Personally I think it's too late to not have Kamen Rider associated with Power Rangers to westerners simply because PR has been a part of mainstream pop culture in America for over 20 years.

The best chance for Rider to have been adapted as a more "mature" alternative to PR would have been mid-late 90s/early 2000s in my opinion.

Debatably it's already had it's DBZ: Godzilla

I would disagree. Godzilla was never a big hit in the west. It was successful, but it was never the gateway for Toku that DBZ basically was for anime.

Yeah. The mainstream Godzilla movies here are different from their original form so even that isn't really the same.

Man, my casual mention of Toei not caring about bringing Kamen Rider overseas really turned into quite the conversation. :o

Anyway, Toku has its DBZ. It's called Power Rangers. Stereotyping has always been a problem for Anime too. After Speed Racer, it was bad dubbing, after DBZ it was mindless action and people grunting for 22 minute chunks. The more things change, you know?

Remember when RPM had its underground popularity? I feel like if Gaim or maybe Blade came over that would happen. "That really good knockoff Power Rangers that's like an anime!"

I just wanna point out:

Buuut

You're both probably right on the Power Rangers point. It's been around for going on a quarter century, multiple generations were weened on it - there's no getting around it - the franchise IS the definition of henshin heroes / tokusatsu in America.


I should have used the term "henshin heroes" - they're not interchangeable, though we often treat them as so.

In our little bubble of toku fandom, we fail to take into account how off-putting mainstream audiences find tokusatsu aesthetics. The elements we find charming are almost universally seen as cheap, silly, and garish to people with no love for the medium.

We may be enamored by rubber-suited monsters whose mouths don't move when they talk, heroes who fight with plastic toy weapons, battles that take place in exterior locations completely devoid of extras, editing that employs rapid and unexplained location changes, miniature sets made of cardboard, and CGI straight out of a cable show from the 90s... but the average viewer, who has no familiarity with or affinity for the budgetary shortcuts this medium utilizes, sees all of the elements we cherish as flaws.

This aesthetic distaste, paired the amount of Japanese cultural knowledge required to decipher what's going on in these stories, creates a nigh impenetrable membrane around tokusatsu that repels casual, mainstream, non-Japanese, adult viewers.

For these reasons, I don't think Toei/Tsuburaya-style tokusatsu can ever rise beyond its status as a niche obsession in the States. That niche may have a higher occupancy threshold than we see now, but it's my belief that this style of tokusatsu will never be mainstream in America, certainly not enough to justify placement on a major broadcast or cable network.

Hey do you guys think a Kamen Rider series in the same vein as Ultraman Nexus work?

I mean like the main rider's powers passed between multiple characters over the course of the show.

So, Faiz?

Faiz in space. Make it Toei.