[MarsHottentot]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Lucha

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.

Sigh... yeah, you're right (hangs head, kicks dirt, then looks out at the lake). It's just kind of stupid, y'know? These shows aren't that much different than the DC stuff on CW, at least budget wise - and people watch the shit out of that. But, yeah, those awesome toku quirks... you either get it, or you don't.