[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Hey, it’s Episode Goddamn Eight, lemme take a minute to talk about some of the hero forms. I love how toyetic they are? Everything that attaches to Gridman is in the style of an action figure accessory, for better or worse. (I think I remember hearing that some of the Gridman toys were janky garbage, due to their gimmicks?)

In particular, the original DX Full Power Gridman from back when the show was new was, as I understand from secondhand accounts, a pretty unpolished release, owing largely to being made by a company who I don't think had much experience making that sort of toy to begin with, and to the design itself not actually being created with the intent of easily translating to toy form. (The crux of the challenge being that you have to make a very tiny Gridman support a *lot* of weight somehow.) That second thing being despite the design *also* being one deliberately and consciously designed to look like a DX toy, to the extent that things like clips that would hold the various bits together in different configurations are explicitly baked right into the design.

Really, just this one topic is kind of a lot to get into? Full Power Gridman is really emblematic of the whole show's ethos in a lot of ways, and a big part of that is how director Akira Amemiya went out of his way to get Tsuyoshi Nonaka to do the designs for the Assist Weapons. Nonaka being a designer and artist who -- aside from doing some Transformers artwork back in the day as part of Studio OX, which maybe means something to Die -- was *also* someone with a long career at Bandai, where his credits include, among other things, designing DaiZyuJin for Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger, which kind of became one of the most widely identifiable and well-loved combining robot designs ever. You could say it was thanks to Power Rangers, but I would personally argue Power Rangers should be thanking DaiZyuJin at least as much in return. Anyways, I also vaguely understand Nonaka himself grew up during the original Chogokin boom of the 70's too, and is thus kind of part of the first generation of guys making cool robot toys who also grew up with cool robot toys, and that probably gels pretty well with what SSSS Gridman is about too. At any rate, the dude is a true legend, for sure.

I'm kind of rambling most of this off the top of my head, so apologies if it's all a little hard to parse, but the whole like, ecosystem of Full Power Gridman and all its various components and forms is one of my favorite things to come out of this series, and I find the history behind it pretty exciting too. So exciting I'm not even talking about the episode it debuts in!