[ljacone]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Switchblade

Part of me really wants to try watching VR Troopers, mostly because I really loved Metalder and am curious to see what the adaptation was like.

The adaption is pretty much non-existant. All of the neat non-visual stuff of Metalder -- the ongoing storylines, the evil army, the ranks and intrigue amongst the bad guys, and so forth -- is excised. The bad guys are all pretty generic, unfortunately, save for a few guys who get a little more attention like Decimator and Dark Heart.

Some of the changes don't really jive, either. One episode uses footage of Metalder fighting a pair of foes who are brothers (their names in the US are Slice and Dice), one armed with a katana and the other with a naginata. In the original footage, it's clear that the brothers are working together, as their weapons and fighting styles compliment one another. But the dubbing has the brothers arguing the entire time in order to fit it with the US story, which revolves around a pair of brothers who don't get along. So the footage from Metalder is cool, the dub just confuses the whole thing.

The main strength as an adaption is that you will often get a lot of tokusatsu footage at once during the fights. The Spielban footage seems to work better than the Metalder footage because JB's dialogue is more low key than the more "in your face" attitude of Ryan Steele ("Seeeee ya!").