surprising amount of killing before being stopped. I don't know, it's complicated.

OH!OH!OH! I've got this one!
Okay, well, see - the 80's were a time when society got really concerned with the content on television and what it was doing to people's psyches since we were watching A LOT of it. In America, a common phrase was "TV Rots Your Brain". Consequently, "Concerned Mothers (aka Bored Moms)" started monitoring what their kids were watching and - DID. NOT. APPROVE. This happened in Japan as well; if you watch 70's kid's shows vs 80's kid shows vs 90's kid's shows - the mid-late 80's shows are definitely "holding back" - though, compared to the garbage American kids had, it's still a good cut above in the excitement department. American TV was all around pretty awful in the 80's, that's why hipsters love it!

So I realized I accidentally skipped like 6 Kuuga episodes. Currently at 33 playing catch up to 38

I started Super Hero Time 2006 recently, so Boukenger/Kabuto.

I'm up to episode 9, and I'm impressed by how much better-constructed Kabuto is than some later Heisei series. Tonally, I think it's the closest series I've seen to what I'd hoped Kamen Rider would be before I actually started watching the shows. The Worms are creepy and interesting. I didn't realize how much I'd appreciate the absence of shadowy villains saying ominous things to one another until now. There are no plotting master villains, yet, so the Worms get to be mysterious.

The show also isn't as weighed down by toys as more recent series. Cast Off is obviously reflected in the retail toy line, and I'm sure there were roleplay toys, but they look less like toys than, say, Shift Cars or Lock Seeds. It's easier to sink into the fantasy of this series and watch the show as a story rather than a toy commercial.

Oh, my gosh! A chatty Driver that's not obnoxious. It makes me regret the relatively singsong voices of more recent drivers.

Now that I'm on 9, I'm starting to suspect how Zecters work. (I don't yet know how to do the spoiler-tag thing, so I'm being vague.) I love that Tendou isn't necessarily the main character. I've somehow managed to avoid many spoilers for this series, so the first secondary Rider to appear was... not who I'd expected. I love being surprised.

I'm enjoying Ex-Aid and Zyuohger, but Super Hero Time 2006 is tremendously more aesthetically pleasing to me. Weapons look less like toys, designs could aim for cool without feeling the need to also be wacky. Both shows feel like they're aiming for older audiences than Super Hero Time 2016. My enjoyment level so far is hitting Gekiranger/Den-O and Kyoryuger/Gaim heights. On to episodes 10...!

Spoiler tags are placed by [spoiler] text [/ spoiler] (No space between the /spoiler when you actually want to place a tag)

Reviewed Blade. Let's see if Toei decides to give me a strike for this review too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_BeYIuH2VM

This may be the first occasion for someone to call Blade's special effects "Excellent" :lol

I love Blade, easily my number 1 Kamen Rider series and one of the few that I would never turn down rewatching, but it's special effects are rather lacking. While the cinematography and action are done well, the effects that accompany them feel very weak, even considering it's time. The effects on things like Mach and Tornado are just straight bad, while Garren's burning drop needs a lot of touching up (Though that one might just have been the TV rip footage I'm used to seeing).

Personally, I felt KR ramped up the special effects around Kabuto, where energy attacks were more than just blue/green colored blobs, speed effects were done far more effectively, and CG enhancements were a lot less conspicuous.

Blade's special effects? I ALWAYS cringed when Chalice used Tornado
Speaking of special effects, Amazing Mighty Kick is surprisingly good considering it's Kuuga SFX

That's because Amazing Mighty deserved it.
But my god, most other effects in Kuuga were bad. The edited in explosions looked horrid, which was kind of a disappointment. I think Titan and Dragon had the better effects in general.

Kuuga Dragon's first Rising Dragon Splash was also awful, you could tell they pretty much paused the footage when Kuuga stabbed that bitch

Not every effect is great, but as a whole, I love them, especially the ones done at night. Upon thinking about it, I did forget to talk about the bad CGI moments. Oops, but then, it's so hard to cover every aspect of a TV series. I even went back and added in a few things I forgot to include in my original script (Nozomi and the designs of the suits/Undead).

Amazon episode 5: My first foaming geyser of blood! Wonderful. I think Amazon might hate transforming even more than Kouta does. Every fight he's just like, "Lemme bleed everywhere first" before transforming. Also gotta love how surreal the fights are. Who needs drugs when you could just watch Amazon?

(Yeah, I'm having fun with this.)

I always thought the were okay for the time, but they certainly didn't age well, especially when watching in HQ....
Did they really expect us to think Takaiwa was Tsubaki (Kenzaki)?! x,D
http://img5.fotos-hochladen.net/uplo...t4510qj3vg.png

Then again, with how... unique... the direction in this show can be, especially with camera angles (all the extreme close-ups....!), the effects kinda fall into the show's "style", I guess?

I have never had a problem with bad special effects as they're doing the best with the budgets on hand. Plus, being a kid of the 70's, I'm so, sooo used to bad FX.

You know, I thought the Beastmen in Amazon looked alright at first, but the snake and crocodile ones were just... incredible. I'm not even sure how to react to monsters on that level of floppy rubberiness.

I'm not really super down against series with bad FX. It's just that Kuuga's were notable due to it being 2000, but the effects felt like it was '91 :p

Let's put it this way: They couldn't really hide the fact that they hardly had any budget to begin with. :lol

Just watched episode 1 of Saban's Masked Rider.


...regrets. I have 'em.